Kurt Volker is warning British and European politicians not to turn their criticism of Donald Trump’s handling of the Iran war into a broader rupture with Washington. In remarks published Friday, the former U.S. envoy to NATO said leaders who have condemned the administration’s approach are making “some very big mistakes.”
Volker told Anne McElvoy on POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast that critics do not need to say the war is “a huge folly and going to have terrible consequences” in order to make their point. Doing so, he said, only alienates Trump and risks tying his anger at their policies to their anger at his, “fragmenting a transatlantic relationship that is still valuable to both of us.”
The warning lands as European leaders escalate clashes with the U.S. administration over the war in Iran, which the U.S. and Israel launched on Feb. 28. Iran has retaliated by attacking U.S. military bases and regional allies before blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil needs. Trump has lashed out at NATO countries that have restricted access to their military bases for U.S. use, singling out Britain and Spain, while allies have said they will help restart shipping only once the fighting fully stops.
In Britain, Keir Starmer told parliament earlier this month, “It is not our war... I’m not going to change my mind. I’m not going to yield.” Rachel Reeves called Trump’s decision to start a war without a clear strategy “folly” and said she was “not convinced that we are safer today than we were a few weeks ago.” David Lammy has described Trump’s threats against Starmer as “small and petty.”
On the continent, Emmanuel Macron called the war “a violation of international law,” while Pedro Sánchez described it as “illegal, unjustified and dangerous.” Volker pushed back on that line of attack, saying it is right to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and arguing that Tehran has been trying to build one for decades. He also said the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and defended Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, which had limited Iran’s program and placed it under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Volker’s argument is blunt: keep the transatlantic quarrel contained, or risk turning a dispute over Iran into a broader political break with a president who is already spoiling for fights with allies. The question now is whether Europe can keep criticizing the war without helping Trump widen it into a showdown over the alliance itself.
