For decades, transatlantic tensions over NATO have followed a familiar pattern: sharp words, bruised feelings, and an eventual return to the alliance’s foundational commitments. European leaders have learned to wait out the friction.
This time, according to one of the world’s most closely watched geopolitical observers, may be genuinely different.
Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, said Monday that European capitals are no longer simply absorbing another round of American pressure — they are beginning to accept that the relationship with the United States may have fundamentally changed.
“I think there’s a recognition in Europe that, you know, maybe this is a divorce,” she said.
The immediate flashpoint is the ongoing U.S. military campaign against Iran — known as Operation Epic Fury — and a specific request from the Trump administration that NATO allies send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait is one of the most strategically critical waterways on earth, serving as the transit corridor for roughly 20% of the global oil supply. Iran has threatened to restrict or block access to the passage in response to U.S. military strikes against Iranian targets — a move that has rattled global energy markets and sent alarm through European capitals that depend heavily on Gulf fossil fuels.
European nations declined to honor the request. President Trump, long a critic of the alliance’s burden-sharing arrangements, responded by stating he is “strongly considering” withdrawing the United States from NATO — a statement he described as “beyond consideration” to reverse.
Europe’s Fury — and Its Fear
Beddoes spoke on CNN’s “Global Public Square” with host Fareed Zakaria, and her characterization of the European mood was unambiguous.
“They’re furious about being called cowards and other insults by the president of the United States,” she said.
The anger, she explained, carries a specific historical weight. NATO’s Article 5 — the collective defense clause that treats an attack on one member as an attack on all — has been formally invoked exactly once in the alliance’s history: in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In response, thousands of European soldiers deployed alongside American forces and served with distinction in Afghanistan — a point European leaders feel is being deliberately ignored.
Beyond the insult, there is a practical dimension driving European anxiety. The potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz does not only threaten abstract geopolitical stability — it threatens European energy supplies directly. The economic consequences of prolonged disruption to Gulf oil flows would fall heavily on European economies already navigating a fragile post-pandemic recovery.
“They see the impact on their economy. And on top of that, now they have the president of the United States and the secretary of state basically saying, ‘NATO is finished,'” Beddoes said.
Even the Optimists Are No Longer Sure
What Beddoes found most striking — and most telling — is not the reaction of European governments that have long been skeptical of the Trump administration’s intentions. It is the shift among those who have consistently tried to find common ground.
“I think there’s a growing realization in Europe, even amongst those European countries that have always seen the glass half full and have always hoped that they can maintain some kind of special relationship with the United States, that this time something really might be different,” she said.
That shift — from cautious optimism to genuine alarm among the alliance’s most pro-American members — may be the most significant signal of all. When the skeptics express doubt, it can be dismissed as expected. When the optimists abandon hope, it suggests the ground has moved.
A Long Series of Warning Signs
Beddoes framed the Iran dispute not as an isolated crisis, but as the most serious entry in a lengthening list of transatlantic ruptures.
She traced the pattern through Trump’s repeated demands that European nations dramatically increase their own defense spending — a position she acknowledged has merit on the policy merits — through the administration’s imposition of tariffs on European goods, to what she characterized as “verbal attacks” targeting Greenland and broader assertions of American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
Each of those episodes generated tension and was ultimately absorbed. The Iran standoff, she suggested, may represent a threshold that the relationship cannot simply recover from through the usual diplomatic mechanics.
What a NATO Divorce Would Mean
The implications of a genuine U.S. withdrawal from NATO — or even a sustained functional breakdown of the alliance — would be profound and far-reaching.
NATO has served as the primary framework for Western collective security since its founding in 1949, underwriting European stability through the Cold War and beyond. A U.S. departure would force European nations to dramatically accelerate their own defense buildups, restructure their security relationships, and navigate a fundamentally altered global order without the alliance architecture that has defined the transatlantic relationship for more than seven decades.
Whether Trump’s threat represents a genuine strategic intention or an aggressive negotiating posture — the kind of brinkmanship that has characterized his approach to alliances since his first term — remains the central question European governments are now being forced to answer for themselves.
According to Beddoes, a growing number of them are no longer confident they know.
The word “divorce” carries particular weight when applied to an alliance that has defined the architecture of Western security for 75 years. Zanny Minton Beddoes did not use it lightly — and neither, it appears, are the European leaders she describes as coming to terms with its possibility. Whether the U.S.-NATO relationship survives the current rupture intact, emerges restructured, or fractures in ways that reshape the global order will be one of the defining questions of this political moment. What Beddoes made clear on Monday is that in European capitals, the assumption that it will all work out in the end is no longer a given.