U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the NATO alliance will have to be “re-examined” given the failure of European powers during the Iran conflict.
Speaking with the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Media Network, Secretary Rubio expressed deep disappointment with the response of allies in Europe to the conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz and suggested that America may be better off without NATO.
Nato will defend Norway’s Arctic territory against a Russian invasion “from the first centimetre” after learning from Ukraine, the commander of the Norwegian army has said.
For decades, Nato’s plan for defending the High North from Russia was a fighting withdrawal from the northern Finnmark region by British Royal Marines and Norwegian troops, buying time until US reinforcements arrived to help retake lost territory.
Yet President Putin’s war has demonstrated how difficult it is for a large force to move forward under drone-saturated skies, and President Trump’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric against Nato has thrown American support into doubt.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has called for the withdrawal of all US soldiers from the country.
Tino Chrupalla, the far-Right party’s co-leader, told a meeting on Saturday that it was time to remove allied troops and nuclear weapons from Germany in order to pursue an “independent” foreign policy.
“Let’s start implementing this with the withdrawal of US troops from Germany,” he told supporters in Saxony.
Long a popular opinion in Germany, it may hasten the end of NATO.
US president considers blocking members of military alliance from decision-making unless 5 per cent spending target hit
Donald Trump is considering a shake-up of Nato designed to punish members who do not meet his funding demands.
The US president is examining a “pay-to-play model” that could block allies from decision-making, including when the bloc goes to war.
It is one of several ideas Mr Trump is weighing up after allies rejected his demand to send warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Sources close to the president said he was also considering pulling US troops out of Germany – a move that he has considered since returning to office last year.
I agree NATO nations have used the US as a sucker and that includes Canada’s failure to pull it’s weight.
He should not have demanded that NATO members join in the war against Iran.
Even though the world will benefit from the defeat of Iran’s Mullah regime Trump can’t expect assistance on demand for a war NATO states are simply unwilling and incapable of fighting especially those harboring significant Muslim 5th Columns. France and England are barely able to control their own streets.
NATO is a paper tiger, a drain on US resources and its resentful anti-American members dubious allies making withdrawal a reasonable response.
Maybe a slap in the face is the right approach, maybe not regardless there’s gonna be a lot of hurt feelings over this!
NATO LEADERS ARE A BUNCH OF COWARDS!!!🐔🐔🐔 pic.twitter.com/1xrKiFjSPp
— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) March 28, 2026
MIAMI BEACH — The United States may stop promising to defend its NATO allies should they come under attack, President Donald Trump said Friday, escalating his verbal barrage against the alliance as his frustration grows that European leaders have not significantly contributed to his war against Iran.
“NATO just wasn’t there” when he asked for help with the Iran war, Trump told a Miami Beach investment conference sponsored by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. That, he said, was “a tremendous mistake” by the Europeans.
“We spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO, hundreds, protecting them, and we would have always been there for them, but now, based on their actions, I guess we don’t have to be,” he continued.
President Trump blasted NATO on Thursday for its unwillingness to help with the Iran war and implied the US may no longer “be there” for its allies.
Before the Feb. 28 US-Israeli military attacks, Trump said, “we’re always gonna be there” for NATO allies.
“At least we were. I don’t know anymore, to be honest with you,” Trump said Thursday at a cabinet meeting.
🚨 BREAKING: President Trump just revealed NATO allies FAILED his test
"I'm so disappointed in NATO, because this was a test for NATO. This was a test. You can help us. You don't have to, but if you don't have, you know, if you don't do that, we're going to remember!"
"Just… pic.twitter.com/lWiD5bN3eF
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 26, 2026
Canada crossed the politically significant threshold of meeting NATO’s defence spending benchmark of two per cent of gross domestic product, according to the Western alliance’s annual secretary general’s report and compilation of statistics released on Thursday.
It is the first time since the late 1980s — toward the end of the Cold War — that the country has met the target, which has in recent years taken on enormous political and symbolic significance.
