Help Me + Help You = Help Us
It Doesn't Have To Be Zero-Sum For The West
Ground Level
Before I became someone who writes about foreign policy, I was someone who executed it at the tactical level. One sandy patrol, one training exercise, one joint operation at a time.
I’ve run drills with Singaporean soldiers during live fire exercises and have had a Bahraini Prince as a fire team buddy. I worked with Iraqi Security Forces and assisted in their mission to prevent ISIS from regaining strongholds in al-Anbar Province. I worked alongside New Zealanders, British Royal Marines, and Australians who needed zero handholding and zero convincing that the mission mattered.
Each opportunity to work with a different military was more than a symbol of “international goodwill.” These were functioning relationships built on a simple truth: we are infinitely harder to kill together than we are apart.
That truth doesn’t change when you scale it from a military base to a geopolitical crisis.
The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. One-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply moves through it. Iran sits on one shore with guns, mines, and forty-seven years of institutional practice using both.
The enemy may be Iran, but the problem is us. The West has forgotten the addition our own militaries learned decades ago: Help Me + Help You = Help Us.
The Reason It Matters
Iran does not operate alone. It is one corner of a four-part coalition: right alongside Russia, China, and North Korea. They share no common culture, language, or long-term ambition. What they share is a single focused interest in dismantling the system of alliances, trade agreements, and security guarantees that has kept great-power conflict off the table since 1945. They want to end the world order that the West built and that the world still benefits from daily, mostly without noticing.
It’s like plumbing. Nobody thinks about plumbing until there’s water (or other stuff) on the floor.
Here’s what the water looks like right now: ships sitting idle in the Strait of Hormuz, a war in Europe nobody can afford to lose, and allies who aren’t sure whether Washington will pick up the phone.
The Axis can’t beat us in a straight fight, and all four of them know it. A conventional war against a unified West ends in their defeat, and they’ve accepted that. This is why they don’t fight us directly. They fight the connections between us. Every trade dispute, every diplomatic slight, every press conference where a Western leader performs outrage at an ally instead of an adversary: that’s the battlefield. The goal was never to defeat the West militarily. It was to make sure the West shows up to the next crisis as individuals.
The Performance
The irony: our Western alliance is actually working. At the operational level, quietly and without fanfare, it is largely functioning. American B-1B bombers are flying combat missions against Iran out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. Ramstein Air Base in Germany, whose government publicly said the conflict ‘has nothing to do with NATO,’ is the control hub routing satellite signals for US drone strikes. Without it, the operations would be nearly impossible. Romania approved American tanker aircraft and surveillance equipment on its soil.
The same Germany whose Defense Minister publicly declared ‘this is not our war’ regarding the Strait of Hormuz had already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase American weapons for Ukraine through NATO’s PURL initiative. Twenty-four countries had joined that program by the end of 2025, committing over $4 billion in total.
German chancellors, French presidents, and British prime ministers have discovered an ace up their sleeve: publicly criticizing Washington plays extremely well domestically. It signals national pride. It costs nothing because the alliance keeps functioning whether they defend it publicly or not. They can shout “Independence!” precisely because the alliance makes them safe enough to do so. It’s mooching, but with better optics.
Washington does the same thing in reverse. Calling out “European freeloaders” fires up a domestic base that has been told, for years, that America is being taken advantage of. Good television, great fundraising. And it doesn’t require anyone to actually dismantle the alliance they’re publicly questioning. The alliance is too valuable, and every leader in every room knows it.
In the military, we call this a self-licking ice cream cone: a system that exists purely to sustain itself, producing nothing useful except the illusion of activity. Both sides are sustaining a performance that serves their domestic audiences at the cost of actively damaging the alliance they depend on to survive.
The Axis doesn’t need to hack our systems or intercept our communications. Tehran, Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing have access to the same press conferences you do. Those press conferences are telling them that the Western alliance is fractured, resentful, and increasingly every-man-for-himself. And Western leaders are broadcasting that picture voluntarily: for applause, for votes, for nothing of lasting strategic value.
You can be furious with your allies on Monday and still need them to show up on Tuesday.
What We’ve Done To Ourselves
Europe’s record earns its criticism. NATO members committed to spending 2% of GDP on defense and most didn’t even pretend to meet that goal. Germany underfunded its military into a running joke while simultaneously making itself structurally dependent on Russian gas. They are functionally subsidizing the army that the West is helping Ukraine to fight.
On Iran, the EU spent decades hedging, abstaining, and sanctioning with holes in the net. While the Islamic Republic carried out assassination plots in France, Germany, and Denmark, on European soil and against European citizens, the response was diplomatic notes and feigned concern. The machinery of consequence never engaged. The IRGC wasn’t designated a terrorist organization by the EU until late January 2026. The United States made that designation in 2019; seven years earlier. I’d argue Washington was long overdue by then.
