The war in Iran has emphatically demonstrated American military might on the world stage. There is only one superpower in the world today, and it isn’t headquartered in Moscow, Beijing or London. Alongside Israel, the United States has decimated much of Iran’s defenses, air force, navy, ballistic missile sites, nuclear infrastructure, and its political leadership. All in the space of just three weeks.

The Iran war has also sharply exposed simmering deep-seated tensions in the transatlantic alliance, as well as the open cowardice, petulance and weakness of European leaders, including among its increasingly diminished major powers—principally the UK, France and Germany, as well as the European Union, representing 27 member states.

Starmer’s craven reaction to America’s latest intervention in the Middle East has been nothing short of abysmal, and has confirmed everything Donald Trump has previously said about the fecklessness and unreliability of America’s European allies. In the wake of conversations with U.S. administration officials and Congressional staffers since the war began, I fear the long-term impact upon the cohesion of the transatlantic partnership and the NATO alliance will be far reaching and destructive. Many here view the pathetic European response to the Iran war as a knife in the back for the American people.

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The anger in Washington at NATO allies lies far beyond the White House and the Executive Branch. Members of Congress have been queuing up to express their disappointment in the failure of European allies to heed the President’s call to join the United States in ensuring the safe passage of international shipping through the vital Strait of Hormuz.

In an interview this week with Fox News, Republican Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, a former Navy Seal team leader, described Britain’s Royal Navy as “a rust bucket” shadow of its former great self, expressing tremendous disappointment in the failure of European allies to step up to the plate. As the Senator’s condemnation sharply illustrates, the immense damage to the U.S./UK Special Relationship has been painful to watch, all prompted by the appalling stance of Keir Starmer and his reckless Labour government.

The U.S. President, a great admirer of Britain’s heroic role in World War II, has been absolutely right in declaring that Keir Starmer is “no Winston Churchill.” Many Americans I have spoken to have warm memories of the partnership between my former boss, Margaret Thatcher, and her great friend Ronald Reagan. They simply cannot understand how the UK has ended up today with a spineless socialist without a backbone or a moral compass on the world stage. With good reason they fear for the future of Britain and its people.

In Berlin, Chancellor Merz’s s government, in a direct rebuke to U.S. requests for support, has declared that “this war has nothing to do with NATO. It is not NATO’s war.” In Brussels, the EU’s grandstanding foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has called on the U.S. and Israel to end the war against the Iranian regime “so that everybody saves face.” And France’s Emmanuel Macron has condemned U.S. strikes on Iran as “outside international law.”

These are the same European voices that have prodded the United States to do more in support of Ukraine, a non-NATO member in Europe’s own backyard, even with large-scale U.S. military assistance worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the face of Putin’s brutal invasion. All while refusing to back American action against a malevolent Iranian dictatorship that slaughters its own people, and which actively provides drones for Moscow’s savage war against Kyiv.

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Even in the aftermath of alliance-wide pledges at last June’s Hague NATO summit to dramatically increase defense spending, there remains a growing fear across the Atlantic that European allies remain feckless, fair-weather friends who simply cannot be relied upon at crucial moments in history. They are content to continue building vast welfare states while clinging to suicidal Net Zero and open-border policies while the U.S. taxpayer foots much of the bill for Europe’s security.

Europe’s arrogant ruling elites are happy to live under the vast security umbrella the United States provides in Europe, with more than 80,000 American troops still on the ground defending Europe for over 80 years since the end of World War II. But today’s European leaders are not even willing to lift a finger to help the U.S. as it confronts a monstrously dangerous Islamist dictatorship in the Middle East—one that has openly threatened to wipe Israel off the map in a nuclear holocaust.

European inaction in support of the United States and Israel over Iran will likely be hugely damaging to both the transatlantic partnership and the NATO alliance. It will weaken trust in the transatlantic alliance in the United States, and further underscore Europe and the UK’s military impotence, its lack of moral clarity, and its refusal to stand up to barbarism and evil. It is a dark and sad day for Europe when its leaders cannot bring themselves to send even a single warship or fighter jet to support the United States, which has shed so much blood in the defense of European nations.