We’ve just heard from US President Donald Trump, who has called Nato allies “cowards” and said it would be “easy” for them to allow ships to safely pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Russia and the Globalist left are working to diminish Trump’s hand in his latest high-stakes gamble with Iran. Moscow is helping Iran conduct surgical strikes in the Middle East while leftist governments in Europe slow-walk support for the U.S. and try to block American access to NATO bases.
Since launching Operation Epic Fury 10 days ago, the U.S. and Israel have destroyed Iran’s navy and air force, much of its missile capacity, layers of its genocidal leadership, and blown up Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities across the country. Trump is now threatening to target their energy infrastructure. But Vladimir Putin is enabling savage Iranian retaliatory strikes on the vulnerable Gulf Arab states hosting U.S. bases in hopes of leveraging them to support a Moscow-brokered peace deal that would frustrate U.S. objectives.
What a difference a year makes. At this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was given a standing ovation for a speech that echoed what Vice President JD Vance had said so scandalously 12 months earlier. Rubio accused Europeans of trying “to appease a climate cult” that has impoverished the continent by forcing it to adopt catastrophic energy policies. Like Vance, he also criticised Europe’s immigration policies and its dogmatic commitment to global free trade, which he said has fuelled deindustrialisation and hollowed out supply chains. He even lamented the transfer of sovereignty to international organisations — a swipe not just at the UN and international legal bodies, but at the EU itself.
Europeans hated Vance’s speech. Yet they loved Rubio’s. The difference was tone. Unlike Vance, Rubio sugar-coated the message. “For us Americans,” he said, “home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.” Europeans just love it when Americans show respect for their cultural heritage. It flatters their sense of pride — and superiority.
Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy.
Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is the other way around. Russia has the world’s second-strongest military, while France comes sixth, UK eighth, Italy tenth and Germany 12th. To put a few figures on it, Russia has 1.32 million active service personnel, 560 fighter aircraft and 3,941 tanks ready for deployment. For Britain, the corresponding figures are 141,000, 67 and 187; for France 264,000, 178 and 342; and Italy 165,000, 62 and 142.
As for Canada, it ranks a lowly 28th, despite being a G7 nation with the world’s tenth-largest economy. It has 63,000 troops, 50 fighter aircraft and 56 tanks – all to defend a landmass that is larger than that of the US. Looked at from a military perspective, it is not hard to see why Donald Trump is considering incorporating Canada into the US. After all, Canada’s vast Arctic frontier is virtually a demilitarised zone.
Our trailblazing Prime Minister was at the podium in Montreal. “Over the last few decades,” Mark Carney said, “Canada has neither spent enough on our defence nor invested enough in our defence industries.”
That has to change, he added, setting out plans for far more domestic spending on military hardware because “the assumptions that defined decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy have been turned upside-down.”
Marco Rubio’s warning against civilizational suicide.
If you live long enough, you can trace the river of history apart from the smaller tributaries and streams. You’ve watched it rise or fall according to the acts of men. You’ve seen great leaders bend it where it wasn’t going, and bad leaders redirect it into the shoals. And you can tell what will lead to greatness and what will end in disaster. Which is how I know Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech last Saturday at the Munich Security Conference was not only the finest of this century, but the most potentially consequential.
The “delusion” of globalism and the decision to allow mass migration into the West threaten the future of Europe and its peoples, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told attendees at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday.
Mass migration is not some fringe concern of little consequence.
It was and continues to be a crisis that destabilizes societies across the West. pic.twitter.com/cPELgF0UrW
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) February 14, 2026
Donald Trump had only just regained the White House when his acolytes dealt Europe two verbal sucker punches in the solar plexus.
Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, declared that “stark strategic realities” meant that America would no longer be “primarily focused on the security of Europe”. Then JD Vance, the vice-president, marked St Valentine’s Day 2025 by telling the Munich Security Conference that Europe’s greatest peril came not from Russia, but “from within”, and that there was “nothing more urgent” than curbing mass immigration.
In the 12 months since those speeches, European governments have been forced to confront the stark reality that they must shoulder prime responsibility for defending the Continent, with all the extra costs and risks that implies, because America can no longer be relied upon to give reflexive support to Nato.