The deeper European failure is systemic. For decades, the plan in Europe has been to let Washington carry the security burden, invest their savings in social welfare, and call it multilateralism. Their armies atrophied as Russia watched. When the bill finally arrived in the form of a Russian tank column crossing into Ukraine, Europe’s response was to ask Washington to keep covering the tab while Brussels drafted strongly worded statements. The continent that benefits most from open sea lanes, stable energy markets, and a rules-based international order has been the least willing to pay for any of it.
This is not to say that Washington’s record is clean.
The Trump administrations, both I and II, have treated alliances like protection rackets. The message, stated and implied, never changed: pay up, or we rethink the arrangement. That framing might survive a real estate negotiation or a book deal, but it doesn’t survive a security partnership because alliances run on trust, and trust runs on consistency. Years to build, seconds to destroy.
The red line problem is worse. When the Obama administration drew a line in Syria over chemical weapons and watched Assad cross it without consequence, every adversary on the planet updated their threat assessment. Tehran updated theirs first.
The lesson wasn’t about Syria. It was a global proof of concept: American threats have an expiration date. Find it and operate freely past it. Ukraine is where that lesson matured. For years, the US treated Kyiv’s defense requests as a political liability rather than a strategic imperative. When Russia finally invaded, the response was a spigot: arms turned on and off. It was cynically calibrated to keep the conflict from being lost rather than won. A hedge in lieu of a strategy.
The tariff question compounds it. Threatening allies with economic penalties while simultaneously asking them to share military burdens isn’t foreign policy. When Europe is weighing whether to commit naval assets to the Strait of Hormuz while absorbing trade threats from Washington, nobody needs to widen the fracture. Time does it for free.
The deepest American wound is self-inflicted and bipartisan. The United States has not sustained a coherent foreign policy across a single decade in a generation because domestic politics resets the board every four years. Iran has had the same strategic objective since 1979. Washington has cycled through engagement, maximum pressure, re-engagement, and maximum pressure again. We signal to every adversary that the way to outlast American policy is to wait for the next election. No adversary has to outfight the United States, not if they wait.
Past a certain point, we don’t even need the Axis to degrade our alliances. We picked the shovel up ourselves and have been digging enthusiastically ever since.
Coming Out Ahead
Picture the negotiation as it’s currently being framed: Europe commits naval assets to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if Washington recommits to Ukraine. Two crises, two ledgers. Everyone shakes hands and goes home.
Western leaders are treating that framing as serious diplomacy, which is ludicrous.
The same country mining the Strait is supplying the army fighting Ukraine. The sanctioned oil markets funding Iranian proxies are financing Russian military procurement. These are not coincidences. The West is negotiating with itself about which front deserves attention while a coordinated campaign runs against both simultaneously.
In 1942, the Allies faced a global ‘tripartite’ threat that forced a hard reality: a win for the enemy on one side of the world was a loss for everyone on the other. There were no ‘Pacific-only’ or ‘Europe-only’ problems. When the West finally committed to the ‘Germany First’ strategy, it wasn’t because of a political trade-off or a quid-pro-quo; it was a cold-blooded recognition that you don’t divide your force in front of a coordinated enemy.
The proof is current. After weeks of public theater, with leaders competing to signal distance from Washington, 22 nations including the UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Gulf states signed onto a coordinated framework for reopening the Strait. France, Germany, and the UK signaled support for defensive measures against Iranian drones and missiles. The coalition exists, but it took a crisis and a month of transatlantic insults to get it moving in a positive direction.
The Math Hasn’t Changed
The math in al-Anbar and the math in a geopolitical crisis are identical. A Singaporean soldier on a live fire range, a Bahraini Prince in a fire team, a New Zealander who needed no encouragement: those relationships were built on a shared understanding that the person next to you is the difference between coming out ahead and not coming out at all.
Western leaders on both sides of the Atlantic know this. The classified briefings tell them what the press conferences obscure. The operational machinery tells them what the campaign rallies deny. The alliance works. It has worked. It can keep working. The gap between what leaders know in private and what they say in public is the only thing that can break it.
The window for getting this right is narrow. The Axis is patient. They don’t need to win today. They just need the West to keep losing ground to itself.
We’ve closed that gap before. We know how.
It begins with leaders on both sides of the Atlantic saying in public what their classified briefings already tell them: the fights in Ukraine and Hormuz are the same fight, and the alliance that wins them is the one that stops tearing at the tendons for domestic applause.
Help Me + Help You = Help Us