President Trump on Sunday warned NATO faces a “very bad” future if the US allies fail to help reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz, as oil prices soar during the Iran war.
Trump said in an interview with the Financial Times that European nations and other global powers that rely on Gulf oil should join a US-led effort to secure the waterway — where roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply normally flows.
“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the Strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump told the British outlet, arguing that Europe and China are more heavily dependent on oil from the region than the US.
“If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”
The president also said he could delay his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping later this month as he presses Beijing to help unblock the Strait.
“I think China should help too because China gets 90 percent of its oil from the Straits [sic],” Trump told the Financial Times.
“We’d like to know before that. It’s [two weeks is] a long time … We may delay,” he said, without elaborating on how long.
Iran said on Saturday that all countries — other than the US and Israel — may pass through the waterway, in a desperate attempt at coalition-busting less than a day after America bombed military targets on Iran’s oil-critical Kharg Island.
International oil prices surged to roughly $106 a barrel on Sunday — skyrocketing by about 45% since the conflict in the Middle East escalated.
Trump said the 32-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization should provide military support, ranging from minesweepers to forces that could knock out “bad actors” along the Iranian shore.
“We have a thing called NATO,” he told the Financial Times. “We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us . . . But we helped them.
“Now we’ll see if they help us,” Trump continued. “Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them, but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.”
The president also singled out his frustration with the UK after speaking to Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, earlier on Sunday, the outlet reported.
“The UK might be considered the number one ally, the longest serving, et cetera, and when I asked for them to come, they didn’t want to come,” Trump said.
“And as soon as we basically wiped out the danger capacity from Iran, they said, ‘Oh well, we’ll send two ships’, and I said, ‘we need these ships before we win, not after we win,’” he added.
“I’ve long said that NATO is a one-way street,” Trump said, claiming that Iran’s military capabilities had been largely “decimated” in the past two weeks of fighting and would pose little danger to European allies moving assets into the Gulf.
A French soldier was killed in an Iranian drone strike in Iraq on Thursday.
Trump also signaled that the US was prepared to launch new strikes that could target oil infrastructure on Kharg Island, the loading site for most of the Islamic Republic’s oil exports.
“You saw we hit Kharg Island, everything but the pipes yesterday,” Trump said, referencing the total “obliteration” of military targets on the island located about 16 miles off the Iranian coast.
“We can hit that in five minutes. And there’s not a thing they can do about it,” he said.
