There is a phrase that has echoed through every American foreign policy debate of the past decade: burden-sharing. Trump invoked it for years as a critique — pointing to NATO allies who benefited from American security guarantees while spending too little on their own defense. Now, in the third week of Operation Epic Fury, he is invoking it as a demand, and discovering that the ledger he believed he was owed does not translate cleanly into warships in the Persian Gulf.

In a phone interview with the Financial Times on Sunday, Trump issued the most pointed warning of his presidency to the alliance he has alternately championed and threatened: “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.” The argument was simple and explicit — America spent years defending Europe, including billions in military support that helped Ukraine resist a Russian invasion. Now America is asking for something in return. The answer, from nearly every capital approached, has been no.

Trump’s appeal is not without strategic logic. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world’s seaborne oil — including the bulk of energy imports to Japan, South Korea, and much of Europe. When Iran imposes a selective blockade that sends oil to $120 a barrel, the pain is not American. It falls on the allies Trump is now calling. The argument writes itself: you need this strait open more than we do. Help us open it.

And yet the allies are not coming.

The Alliance’s Uncomfortable Calculation

France has declined to send forces, citing the need for de-escalation. Germany’s Foreign Minister was blunt: “I don’t see a role for NATO in the region.” Japan, which imports nearly all of its energy and is structurally one of the nations most dependent on Hormuz remaining open, has opted to release strategic oil reserves rather than risk any military commitment. Australia, which has been providing air defense support to the UAE, has drawn a firm line against naval involvement in the strait. Even the United Kingdom — America’s closest ally, the one that has followed Washington into every major military engagement of the past thirty years — announced through Prime Minister Keir Starmer that it will not send warships, though it is “intensively looking” at the possibility of contributing minesweepers.

South Korea remains under review. China — whose 90% oil import dependency on the strait gives it the most obvious structural incentive to act — has rejected military involvement entirely, while quietly enjoying the preferential passage Iran has granted it as a diplomatic reward for Beijing’s neutrality.

The Alliance Scorecard

China’s Calculated Silence

Of all the geopolitical ironies produced by this conflict, none is sharper than China’s position. Beijing is the single nation most structurally dependent on the Strait of Hormuz — 90% of its oil imports flow through it — and yet it is also the nation that has least to fear from the current crisis, because Iran has granted it a formal exemption. Chinese tankers sail unimpeded. Chinese refineries receive their crude. Chinese industry keeps running while the rest of the world pays a 50% surcharge.

Trump has raised the possibility of delaying or canceling a planned summit with President Xi Jinping if China does not contribute to the coalition. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright described Beijing as a potential “constructive partner.” That optimism, for now, appears to be entirely one-directional. Why would China help reopen a strait it is already sailing through freely?

“Bombing the Hell Out of the Shoreline”

With coalition-building stalling, Trump has shifted his public rhetoric toward unilateral action. Writing on Truth Social, he promised that American forces would bomb Iranian shoreline positions and destroy any vessel that threatened passage, with or without allied support. He also ordered the U.S. Navy to begin escorting commercial tankers through the strait and unlocked federal war-risk insurance for maritime trade — a practical acknowledgment that commercial shipping cannot resume without government backing.

But Trump’s own posts contain a tension that his critics and adversaries have been quick to highlight. He claimed that U.S. and Israeli forces have already “destroyed 100 percent of Iran’s Military capability” — and then, in the same message, acknowledged that Iran can still “send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile” along the waterway. In other words: the military victory is complete, and the threat remains. Pentagon planners have described the strait as an Iranian “kill box” for precisely this reason — the asymmetric tools Iran has left do not require a navy, an air force, or a missile battery. They require a small boat and a mine.

The Human Cost Behind the Headlines

The strategic abstractions of oil prices and alliance politics resolve, on the ground, into moments like Maretis’s: a door shaking, an explosion close enough to feel in the bones, a prayer offered in a language and faith far from the corridors of power that produced the conflict. Bahrain is home to over 1.6 million people — more than half of them foreign nationals who came to the Gulf to work, to send money home, and not to be caught between superpowers.

Officials and analysts now estimate that more than 2,000 people have been killed since the conflict began — Iranian soldiers and commanders, Israeli civilians caught under missile fire, Gulf state workers and residents, and thirteen American service members whose names have been formally released by the Pentagon. The United States has evacuated nearly 24,000 American citizens from the broader Middle East and ordered all remaining Americans to leave Iraq immediately, citing the threat from Iran-aligned militia groups. A missile reportedly struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad late last week. The State Department confirmed no American personnel were injured.

What Comes Next: Four Paths Forward

The war that began as a targeted campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear ambitions and missile programs has become, in its third week, something considerably more consequential: a global energy crisis, the most serious NATO stress test since the alliance’s founding, and a naval standoff in a waterway the whole world depends on — with no coalition yet willing to help keep it open.

Trump has a point about the debt. America did show up for Ukraine. America did carry NATO’s burden for decades. The question his allies seem to be answering — not in words but in the silence of their refusals — is whether that debt is payable in the Persian Gulf, in a war they did not choose, against a nation that has not attacked them directly.

The Strait remains closed to most of the world’s shipping. The answer, as of Monday morning, is still no.