"I urge you to comply,” US president Dwight Eisenhower wrote to prime minister David Ben-Gurion, diplomatese for what in US President Donald Trump’s phrasing would have been something like “do as I say, or I’ll strip you nude and have you tarred and feathered.”
It was November 1956, and the American president was ordering the Jewish state to withdraw from the Sinai Desert following the previous month’s Sinai Campaign.
That the war pitted a dictatorial aggressor against an embattled democracy was immaterial. What mattered was the Soviet-American world order, which the war unsettled.
Eisenhower thus forced an Israeli withdrawal, and also stood by while Moscow massacred the Hungarian rebels who, in those very days, rose up in arms, demanding democracy and declaring their intention to have their country join NATO, and thus defect from East to West.
Israel was marginal in that global configuration, and that is how it was treated at a time when America imposed itself even on Britain and France, which had fought alongside the IDF during the Sinai Campaign.
It was all part of the postwar order that was consolidated with NATO’s establishment, 77 years ago this month, and, in fact, extended much further, effectively including non-NATO members like Australia and Japan.
Now the Western alliance, the fears that produced it, and the international reality it shaped are all things of the past. It is one historic transformation that the Iran war, no matter how it ends, has already exposed.
What, then, was this alliance about, and what should come in its place?
We have come a long way since Eisenhower’s patronizing treatment of Ben-Gurion.
American-Israeli cooperation in fighting Iran is not only unambiguous and open, but also intimate and intense. As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens noted, this may be the first time since 1945 that the US has “an equal partner with which to share the burdens of war.”
In fact, the American-Israeli symbiosis has demonstrated what the concept of alliance is all about: a joint struggle for a shared cause. And the cause is the same one that guided the Western alliance since its inception: a free world and a secure West.
Yes, allies do not always actively join each other’s wars, but at the very least, they lend each other moral support. And in the current war’s case, the Western cause should have been a no-brainer: stopping a regime that massacred its own people, vowed to destroy another country, deployed terrorists worldwide, and openly piled uranium, missiles, rockets, and drones.
But alas, the allies refused to share the cause. In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected an American request to join the war; in Berlin, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said, “This is not our war”; and in Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the war “Illegal.”
Worse, Washington’s ostensible allies would not even help it reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a cause which is not about interference in another country’s internal affairs, but about defending the West itself from a hijacker that took an economic hostage and pointed a pistol to its head.
What, then, happened to the alliance that once defined the free world?
Historians will debate the cause of the Western alliance’s collapse. Some will blame it on American idiocy and others on European exploitation, some will stress the role of personalities, and others will point to historic events. They will all be right.
Telling a major ally like Britain that its troops are cowards and its warships are “toys,” as Trump did, or saying of the president of France, “his wife treats him very badly,” is no way to treat allies, not to mention the attempt to snatch Greenland from Denmark, nor the suggestion that Uncle Sam should gobble Canada.
Then again, America’s allies spent but a fraction of what the US spent over the decades on the alliance’s defense. Even today, after European governments raised their defense spending following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US defense spending is 3.1% of GDP, whereas Britain, France, and Germany still spend under 2.5%, and Spain and Italy under 2%.
The era of a unified European enemy has passed
But the real problem lies not in such accounting and also not in Trump’s rhetoric, but in the passing of an era – the era that produced the Western alliance. What glued that alliance – the Soviet war machine’s menace and the communist idea’s appeal – are gone.
As long as the West faced a single aggressive and imperial enemy, Washington readily spent far more than its allies on confronting it, and the allies mostly accepted America’s lead.
Now, European leaders do not feel that Khomeinist Iran is Europe’s enemy, and Trump does not feel that Europe’s new enemy – Vladimir Putin’s Russia – is America’s enemy.
The Western alliance, in short, has lost its compass, driver, and fuel. And since this alliance is brain-dead, a new one will have to come in its place.
That new alliance will not be assembled by the current American leader. This project will take the kind of conviction, vision, inspiration, and focus he does not possess.
But the new alliance will nonetheless emerge. It will include all those who believe in and are prepared to fight for liberty, tolerance, and free trade. And it will have two tiers: one political, the other economic.
The political alliance will confront those out to subdue humankind, the way communist leaders did in the past and Islamist radicals do today.
Many will not join it, whether out of cynicism or cowardice, but the alliance’s other tier will include every county that uses the high seas.
No, these allies will not make budgetary pledges, much less station troops in each other’s realms. They will, however, jointly declare: Freedom of navigation is sacred. Anyone obstructing it declares war on the rest of humanity and becomes its fair game.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarrim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.