Donald Trump has warned that Nato faces a “very bad” future if US allies fail to assist in opening up the Strait of Hormuz, sending a blunt message to European nations to join his war effort in Iran.
The US president told the FT in an interview on Sunday that he could also delay his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping later this month as he presses Beijing to help unblock the crucial waterway.
“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the Strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump said, arguing that Europe and China are heavily dependent on oil from the Gulf, unlike 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,” he added.
Trump’s comments, made in an eight-minute phone call with the FT, came a day after he appealed to China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK to join a “team effort” to open up the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes.
Iran, in effect, shut the strait after the US and Israel launched their war more than two weeks ago, sparking fears of a new oil price shock for the global economy. US efforts to open the waterway have largely failed. International oil prices hit $106 a barrel on Sunday evening, up about 45 per cent since the start of the war.
Despite his warning, Trump was pessimistic that US allies would heed his pleas for help.
“We have a thing called Nato,” said Trump, who has often criticised the alliance. “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. 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.”
Asked to specify the help he needed, Trump said “whatever it takes”. He added that allies should send minesweepers, of which Europe possesses many more than the US.
He also wanted “people who are going to knock out some bad actors that are along the [Iranian] shore”. Trump implied he wanted European commando teams or other military help to eliminate Iranians making “a nuisance” in the Gulf with drones and naval mines.
“We’re hitting them very hard,” Trump said. “They’ve got nothing left but to make a little trouble in the Strait but these people are beneficiaries and they ought to help us police it. We’ll help them. But they should also be there. You sort of need a lot of people to watch over a few.”
Trump said he was also expecting China to help unblock the strait before he travels to Beijing at the end of this month for a summit with Xi Jinping, his first trip to China in his second term.
“I think China should help too because China gets 90 per cent of its oil from the Straits [sic],” Trump said. Waiting until the summit would be too late, he said.
“We’d like to know before that. It’s [two weeks is] a long time.” He added that his trip to China might also be put back. “We may delay,” Trump said. He did not say for how long.
The US president’s comments came as his Treasury secretary Scott Bessent met his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng in Paris for talks about the planned summit in Beijing in late March.
Xi invited Trump to visit China when the two leaders met in South Korea at the end of October and reached a truce in the US-China trade and technology war. Beijing has shown no sign of wanting to delay the summit despite the war in Iran, which is a major oil supplier to China.
Having spoken earlier on Sunday to Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, Trump expressed particular frustration with Britain’s response so far.
“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,” he 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’. I’ve long said that Nato is a one-way street.”
He claimed any danger to allies moving assets into the Gulf would be minimal since the US and Israel had destroyed Iran’s military capacity in the past two weeks.
“We’ve essentially decimated Iran,” Trump said. “They have no navy, no anti-aircraft, no air force, everything is gone. The only thing they can do is make a little trouble by putting a mine in the water — a nuisance, but the nuisance can cause problems.”
However, European allies have already been harmed in the war. A French soldier was killed on Thursday in an Iranian drone strike in Iraq. An Italian aircraft was destroyed on Sunday at a base in Kuwait.
Trump also warned that the US was prepared to launch new strikes on Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export hub, and could target its oil infrastructure.
“You saw we hit Kharg Island, everything but the pipes yesterday,” he said, referring to a bombing raid he announced on Friday. “We can hit that in five minutes. And there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
Asked whether Russia was helping Iran with satellite data to target US and Israeli anti-missile shields, Trump said: “I don’t know one way or the other. But you could also make the case that we helped Ukraine to an extent. It’s hard to say: ‘you’re targeting us, but we’ve been helping Ukraine’.”
Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden had given Ukraine $350bn in cash and equipment, the president claimed. “So it’s hard to say: ‘Gee what are you doing?’ when we’ve been doing the same thing.”
Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington