Ask Before You Bomb

Trump launched a war without securing America's European allies. He's shocked-shocked that some of them won't help him fight it.

Photo by Valentin Karisch on Unsplash

“History testifies to the ineptitude of coalitions in waging war,” Dwight Eisenhower wrote in Crusade in Europe, his 1948 memoir of his time as Supreme Commander of Allied forces in World War II.

Ike knew whereof he spoke. He had spent years navigating the fractious, ego-laden, nationally self-interested coalition that ultimately defeated Hitler — and he never romanticized the experience. And yet, for all his skepticism, he arrived at an equally firm conclusion: that allies, however difficult, were absolutely essential. “Immediate and continuous loyalty to the concept of unity and to allied commanders,” he wrote, “is basic to victory.”

Donald Trump plainly has no “continuous loyalty to the concept of unity.” He enjoys nothing so much as berating America’s European partners and threatening to withdraw from NATO. And yet, he apparently expected those same allies to quietly make their bases available for his bombing campaign against Iran.

The allies have not taken kindly to this. Spain has closed not just its jointly operated bases at Rota and Morón, but its airspace to American aircraft involved in the conflict. Defense Minister Margarita Robles was blunt: “We don’t authorize either the use of military bases or the use of airspace for actions related to the war in Iran.” Italy this week denied landing rights to American bombers at Sigonella in Sicily; according to Italian reporting, no one had even requested authorization beforehand — the flight plans were communicated while the planes were already in the air.

France, while allowing non-combat support aircraft at its Istres base, has made clear it will not permit offensive use of its facilities, with President Emmanuel Macron declaring that the American operations were conducted “outside international law.”

This is not a peripheral inconvenience. It is a strategic crisis that was entirely foreseeable — and which a more disciplined administration would have anticipated.

(The one ally the US does have in this war, Israel, is of limited use as a staging ground, being as it is inside the war zone.)

The dependence of American military operations on European soil is not incidental, it is structural and profound. As of early 2025, the US had roughly 84,000 service members across its European Command area of responsibility, operating from 31 persistent bases and 18 other military sites — air bases, naval stations, army garrisons, missile defense systems, and surveillance hubs. The continent is not just a staging area for the defense of Europe, it is the launchpad for American power projection everywhere. As EUCOM Commander General Christopher Cavoli put it before Congress: Europe is “the first line of defense of our homeland.”

Ramstein Air Base in Germany is the nerve center of this network, and its role in the current war illustrates why geography is not merely tactical but existential for American operations at this range. Drone pilots in the American Southwest cannot send direct signals to aircraft operating over the Middle East or Africa; the earth’s curvature makes it physically impossible. Signals travel via fiber-optic cables to Ramstein, which transmits them to satellites and then to the drones in real time — eliminating the lag that would make remote strikes unworkable. Germany may not be a party to this war, but without German soil, this war would be operationally different in kind, not just degree.

None of this was secret. The centrality of European bases to American force projection in the Middle East has for decades been documented in open-source analyses, congressional testimony, and think-tank reports. Maj. Gen. Gordon Davis, former director of operations at U.S. European Command, has described it thus: “Europe’s location — at the intersection of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia — makes it ideal for rapid deployment in all directions.” A Hudson Institute analysis prepared for NATO’s Allied Command Transformation was equally clear: a large-scale withdrawal from European basing “would make US power projection slower, costlier, and less effective.”

The obverse of this truth is what the Trump administration apparently failed to reckon with: that dependence on bases you do not own is only as reliable as the political goodwill of the governments that host them. Those governments have their own electorates, their own legal constraints, and — as the past month has demonstrated — their own views on whether a given American war is just.

This is hardly the first time when America’s European allies have refused to go along with a military campaign hatched in Washington. In 1986, when Ronald Reagan ordered strikes on Libya in retaliation for the Berlin disco bombing, France and Spain denied overflight rights to American F-111s, forcing the aircraft to make a lengthy detour around the Iberian Peninsula, adding many hours to an already complex mission and nearly compromising the element of surprise. The operational degradation was significant; the diplomatic damage lingered for years.

But Reagan, at least, went into that operation knowing the political landscape among his allies. He did not learn of the refusal while his aircraft were already airborne.

The more instructive parallel may be the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns of the early 18th century. Fighting across the breadth of continental Europe in the War of the Spanish Succession, Marlborough understood that his genius for battle was inseparable from his talent for alliance management. Before every campaign season, he cultivated the rulers and regents whose territories he needed to traverse and supply his army. He cajoled the Dutch, flattered the German princes, and diplomatically outmaneuvered his own government’s reluctance. The result was Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde — a string of victories that redrew the map of Europe.

The lesson Marlborough taught, and which Clausewitzians have been repeating ever since, is that logistics and alliance solidarity are the unglamorous but essential preconditions of waging a successful war.

Donald Trump governs by improvisation and bravado, which works as a political style but fails as a military one. This was not a diplomatic miscalculation, it was a category error — a failure to understand that political relationships are the infrastructure of military operations, not a separate consideration.

Trump’s response to the refusals has been characteristically volcanic. On Truth Social, he warned European allies that they would “have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore”. At one point he posted that France had been “VERY UNHELPFUL” and that “the U.S.A. will REMEMBER” (the Élysée disputed his account, saying France had not changed its policy — what likely occurred was a routine per-flight clearance being denied, not a blanket ban).

Outrage is an odd response to a surprise you inflicted on yourself.

A White House spokesman offered a different flavor of defiance, telling Newsweek that Washington “does not need help from Spain or anyone else.” What neither Trump nor his spokesman offered was any explanation for why, if allied support was so dispensable, they had apparently counted on it without asking.

Spain’s decision has been described by El País as “the most significant public break with Washington by a major Western ally since the 2003 Iraq invasion.” That comparison is instructive. In 2003, with the transatlantic alliance badly strained, France and Germany denied diplomatic support but allowed overflights; the axis of disagreement was political, not operational. What is happening now is different: the operational constraints are real, they are growing, and they were not anticipated by an administration that mistook hostility toward allies for leverage over them.

The good news — if it can be called that — is that Germany remains compliant, that Portugal’s Lajes base in the Azores continues to function as a logistics hub, and that Britain has granted access for defensive operations. The architecture of American power in Europe has not collapsed. But it has developed cracks, and cracks have a way of widening. Retired officers at the Center for European Policy Analysis have warned that such facilities are hard to recover once they’re lost, with one retired admiral cautioning that base closures and troop withdrawals signal a downgrading of the US from global to regional power status. That warning was issued before the current crisis; it lands harder now.

The Trump administration is threatening trade penalties against Spain, as if economic coercion were a substitute for patient alliance maintenance. This is the diplomatic equivalent of trying to crash on a friend’s couch after you’ve set fire to their house.

What the war against Iran has exposed, at significant operational cost, is a truth that American strategists have known for decades but that the current administration treated as inconvenient: the US’s extraordinary capacity for projecting military force across the globe is not a product of American power alone. It is a product of a network of relationships in Europe, undergirded by legal frameworks and informed by political accommodations largely forged during the Cold War and maintained, imperfectly, ever since.

That network does not survive contempt. It requires cultivation, and cultivation requires the very qualities this administration most conspicuously lacks: patience, consistency, and a willingness to treat allies as partners rather than supplicants.

Eisenhower learned how to treat difficult allies during WWII, and helpfully put it all down in a book. It is one of many Trump should have read.