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The Putin regime may be sharing intelligence that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is using to target US troops, but President Trump is more mad at NATO. Sure, Trump’s adoration for Putin stopped being surprising a long time ago, but it’s notable that he’ll make excuses for the Russian strongman even if he has American blood on his hands.
Alas, in recent comments to the press, America’s aspiring strongman has been railing against our erstwhile allies for not being more eager to put lives and treasure on the line in the Strait of Hormuz to help him salvage a war he started without consulting them.
“I said, 'For 40 years we're protecting you and you don't want to get involved in something very minor?' Very few shots are gonna be taken because they don't have many shots left. But they said, ‘We’d rather not get involved,’” Trump said yesterday, recalling (or making up) recent conversations he had with other foreign leaders.
He continued, “I’ve been a big critic of all of the protecting of countries because I know we’ll protect them, but if we ever needed help, they wouldn’t be there for us. I’ve just known that for a long period of time.”
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Trump has taken aim at NATO during numerous recent press events, including a Sunday evening gaggle on Air Force One.
"We're always there for NATO. We're helping them with Ukraine. It's got an ocean in between us,” he said. “It doesn't affect us, but we've helped them. It would be interesting to see what country wouldn't help us with a very small endeavor, which is just keeping the strait open.”
How dare the rest of NATO not join Trump’s illegal, unnecessary war in Iran! How dare our allies not send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to risk getting blown up by Iranian mines! Don’t they know it is their job to clean up after Trump? Surely that’s somewhere in the NATO treaty, right?
Here’s Trump’s logic as to why other countries are required to scurry to the strait: “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory. It’s the place from which they get their energy.” According to Trump, this means that China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, along with some unspecified “others,” have to help.
That is an exceedingly odd definition of “territory.” The Strait of Hormuz is in international waters and does not belong to any country at all. Iran can control shipping not because it has any claim to the strait, but because it borders the waterway, making it easy to attack ships and lay mines. Functionally, Trump is saying that countries that get Gulf oil via ships transiting the strait magically transform that international waterway into their own territory, which they are then obliged to help protect.