NATO Backed the US at Ankara. But Should It Have?
When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stood alongside Donald Trump in Ankara on July 8 and said that the US strikes on Iran were "totally crucial" — that "when you have a ceasefire and Iran is basically violating it, I think it is totally crucial that the US forcefully react" — he was doing something that deserves more scrutiny than it has received.
He was lending the moral authority of a 32-member defensive alliance to a war that alliance had not sanctioned, that no NATO treaty obligation required, and that one of its own members — Spain — had explicitly refused to facilitate.
The Ankara summit declaration called on Iran to "fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz" and reiterated that "Iran must never have a nuclear weapon." NATO forces shot down Iranian drones near the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. And Trump, returning from Ankara on Air Force One, declared the ceasefire "over" and launched another round of strikes on Iranian territory.
NATO, in other words, was present at the creation of another escalation in a war it has no formal mandate to fight — and whose origins it has been conspicuously reluctant to examine.
Who Started This War
The foundational fact that Western coverage has consistently buried deserves to be stated plainly.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched air and missile strikes on Iran. They destroyed nuclear facilities, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated senior military commanders, and initiated what Washington designated "Operation Epic Fury." Iran did not attack first. Iran did not attack a NATO member. Iran did not threaten NATO territory.
Iran's response — closing the Strait of Hormuz, launching missiles at US bases across the Gulf region, targeting shipping — was retaliation for the February 28 strikes. Whether that response was proportionate, or strategically coherent, or legally defensible under international law, is a legitimate question. But the sequence is not in doubt.
NATO is a defensive alliance. Its founding purpose, as stated in the Washington Treaty of 1949, is the collective defence of member states against armed attack. Article 5 — the clause that says an attack on one is an attack on all — has been invoked exactly once in NATO's 77-year history: after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. It has never been invoked in response to an attack that a member state launched first and then suffered retaliation against.
The question that Ankara raised — and that nobody at the summit asked aloud — is whether NATO's political solidarity with the US in this war is consistent with what the alliance is actually for.
This is not a fringe argument. On July 9, former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Trump of "once again" dragging the United States back into "a dangerous and illegal war with Iran." That characterisation — illegal war — from the most senior Democrat in recent US political history is precisely the legal question that NATO, at Ankara, declined to engage with.
Article 5 and the Geography Problem
NATO's collective defence obligation is not only conditional — it is also geographic. Article 6 of the Washington Treaty specifies that Article 5 applies to armed attacks "on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the territory of Turkey or on the islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer."
The Gulf region — where US bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE have been repeatedly struck by Iranian missiles since February 28 — sits well outside that geographic boundary. US forces at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where roughly 10,000 American service members are stationed, are operating in a country that sits entirely outside the zone where NATO's collective defence obligation automatically applies.
This is not an obscure technicality. It is a deliberate design feature of the alliance, written into the treaty text after careful negotiation in 1948 and 1949. The drafters of the Washington Treaty made a conscious choice about where NATO's obligations would and would not extend. The Middle East was not inside that boundary.
When Iranian missiles struck US installations in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait on February 28 — in direct retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that had begun earlier that morning — NATO's Secretary General said the alliance "stands firmly with all allies." As of July 9, Iran has now struck military and civilian targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and the UAE — none of which are NATO members, and most of which sit well outside Article 6's geographic boundary. Jordan, a key US partner and host to American forces at Al-Asad and other bases, had eight Iranian missiles intercepted by its air defences overnight on July 9. The geographic spread of Iranian retaliation now encompasses virtually every US-aligned state in the Middle East — none of it within NATO's formal defensive perimeter. That was a political statement of solidarity. It was not, and could not have been, a legal invocation of Article 5. Rutte himself said explicitly: "Nobody is talking about Article 5."
But if Article 5 doesn't apply — if NATO has no formal collective defence obligation to a war being fought in the Gulf by a member state that started that war — then what exactly is NATO's role here? And who authorised it?
The Alliance That Didn't Say No
The most revealing aspect of NATO's Ankara posture is not what the alliance said. It is what it didn't say.
The Ankara summit declaration contains no reference to the February 28 strikes that started this war. It contains no reference to international law, the UN Charter, or the legal basis for Operation Epic Fury. It does not acknowledge that Iran was struck first. It calls on Iran to "fully respect freedom of navigation" without acknowledging that the Strait of Hormuz crisis was triggered by the conflict that the US and Israel initiated.
