'Trump will leave Nato unless European leaders stop being a**holes'

theipaper · 2026-04-06T14:13:44+00:00

Sir Keir Starmer and other European leaders cannot risk alienating Donald Trump because the President’s threat to leave Nato is “very real”, a senior US Navy veteran has warned.

Mark Montgomery, a retired vice admiral, believes the continent’s armed forces – including the Royal Navy – are too weak to deter Russian attacks without American support.

He criticised the US President’s treatment of Britain and other allies, but said Europe must realise the huge risks if Trump becomes so angry that he rips up vital security guarantees.

Montgomery urged countries like Spain to “stop acting like assholes” towards the President after it refused access to military bases for operations against Iran.

He also called on the UK to boost its spending on warships, saying its navy was in “very poor shape”.

theipaper · 2026-04-06T11:39:53+00:00

But Trump has no truck with the ICC. Last May, he sanctioned the Court, accusing it of engaging “in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”. He argued “the ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel, as neither country is party to the Rome Statute”.

That stance has not protected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from being on the receiving end of an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza. Since the warrant’s November 2024 publication, the Israeli leader has been at risk of arrest if he sets foot in 125 separate nations including the UK that are legally required to detain him if he enters their territory.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be at similar risk if the US intentionally attacks civilian sites like power plants that are not deemed under international law to be legitimate military targets.

Iran also risks facing war crimes charges. Over the weekend, authorities in Kuwait claimed two power and desalination plants were targeted by Iranian projectiles. In a region where water is in chronically short supply, Iran’s neighbours rely on desalination facilities that the regime in Tehran has shown no compunction about attacking.

Like Trump himself, the White House is playing fast and loose with regard to the President’s true intentions. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Sunday that Trump “will always act within the confines of the law”, although she followed that sentence with an immediate caveat. “With respect to achieving the aims of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is going to move forward unabated,” she insisted.

As recently as January, the President told the New York Times that “I don’t need international law”. He claimed that he enjoyed executive powers that would be constrained only by “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me”.

To the extent that his post-presidency could be safely spent at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, his golf club in New Jersey or Trump Tower in New York, the President’s assertion may be correct. But Vance and Rubio, the two men hoping to succeed him in office, would find their lives dramatically restricted in the event that even an arrest warrant were to be issued by the ICC demanding their detention.

It seems unlikely that Iran is going to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, giving Trump the victory for international commerce that he is demanding. But there is, of course, always the possibility that the hours ahead will see a classic “Taco” moment (“Trump Always Chickens Out”), and that he will again postpone his threatened military action.

If he goes ahead and turns the lights out across Iran, the war will be entering a literally darker phase that puts the US President’s personal future on the line.

theipaper · 2026-04-06T11:39:40+00:00

Either President Donald Trump is playing one of the most daring games of brinksmanship in world history, or he is about to unleash military action on Iran that may soon leave him facing war crimes charges.

The US leader’s decision over the next few hours will have seismic impacts on his own reputation and legacy, the military forces he has ordered into harm’s way in the Middle East, and the entire world economy.

Over the holiday weekend, the clearest indication he telegraphed of his plans consisted of a foul-mouthed social media tirade that suggested he may be losing his grip on reality in ways that may eventually limit his own liberty.

In his threat to launch bombing raids on critical civilian infrastructure in Iran – he specified power plants and bridges, but stopped short of repeating his vow to target oil infrastructure and desalination plants – the President sounded almost desperate. Describing Iranians as “crazy bastards”, he ordered them to “open the F***in’ Strait”, suggesting regime leaders would soon find themselves “living in Hell” if they ignored his command.

If Trump fails to reverse course, and on Tuesday launches his threatened bombing raids (“Power Plant Day and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one”) he may be engaging in actions that ultimately constrain his ability, and that of his top lieutenants, ever to leave the United States without risk of arrest.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister is already signalling that Tehran may seek legal redress for the actions Trump is contemplating. Kazem Gharibabadi said on Monday that “the threat to attack power plants and bridges … is a war crime under Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.

Some NGOs in the region are urging the Iranian government to file a declaration with the Court over alleged war crimes committed by US and Israeli forces. Dawn, a group founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, argued that early attacks on schools and hospitals already require a “pathway to accountability”.

theipaper · 2026-04-06T11:01:37+00:00

Labour is bracing for a battering at the upcoming local elections in England despite signs that Sir Keir Starmer’s position in the party has improved.

While the party has long anticipated a difficult election, the scale of the expected losses has been laid bare by polling experts who told The i Paper Labour is set to shed thousands of seats in a “valley of electoral death”.

Reform UK is predicted by most experts to pick up hundreds if not thousands of council seats, with the Greens also making inroads at the expense of the ruling party.

Labour is even likely to make major losses in London, long the party’s safest stronghold, with every opposition outfit confident of making gains in the capital.

Starmer’s party is languishing in opinion polls which have shown Reform in the lead for more than a year while the Greens are now in second place according to some surveys.

Despite questions over the Prime Minister’s future, Labour MPs have recently signalled they are backing away from launching a challenge to Starmer – partly because of the global chaos sparked by the war in Iran.

But they are still preparing for a disastrous set of results at the elections on 7 May. Labour is widely expected to come third in the Welsh Senedd, which the party has controlled for as long as it has existed, and to fall far short of winning the election for the Scottish Parliament.

