The B1 bridge in Karaj, Iran’s tallest, is gone. The smoke had barely cleared before Donald Trump posted the footage himself — a president celebrating the destruction of civilian infrastructure in a country of 88 million people, then warning of “much more to follow.”

Eight people were killed and 95 wounded in the strike, according to Ghodratollah Seif, the deputy governor of Alborz province, who spoke to Iranian state TV and the Fars news agency. Agence France-Presse, citing reporting restrictions inside Iran, has not been able to independently verify the toll.

The bridge strike came hours after Trump’s televised address to the American public on Wednesday night, in which he vowed to take Iran “back to the Stone Ages” over the next two to three weeks. The address, which came amid the five-week air war, functioned equally as a threat to European allies who have declined to support it.

A War Europe Didn’t Start

The US-Israeli air campaign against Iran, which began on February 28, has killed an estimated 1,606 civilians in Iran including at least 244 children, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Another 1,345 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon during the same period.

None of NATO’s European members joined the war. Most have actively resisted it.

Spain has closed its airspace to any American aircraft involved in the Iran campaign and barred Washington from using jointly operated military bases. France blocked US military transport planes loaded with supplies bound for Israel from transiting French territory. Italy restricted access to the Sigonella air base in Sicily, though Defence Minister Guido Crosetto denied that all access had been cut. Britain, Washington’s closest military partner, permitted the use of its bases only for defensive missions — a category the UK government has explicitly defined to exclude the kind of strike that leveled the B1 bridge.

“This is not our war,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told parliament on Wednesday. “We will not be drawn into the conflict. That is not in our national interest.”

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius was blunter, responding to Washington’s request for European naval vessels to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global oil and gas exports pass. “This is not our war. We have not started it,” he said. “Does…Trump expects a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz what the powerful US Navy cannot do?”

Iran has effectively choked the strategic waterway. Benchmark US crude prices have surged more than 50 percent since the war began, and the average price of a gallon of American gasoline cracked $4 this week, according to the Associated Press.

The Alliance That Forgot How to Agree

Trump’s response to European reluctance has been characteristically direct. He told Reuters on Wednesday he was considering withdrawing from NATO. Asked whether he would pull out, he replied: “Wouldn’t you if you were me?”

He had already called the alliance “a paper tiger” in an interview with The Telegraph. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera that if NATO is “just about defending Europe and not the other way around, then it’s not a very good arrangement.”

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly reinforced the message: “President Trump has made his disappointment with NATO and other allies clear, and as the President emphasized, ‘the United States will remember.’”

Legally, Trump may lack the authority to withdraw. A 2023 US law requires two-thirds Senate approval to exit the alliance — a nearly impossible threshold. But as commander-in-chief, he can simply decline to commit American forces to European defense, effectively hollowing out the mutual security guarantee without the paperwork of a formal withdrawal.

Max Bergmann, a former State Department official who now leads the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the situation in stark terms. “This is the worst place NATO has been since it was founded,” Bergmann told Reuters. “It’s really hard to think of anything that even comes close.”

The Ruins of Certainty

The fracture runs deeper than a disagreement over Iran. At a G7 foreign ministers meeting near Paris last week, Rubio and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas had a tense exchange, according to five people familiar with the matter. Kallas asked when American patience with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine negotiations would run out. Rubio responded with irritation that the US was simultaneously trying to end the Ukraine war and supporting Kyiv — and that the EU was welcome to mediate if it wished.

Meanwhile, the administration has remained silent about reports that Moscow has provided targeting data to Iran for attacks on American assets in the Middle East. It has lifted sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to ease the global energy price spike caused by the very war it is waging.

General François Lecointre, who served as France’s armed forces chief from 2017 to 2021, told Reuters the question was no longer whether NATO could survive in its current form. “NATO remains necessary, but we must be capable of thinking of NATO without the Americans,” he said. “Whether it should even continue to be called NATO — North Atlantic Treaty Organization — is a valid question.”

Julianne Smith, the US ambassador to NATO under Joe Biden, put it differently: “I do think we’re turning the page of 80 years of working together.”

What Comes Next

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who has maintained a working relationship with Trump, is scheduled to visit Washington next week in an effort to repair the damage. As recently as February, Rutte dismissed the idea of European defense without the US as a “silly thought.” Now, according to Reuters, many European officials and diplomats consider it the default expectation.

On the ground in Iran, the war continues to escalate. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed this week to have targeted an Oracle data center in Dubai and an Amazon facility in Bahrain — striking at American tech companies it accused of assisting US and Israeli military operations. The UAE reported intercepting 24 ballistic missiles and 61 drones over two days. Neither strike has been independently confirmed.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded to the bridge strike on social media: “Striking civilian structures, including unfinished bridges, will not compel Iranians to surrender.”

Trump, for his part, remains focused on the imagery. “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again - Much more to follow! IT IS TIME FOR IRAN TO MAKE A DEAL BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF WHAT STILL COULD BECOME A GREAT COUNTRY!” he wrote online.

A bridge destroyed, eight civilians dead in Karaj, and 76 years of transatlantic security architecture straining under the weight of a war most of the alliance never agreed to fight.

Sources