This is political communication, not legal analysis. And it reveals something important about how NATO functions in practice: as a political community that provides solidarity to its most powerful member, regardless of the circumstances that created the situation requiring solidarity.
The contrast with Ukraine is instructive. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state — NATO's political and moral clarity was immediate and total. The aggressor was named. The victim was named. The legal basis was clear. The alliance rallied.
When the US and Israel struck Iran on February 28, 2026, the political and moral picture was considerably more complicated. Iran had not attacked NATO. The US had launched an offensive military operation. The legal basis was contested. And yet NATO's response — political solidarity, joint air defence operations, a summit declaration backing the US position — was functionally similar to its Ukraine response, without the same legal and moral foundation.
Spain Got It Right
The exception within the alliance is worth examining.
Spain refused to allow the United States to use its air bases for Operation Epic Fury. Trump responded by calling Spain "a worthless partner in NATO" and threatening to cut trade ties. At the Ankara summit, he pointedly criticised Spain for "handling Mark Rutte very badly" — a reference to an earlier bilateral dispute.
But Spain's position is arguably the most constitutionally coherent one in the alliance. A NATO member state has no obligation under the Washington Treaty to facilitate an offensive military operation launched by another member against a third country that has not attacked NATO. Spain made a sovereign decision not to be operationally complicit in a war it hadn't sanctioned and that carried no Article 5 obligation. That is not a betrayal of the alliance. It is an exercise of exactly the kind of sovereign judgment the alliance's unanimity requirement is designed to protect.
The legal analysis is straightforward: Article 5 exists to protect members from armed attack. It does not exist to provide political cover for members who launch armed attacks. Whether or not one agrees with the moral framing, the legal conclusion is accurate.
What Iran's UN Ambassador Said — and Why It Matters
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, condemned the latest US strikes as "a clear violation of the United Nations Charter and its international obligations." He was not making a political speech. He was making a legal argument.
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." The exceptions are narrow: UN Security Council authorisation, or individual and collective self-defence under Article 51 in response to an armed attack. Operation Epic Fury was not authorised by the UN Security Council — Russia and China would have vetoed it. The self-defence argument requires that the US was responding to an armed attack; Iran had not attacked the US before February 28.
These are not arguments that will be adjudicated in any court in the near term. But they are arguments that the international community — particularly the Global South, which has watched the US and Israel launch a war against a Muslim-majority country, kill its supreme leader, and now threaten to bomb its water supply — is hearing and registering.
NATO's decision to align itself politically with this operation, without engaging with its legal basis, carries costs that the alliance will pay over time in its credibility with the countries it needs to maintain relationships with.
The Harder Question
None of this is to say that Iran's conduct has been blameless, or that the IRGC's attacks on commercial shipping, Gulf state infrastructure, and US bases are legally or morally defensible. They are not. The Strait of Hormuz closure has caused immense harm to the global economy and, most directly, to the seafarers and civilian populations caught in the middle of a conflict between great powers.
The harder question is whether NATO — an alliance created in 1949 to defend Western Europe from Soviet aggression — is the right institution to be providing political cover for a 21st-century war in the Persian Gulf, launched by two of its member states against a country that had not attacked them, under legal authority that has not been clearly established, and in a geographic region that falls outside the alliance's foundational treaty obligations.
At Ankara, the answer appeared to be yes. But the question was never asked openly. And the countries that might have asked it — Spain, perhaps France, perhaps Germany — stayed quiet in the room, or were simply outmanoeuvred by Trump's political energy.
The one country that said no was called worthless.
The Bottom Line
NATO backed the United States at Ankara. It backed it politically, rhetorically, and in some cases operationally. And it did so without publicly examining whether the war it was backing was consistent with the defensive principles on which the alliance was founded.
That is not a trivial question. It is the question that will define whether NATO remains a genuine collective defence organisation — one that members can trust to apply consistent principles regardless of which member is the aggressor — or whether it has become something else: a political solidarity club for the Western great powers, available to provide moral cover for whatever the United States decides to do next.
Spain's refusal to facilitate the operation was treated as betrayal. It might, in time, look more like principle.
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