{"id":205682,"date":"2026-03-28T20:15:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T20:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/not-our-war-u-s-allies-balk-at-trumps-strait-of-hormuz-demands-nbcnews-com\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T20:15:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T20:15:22","slug":"not-our-war-u-s-allies-balk-at-trumps-strait-of-hormuz-demands-nbcnews-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/not-our-war-u-s-allies-balk-at-trumps-strait-of-hormuz-demands-nbcnews-com\/","title":{"rendered":"'Not our war': U.S. allies balk at Trump's Strait of Hormuz demands – nbcnews.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

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LONDON \u2014 President Donald Trump has berated and threatened America\u2019s NATO allies<\/a>. Now he wants these same countries to help unblock the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> \u2014 and their response has not exactly been enthusiastic.
\u201cThis is not our war, we have not started it,\u201d German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters Monday.
That appeared to sum up the mood among U.S. allies, with leaders from Berlin to London expressing reservations about Trump\u2019s demands and indicating they had no immediate plans to provide military support to reopen the crucial waterway<\/a>.
Iran effectively closed the trade route<\/a> in response to the American-Israeli assault launched last month. This sent global oil prices surging and threatened an international economic shock, something economists had warned about before the war began.
Follow live coverage here.<\/strong><\/em><\/a>
Trump called upon “countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz Strait” to “take care of that passage,” as he put it in a post Sunday on Truth Social. In an interview with the Financial Times the same day, he went further, warning that NATO would have a \u201cvery bad future\u201d if its members did not help free up the strait.
It was \u201ca bit rich\u201d for Trump to be asking help from countries he had previously insulted, former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday.
Earlier, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna called on Trump to provide more information. Europe needed to understand Trump\u2019s \u201cstrategic goals. What will be the plan?\u201d he asked.
Though often wary of risking the president’s ire, many European governments have been reluctant to be pulled into the war with Tehran.
Some, such as the leftist government of Spain, outright refused the Hormuz demand.
\u201cSpain will never accept any stopgap measures\u201d to keep the strait open, Defense Minister \u2060Margarita Robles said, \u201c\u200bbecause the objective must be for the war to end, and \u200cfor \u2060it to end now.\u201d
Even in Italy, whose Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has previously cast herself as something of a Trump whisperer, the government declined to get involved.
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told reporters that \u201cdiplomacy needs to prevail.\u201d
In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been criticized by Trump for not taking part in the initial attack on Iran.
Starmer told a news conference Monday he was \u201cworking with all of our allies, including our European partners,\u201d to \u201crestore the freedom of navigation\u201d as quickly as possible.
\u201cUltimately, we have to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to ensure stability on the market,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is not a simple task.\u201d
But Starmer made it clear that he would not be drawn into \u201cthe wider war,\u201d and that any Hormuz mission should be a broader effort \u2014 including the U.S. and Gulf states \u2014 rather than something for NATO.
Meanwhile, Japan and Australia said they had no plans to send ships to aid Trump\u2019s request.
There are other proposals on the table, such as top European diplomat Kaja Kallas on Monday floating a similar deal to the one in 2022 that ensured Ukraine could export grain amid Russia’s invasion.
But the proposal to expand the mandate of a European Union naval force currently in the Red Sea to include the Strait of Hormuz was rejected by member states. \u201cFor the time being, there was no appetite in changing the mandate of the operation,\u201d Kallas said.
The wrangle over the strait marks the latest point of tension between the Trump administration and Washington\u2019s historic friends across the Atlantic.
Last year, the president refused to rule out using military force to seize Denmark’s semi-autonomous island of Greenland. He then claimed incorrectly that NATO allies had not fought on the front lines in Afghanistan<\/a> \u2014 which caused dismay and anger across the continent.
“It’s a bit rich \u2014 after you’ve been threatening Denmark and insulting the memory of around 1,000 NATO troops who fought in Afghanistan \u2014 to say, ‘Oh, you all have to come and help us now,” said Ilves, who was Estonian president between 2006 and 2016. “If countries send troops and something happens to them, is he going to make fun of them again?” he added.
“It’s a political nonstarter from the get-go,” he said. “I’m not sure what he expected.”
Ultimately, much European skepticism over Trump’s Hormuz demand seemed to stem from their wariness of the war itself.
\u201cThe European answer must be: The way to end the problem is to end the war, not to join it,\u201d said Sven Biscop, a director at the Egmont Institute, a Belgian think tank. He said the main thing was \u201cnot be intimidated by threats on NATO\u201d by Trump.
Asked for comment on the European reaction, the White House directed NBC News to comments made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told reporters that these countries should help out because they \u201care benefiting greatly from the United States military taking out the threat of Iran.\u201d
She added that \u201cthe president is absolutely right to call on these countries to do more to help the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that we can stop this terrorist regime from restricting the free flow of energy.\u201d
Despite several ships being bombed as they attempt to cross the strait, Iran denies it has closed the narrow neck of water entirely. After the U.S. and Israel launched the war, it said it would attack vessels from those countries or their allies.
\u201cFrom our perspective the Strait of Hormuz is open, and only closed to enemies,\u201d Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on Telegram.
Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for\u00a0NBC News Digital based in London.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeLONDON \u2014 President Donald Trump has berated and threatened America\u2019s NATO allies. Now he wants these same countries to help unblock the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 and their response has not exactly been enthusiastic.\u201cThis is not our war, we have not started it,\u201d German Defense Minister Boris […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":205683,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-205682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}