No Good Deeds Go Unpunished By Our European ‘Allies’ and Their Total Inaction

With too few exceptions, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been AWOL in aggressively supporting the United States in derailing Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Especially for Spain, Italy, and France, Operation Epic Fury has been an epic example of their shortsighted policies, short-term memories, and, as far as America is concerned, a short-changing case of their no-good-deeds-go-unpunished narcissism.

But given the miserly defense spending of those nations, such reluctance to support Epic Fury should have been expected. Since 2006, when NATO first agreed to a 2 percent GDP guideline for member defense spending, those nations remained below that aspirational threshold for almost 20 years.

Contrastingly, the United States spends by far the most on defense for NATO’s 32 member nations, allocating nearly 13 times more than France, about 25 times more than Italy, and over 45 times more than Spain.

Furthermore, the U.S. earmarks 3.22 percent of its GDP to defense, accounts for roughly two-thirds of total NATO defense spending, and, when per capita disbursements are considered, ranks only slightly behind Norway.

Thus, with America doing the heavy lifting — supporting NATO and also ending the threat of a nuclear-weaponized Iran — Spain, Italy, and France have been freeloading under our security umbrella for decades.

And such no-good-deeds-go-unpunished dependency becomes even more obvious when reviewing their almost total unwillingness to support Epic Fury in a military or even a logistical sense.

Along with Italy and France, the worst do-nothing offender is Spain, which closed its embassy in Israel, kept it open in Iran, and whose prime minister labeled Epic Fury an “illegal war” — but also citing concerns about being drawn into a wider regional conflict, “categorically” refused any support for the operation by denying American military access to airbases for any combat or refueling missions to Iran.

But the prime minister of Italy was also critical of Epic Fury, describing the intervention as “outside the scope of international law.” And not surprisingly, in refusing to join the military coalition against Iran, offensive operations for Epic Fury at U.S. bases in Italy were prohibited.

Although France initially offered diplomatic support for “proportionate defensive action” against Iran, its stance shifted as the conflict intensified. In late March, France denied the United States’ use of its airspace to transport military supplies and weapons, specifically for Israel and more generally for Epic Fury.

The overall NIMBY theme among those three exploiting nations was best expressed by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who initially said that Epic Fury was “not our war” and that the U.K. would not be “drawn into” American or Israeli operations.

Yet such comments clearly forgot our “special relationship” with Britain, which has supported them in numerous “not our war either” regional conflicts since 1945.

More specifically, during the 1982 Falklands War against Argentina, American military and logistical support for the U.K. was described by British officials as “essential.”

Afflicted with such selective amnesia, Starmer initially withheld consent for direct American action against Iran from British soil but reversed that position following an Iranian drone strike on a British base in Cyprus. Only after that attack were U.S. aircraft permitted to conduct “specific and limited defensive” strikes on Iranian leadership and infrastructure from the United Kingdom.

However, that change of heart has not occurred in Spain, Italy, or France, even though our contributory purging of Europe from authoritarianism in World War I was “not our war” as well. But the price was high in exorcizing that faraway menace in 1918, as its cost was the lives of more than 100,000 Americans.

Notwithstanding that after Pearl Harbor, World War II became “our war,” that should not devalue our “good deeds” as the deciding factor in that conflict either. After all, freeing Spain from Franco, Italy from Mussolini, and France from Hitler cost over 400,000 American lives.

Yet, those are the very nations that have continually rationalized inaction in supporting their greatest ally, when America is all that stands between them and a nuclear Islamist regime murdering anyone unwilling to return to a Medieval existence.

And though it could be said that, in defanging Iran, we were keeping those wolves from our own door, the same could also be said of NATO allies, since supporting that endeavor would irrefutably do the same for them.

More to the point, if our good deeds remain largely one-sided and America is forced to reconsider its relationship with NATO, a positive result is still certain. And that is, when Epic Fury ends, Iran will no longer pose a threat to anyone but the current monsters killing innocents by the thousands.

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