The Beginning of the End of NATO
As NATO stands aside cowardly, the CENTCOM–Israel partnership is proving to be a far more effective alliance.
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This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes from Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has attacked nine countries this week.
Missiles hit Dubai’s airport and damaged the Burj Al Arab. Smoke rose over Manama, Doha, and Riyadh. A drone struck RAF Akrotiri, a British sovereign base on Cyprus, hitting the runway in an act of direct aggression against British soil.
For the first time in history, every single Gulf state was targeted by the same actor within 24 hours — roughly 420 missiles fired across the region in a single week.
Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary General, issued a statement. The alliance, he said, is “not itself involved.”
Not itself involved. A member’s sovereign territory was struck by a foreign state. Four Major Non-NATO Allies were attacked. The organization that exists for precisely this moment looked at what happened and concluded it had nothing to do with them.
Let’s start with Britain, because Britain deserves the most scrutiny.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially refused to allow American bombers to use British bases, including Diego Garcia, to launch strikes on Iran. Britain, America’s oldest ally, the country that stood with the United States through two world wars and the Cold War, looked at its closest partner going to war and said it wasn’t going to support.
U.S. President Donald Trump responded publicly and without diplomatic cushioning: “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” Only then, under that public humiliation, did Starmer reverse course and grant permission — not out of principle, not out of alliance solidarity, because the political cost of being called “no Churchill” by the President of the United States in front of the entire world became too high to bear. Eventually isn’t leadership. In wartime, eventually doesn’t save lives. It’s damage control with a press release attached.
Spain didn’t even get that far. Madrid refused to allow its military facilities to be used entirely. Trump’s response was direct: “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.” Trade has a way of clarifying alliance commitments that decades of NATO summits apparently couldn’t.
What makes Britain’s position particularly striking is the context. For two years, Starmer’s government has withheld arms from Israel, supported International Criminal Court proceedings against Israeli leaders, and done everything in its power to isolate the one country in the region that was actually fighting the enemy Britain couldn’t bring itself to name.
And then Iran hit a British base in Cyprus. And the country Britain had spent two years trying to delegitimize was out there in the skies, doing the work Britain wouldn’t do. Britain eventually allowed limited use of its bases, but only for defensive operations, drawing legal distinctions about what counted as offensive and what didn’t, while missiles were killing people. That isn’t principle. That is cowardice dressed up in legal language.
UK Member of Parliament Nigel Farage said it plainly: “Keir Starmer has finally given the UK permission to use British bases to destroy Iranian missiles. Better late than never. The prime minister is a follower, not a leader.”
Turkey’s position is even more damning, because President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan didn’t merely stay home. His government actively denied U.S. forces access to Turkish air, land, and maritime space for operations against Iran, pushed for an immediate ceasefire, and shielded Iran diplomatically at the precise moment America and Israel were putting their pilots in harm’s way.
Turkey is NATO’s second-largest army, and a member since 1952. Turkey has occupied half of European Union member Cyprus since the 1970s and lectures the world about violations of sovereignty. Now it blocks America from defending itself against the country arming its enemies. That is not an ally. That is an obstacle wearing an ally’s uniform.
France sent its aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean to protect French bases. It deployed Dassault Rafale jets over the United Arab Emirates to protect French facilities. It issued a joint statement with Britain and Germany saying it was “in close contact” with the U.S. and Israel. Close contact. While Israel was hunting ballistic missiles over Iran and American pilots were flying strike missions into Tehran, France was in “close contact” and Germany issued statements.
Now look at the countries that weren’t in NATO’s press release.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Abraham Accords signatories, were hit by Iranian missiles and stayed in the fight. So were Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, countries that have no formal peace agreement with Israel but found themselves on the same side of the same war anyway. Iran hit all of them, striking their airports, military bases, and civilian infrastructure.
Dubai’s airport was hit. Manama’s residential neighborhoods were hit. Kuwait’s international airport was struck. And every single one of those countries activated their air defenses, intercepted hundreds of Iranian missiles and drones, condemned the attacks as violations of their sovereignty, and signed a joint statement with the United States declaring: “We stand united in defense of our citizens, sovereignty, and territory, and reaffirm our right to self-defense.”
That joint statement was issued from the U.S. State Department while NATO was drafting its statement of non-involvement. It isn’t a formal alliance. But it’s something NATO hasn’t managed to be this week: a group of countries willing to say plainly that they stand together and mean it.
Kuwait has intercepted 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones. Bahrain has shot down 45 Iranian missiles and nine drones while hosting the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Qatar has thwarted every single missile aimed at its territory according to its own defense ministry. The United Arab Emirates has tracked 689 Iranian drones and intercepted 645 of them. These aren’t observers. These are partners absorbing Iranian fire and fighting back alongside American forces while NATO watches from Brussels.
And then there’s Israel. The country that has been under continuous attack since October 7, 2023, fighting on seven fronts for more than two years, while burying our soldiers and civilians. The country whose arms Britain is withholding and whose diplomatic standing has been systematically undermined by the very allies it has spent decades supporting. That country is out there right now, flying drones over Iran, hunting ballistic missiles before they can fire, protecting not just its own people but American bases, Gulf states, and the broader region in which British personnel operate — whether Britain acknowledges it or not.
Understanding why NATO failed matters as much as knowing that it did. Because this isn’t a one-time lapse. It’s built into the architecture.
NATO was founded in 1949 to defend Western Europe from Soviet invasion. Its collective defense obligation, Article 5, applies only within defined geographic areas, specifically Europe and North America. Royal Air Force Akrotiri, a large Royal Air Force military airbase in Cyprus, is actually British sovereign territory. An alliance designed to protect its members wrote its founding treaty so narrowly that an attack on a British base doesn’t automatically trigger collective defense. That isn’t a loophole. That’s a 76-year-old design flaw that this war just exposed to the entire world.
Beyond the geography, there’s the money. The United States has been paying roughly two-thirds of NATO’s total defense spending for decades, while European members treated defense as optional and the peace dividend as permanent. Trump demanded they pay their share. He was right. At the Hague summit in June 2025, Trump finally extracted a commitment from almost every member to reach five percent of GDP by 2035.
And then, months later, in the first real test of that commitment, NATO’s members decided they weren’t involved. America has been subsidizing an alliance that, when it counted, couldn’t be bothered to show up. Trump will not forget that, neither will the American people, neither should anyone.
Iran didn’t just attack military targets this week. It attacked Dubai’s airport, the Burj Al Arab, residential neighborhoods in Manama, and Kuwait’s international airport. It deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure across the Gulf to send a message to every Arab leader who chose America and Israel over Tehran. The message was: Your bet on the West will cost you, your people will pay the price.
It didn’t work. Every Gulf state that was hit stayed in the fight. Not one of them called for a ceasefire on Iran’s behalf. Not one of them broke from the coalition. Iran tried to break the coalition by hitting everyone in it. Instead, it revealed exactly how strong that coalition is. That failure matters as much as anything NATO did or didn’t do this week, which brings us to the question nobody in Brussels wants to answer: If this coalition fought without NATO, held without NATO, and won without NATO, what exactly is NATO for?
Here is what I find most extraordinary about this week: Nobody declared a new alliance. There was no summit, no treaty, no press conference with flags. What there was is a war. And in that war, you could see very clearly which countries picked up the phone and which ones let it ring.
In 2022, Israel’s integration into CENTCOM — the United States Central Command responsible for the Middle East (including Egypt in Africa), Central Asia, and parts of South Asia — wasn’t a diplomatic footnote. It was a structural foundation that means Israel and the United States share intelligence, coordinate defense, and have the capacity for joint action in real time. That’s what Operation Roaring Lion (Israel’s name for this war) is — not a NATO operation, a CENTCOM operation with Israel, with the Gulf states providing basing, intelligence, and regional legitimacy. The architecture that the Abraham Accords built over the last five years was tested this week under live fire, and it held together without NATO’s blessing or participation.
Nadav Eyal, one of Israel’s top journalists, summed up the CENTCOM–Israel alliance beautifully:
“Very few countries in the world can conduct sustained large-scale air operations alongside the United States. Operationally speaking, there is currently only one partner to the U.S. capable of placing so many fighter aircraft in the air simultaneously for coordinated strikes, and supplying this kind of intel. It is the same partner that, roughly once every two decades since 1981, has destroyed the nuclear programs of three different dictatorships in the Middle East.”1
That’s why a senior Israeli diplomatic official has already proposed the following framework: a formal regional defense alliance built around the countries that have peace agreements with Israel and those that will make them. That proposal deserves to be taken seriously, because this week showed exactly which countries share the same threats, the same enemies, and the same willingness to fight back. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United States signed a joint statement declaring they stand united in defense of their citizens and sovereignty. That’s not an alliance yet, but it’s the raw material of one. And the countries that signed it found out this week, under fire, that they can count on each other in ways they apparently cannot count on NATO.
However this war concludes, the right people need to be paying attention to what just happened. The countries that showed up this week share the same threats, the same enemies, and the same understanding of what’s at stake. That’s the foundation of every serious alliance. The question is whether anyone has the courage to build on it formally, rather than leaving it as an improvised arrangement that gets tested again the next time Iran decides to fire 420 missiles at nine countries in just a few days.
Turkey’s membership should be the first question on the table the moment this war ends. A member that blocked American operations and shielded Iran diplomatically while Iranian missiles were hitting Gulf cities isn’t a NATO member in any meaningful sense. Britain needs to look hard at what Starmer’s paralysis revealed about where it actually stands. France needs to decide whether “close contact” is what an ally looks like. And the United States needs to have a serious conversation about whether it wants to keep subsidizing an alliance that watches its partners fight and calls itself “not involved.”
NATO won’t dissolve overnight. Institutions never do. But relevance isn’t guaranteed by longevity. The question isn’t whether NATO survives. It’s whether it means anything when it does.
The countries that showed up this week are defending something that NATO forgot how to name — not just territory, not just trade routes, not just oil, but the idea that free people have the right to live without the threat of annihilation from regimes that have spent 45-plus years announcing exactly what they intend to do. The State of Israel has been living that fight since its founding. America understood it after October 7th. The Gulf states understood it when Iranian missiles and drones started landing on their soil this week.
The West used to understand it too. Some of it still does. The question NATO must answer is which of its members still recognizes that alliances are not just summits and press conferences.
Eyal, Nadav. “Iran After Khamenei: The Indicators That Will Decide This War.” Between Us.
If you want to know why NATO nations weren’t involved, it boils down to three reasons:
A) Those in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Finland and the Baltics, have to focus on Russia. We should not expect them to be involved.
B) We can crack jokes about France, Britain and Belgium being Islamic republics, but effectively they are in this case. Fear of the Muslim vote and of Muslim terrorism is what guides them here.
C) Closely related to (B) is Europe’s pathological and institutional Jew hatred, which is aggravated by the Muslim community but would still be a factor without them due to the left. Leon DeWinter’s famous quote applies here “Europe will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust”.
Maybe these Gulf states would not stand by the Ayatollahs and Mullahs next time.