How Trump’s war will hurt Europe Welcome to the age of American militarism

Is it 2003 again? Having won his second term by promising no more adventures in the Middle East, Trump has launched “Operation Epic Fury” in conjunction with Israel, to bomb Iran into regime change. My first thought on hearing this was: “Bother, the neocons won after all.” But if we really were re-running the aughts, wouldn’t we expect (bar maybe the French) a bit more enthusiasm from the rest of the West?

The memes have been merciless: ribaldry about Germany’s eagerness to take in the next wave of migrants, and Ursula von der Leyen’s unprecedented levels of monitoring the situation. The overall imputation is of a pusillanimous Europe, both under-militarized and overcommitted to sentimental humanitarianism.

This picture is not wrong. But it’s also uncharitable. Europe’s states find themselves in an unhappy position. They have good reason to deprecate a new conflict in the Middle East. But they also remain, however ambivalently, committed to overall political and military alliance with the American hegemon driving this conflict, as well as to the moribund “international law” Trump just cheerfully ignored in order to launch it.

And this is the first clue that what we’re looking at here isn’t precisely neoconservatism.

There are some superficial similarities: notably that (as in Iraq and Syria) Khameini was an autocrat. He led an Islamic regime, as in Afghanistan, which supported all manner of hostile action against the West either directly or through proxies.

Energy politics likely also plays a part in this conflict, albeit less overtly. The current block on energy shipping from the Persian Gulf will also benefit Atlantic producers. And China, whose oil demand far exceeds domestic supply, was the majority purchaser of Iranian oil, just as it was in Venezuela prior to Trump’s recent capture of Nicolás Maduro. Great power rivalry being what it is, squeezing Chinese access to energy could well have been a factor in US decisions.

But there the similarity ends. For one thing, neoconservatism was genuinely ideological: animated by a sincere belief that divinely ordained defeat of “evil” could be brought about through military might. By contrast, Trump has offered various justifications for the Iran bombings at different times, seemingly at random. In other words: this feels much more straightforwardly like the leader of a powerful state crushing a political enemy, not because “God told me” but because he can.

Additionally, and relatedly, there has been little effort to dress this attack up in “international law”. Prior to the Iraq war, Blair and Bush went to considerable lengths to make it look legal-ish, including the notorious “dodgy dossier” on WMDs. But what’s so striking in retrospect is not even how bogus this was, but that leaders at the time felt it necessary to bother at all. By contrast, Trump has offered no dossiers, dodgy or otherwise, nor flannel about “international law”; just bombs. The only announcement was a 3am Truth Social post by Trump himself.

This isn’t neoconservatism; it’s just militarism. And it leaves Europe in an awkward position. The fig-leaf for “the West”, which is to say an American empire in which European states are subservient but safe, was always the presentation of this arrangement as a friendly alliance of states voluntarily adhering to “international law”. But the Trump administration has been forthright in its disregard for this convention.

Washington’s proposed new frame for Europe’s erstwhile “rules-based” embrace of the American project reimagines this in “civilizational” (with a z) terms. This was the gist of the US message to Europe at the past two Munich security conferences, delivered first bluntly by JD Vance and latterly in more emollient terms by Marco Rubio. Roughly: that shared cultural and genealogical ties mean Europe has a special place in US affections, so if you will fund more of your own defense and stop letting so many migrants in, we can all go on being the best of friends. The idea appears to be shifting from ersatz imperialism, characterized by literal military occupation, to a more voluntaristic, affinity-based, and self-funding model.

Never mind getting with this new program: Europe is still in denial about Trump unilaterally discarding the old one. So what happens when the newly unchained hegemon takes action that is neither in the material nor the “civilizational” interests of former protectorates? Keir Starmer has been obliged to split this difference more painfully than most.

He has just lost a by-election to the Greens, who triumphed by annexing the clan-based Pakistani Muslim bloc vote, that had hitherto reliably backed Labour. With an eye on his own ailing regime, and the May local elections, Starmer has a strong incentive to avoid further foreign policy entanglements that might be interpreted as anti-Muslim. Supporting the destruction of Iran’s Islamic Republic, especially at the hands of a joint Israeli-US task force, indisputably falls into that category; no wonder he resisted US pressure to grant access to British airbases.

To no avail, though: the PM was soon found squeaking out a legalistic justification for acceding to their use. It would have been less painful all round if he’d just felt able to say “they made me do it”. But he has a commitment to international law where most people have a personality, so to save appearances, we’ve been treated to a miniature re-run of the Iraq legal posturing.

But the risks to Europe from destabilizing Iran run much deeper than Starmer’s electoral prospects. Previous neocon plans for “nation-building” notoriously didn’t pan out as intended, but Trump has launched this offensive seemingly without any plan at all. Turkey has already stated it is preparing for a massive new wave of irregular migration, and we can reasonably assume many of these will continue to flow westward, as was the case when Syria went up in flames. It was not the USA that bore the brunt of that crisis, whose second-order effects in Western Europe have included rises in violent crime, Islamic terrorism, unemployment, sexual assault, and support for the populist Right.

Nor was it the USA that bore the brunt of the arms-length “regime change” efforts in Libya (enthusiastically supported, at the time, by David Cameron) that killed Muammar Gaddafi. In the aftermath of this operation, Libya remains a failed state to this day, not to mention a prime corridor for people-trafficking into Europe.

We can only speculate as to what, if any, plans have been discussed internally, in Washington. If, as some suggest, these are more about energy interests and great power rivalry, here too the risk is mostly on the European side. Europe has already sworn off Russian energy, at America’s urging and (some say) with assistance from a US-sponsored special ops. Now, a protracted block is likely on shipping via the Strait of Hormuz, a choke-point between Iran and the Gulf states and a key shipping route for oil from the Middle East. This is great news for Atlantic oil producers, but raises the unhappy prospect for Europe of further rises in the price of energy, with all the consequences this will inevitably have for an industrial and domestic politics that was already far from happy.

Worse still, far from being a quick in-and-out like Venezuela, the conflict shows every sign of metastasizing. Iran has launched missile attacks on Dubai, Doha, Manama, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while Israel is now fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. Further afield, migrant diasporas scattered by previous Middle East conflicts, and now linked internationally by digital communications, may take the conflict in unexpected, post-geographic, hybrid-warfare directions. Mob attacks on US embassies in Karachi and Baghdad, concerns about “sleeper cells” in European nations including Britain, and a drone strike on a British airbase on Cyprus all speak to this emerging world of networked conflict.

Under these circumstances, European states can be forgiven for lack of enthusiasm about their near abroad dissolving into the kind of violent chaos that characterized the regime-change efforts in Syria and Libya. The genealogical ties between Europe and America are real, and this is all very well, in principle. But we are about to find out how far opt-in “civilizational” ties really stretch, as a framework for alliance where material interests are otherwise so divergent.

Trump’s unilateral decision to bomb Iran poses far graver material risks to those “civilizational” allies that share a landmass with Iran, than to his own continent. Recent history suggests that Middle East instability tends to empower warlords and people-traffickers, and disrupt energy supplies, while impelling ordinary citizens to flee for safety, including to Western Europe.

European states bracing for a spike in energy prices and another million refugees might be tempted to re-read Rubio’s Munich sentiments, on prosperity and “civilizational” ties, with the hollowest of laughs. Then, when they’re done mourning the lost world of 2003, they must do as he suggests, and harden Europe’s borders and capabilities.

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