PARIS (AP) — We’ve long had your back, now it’s our turn. That is how the famously transactional U.S. President Donald Trump is framing his demands that allies help him with the Iran war. He wants to call in IOUs for decades of U.S. security guarantees.
The string of refusals indicates his stock of European goodwill is low. He has put allies through the wringer since returning to the White House, bullying them over tariffs, Greenland and other issues, and disparaging the sacrifices their soldiers made alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Now he’s demanding — not just requesting — that they send warships to help the U.S. unblock the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes — essentially mop up behind the conflagration that he and Israel ignited in the Middle East.
The reply has been a “global raspberry.”
That’s how a veteran French defense analyst, François Heisbourg, described allied responses.