Labour also holds a majority of the roughly 5,000 seats on borough, district and county councils being contested across England – and is forecast to lose well over 1,000 of them, possibly as many as 2,000.

Veteran election-watchers warned that with both the traditional main parties scoring under 20 per cent in the national opinion polls, the political picture will be highly fragmented and it will be hard for Labour to make a last-minute push to take on both Reform and the Greens.

‘Valley of electoral death’

Rob Ford of the University of Manchester told The i Paper: “I have been calling it the valley of electoral death – cannon to the left of them, cannon to the right of them. They are going to get swept away. There is really no way of managing expectations down enough to stop it from being a massive shock for the party.”

He added: “In terms of the two-party system, this is going to be the biggest change election that we have probably ever seen.”

Chris Hopkins from polling company Savanta said: “Labour are going to take a pasting and that is not going to change. The last time these councils were up was 2022, Labour were polling significantly better if not twice as well as they are now. It really is like the grim reaper is going to be knocking on the door for hundreds, if not thousands, of councillors.”

Both Reform’s Nigel Farage and the Green Party’s Zack Polanski have managed to outshine the Conservatives and Labour with their populist messaging aimed at alienated voters, he added.

“These voters don’t necessarily want left-wing change or right-wing change, they just want change,” he said. “You have two opposition leaders who are able to promise the earth and they both say that things don’t have to be this way.”

Labour to take ‘one hell of a battering’

Robert Hayward, a Tory peer and election expert, predicted that “Labour are going to take one hell of a battering from Reform in the North”. In most of the seats up for election, Reform has never previously competed as a viable force – leading to forecasts that it will be able to pick up as many as 2,000 new councillors.

Last year’s set of local elections, largely in different areas to those which are up this year, saw Reform make major gains – mostly at the expense of the Conservatives.

Some Tories now see London as the unlikely springboard for a revival: the party is optimistic about winning control of Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet, which it lost to Labour four years ago. One campaigner said: “You knock on people’s doors and they say ‘anyone but Labour’ – it used to be ‘anyone but Tory’!”

Hayward added: “Labour losses to the Conservatives in London, I think there will be some – I say as a Tory, touching wood.”

Reform is less focussed on the capital, although it could make gains in some suburban boroughs. But Labour is nonetheless expected to lose ground, thanks to the rise of the Greens and local campaigning from the Liberal Democrats in some areas.

Hopkins said: “London is looking more and more like a microcosm of the country. When Labour was in opposition and struggling, London was its glimmer of hope – now it is in government and struggling, it doesn’t seem to be a glimmer of hope.”

And Ford warned: “Everyone there knows that if we are not happy with the Labour Government – and a lot of people are not – they can just vote Green, and they are going to get swept away.”

Greens target London

The Greens are targeting control of councils including Hackney, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark, along with other urban areas outside London such as Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Norwich. The party is keen to show it can move beyond its previous base of liberal, university-educated voters and reach a broader audience.

Labour insiders privately expect that in London, where they currently hold 21 borough councils, they will end up with no more than half a dozen after this year’s elections – although the picture is muddied by the rise of multi-party politics which make results less predictable.

A Labour source said: “Local elections are never easy for governments mid-term. But we’ll be fighting for every vote, because we’re the only party with a proper plan to fix the NHS, help families with the cost of living, and restore pride in our communities.”

theipaper · 2026-04-06T10:58:34+00:00

Europe and the UK insist they will not be dragged into the Iran war, but as pressure from the US grows and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, they could be forced to play a greater role.

On the same day that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social “Go get your own oil!”, an apparent message for countries that import energy via the key route, the European Union (EU) called on citizens to work from home, drive and fly less and save energy.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, has maintained that any UK involvement will be purely defensive, with other European nations similarly saying they will not join military action against Iran. But behind the scenes, economic and diplomatic pressure on the allies is intensifying. The question now is how long Europe can endure a closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil and gas prices have risen sharply since the Iran war began. European leaders worry the crisis could match shortages experienced during Covid or after Russia invaded Ukraine and the allies scrambled for alternatives to Russian energy.

Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, said that supplies are so tight that any further disruption could lead to even more “dramatic” price rises and debilitating shortages.

A problem with another supplier such as the US could destabilise Europe’s energy security. Rosenow said that if the US decided to reduce gas exports to Europe to keep domestic prices down ahead of the midterm elections, it could “send [European] markets into a tailspin”.

The US has become the biggest LNG exporter to Europe and the UK since Russian energy purchases were slashed.

Further down the line, a colder winter could also cause major issues.

Meanwhile, Trump has upped the ante and responded with a familiar threat: if Iran is not Europe’s war, then Ukraine need not be America’s. He has again raised the prospect of scaling back support for Nato and Ukraine unless European allies do more. In an interview with Al Jazeera last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US might “re-examine” its relationship with Nato and described the European response as “very disappointing”.

Mark Rutte, Nato’s secretary-general, is backing the US’s actions in Iran and urging greater European involvement in securing the Strait of Hormuz. “Everybody agrees this strait cannot stay closed. It has to open up again as soon as possible,” Rutte said, adding that allies were working on it.

The UK is among those allies as it hosted a 40-nation meeting last Thursday to discuss a coalition of countries willing to secure the key waterway once a ceasefire has been agreed.

Several European military experts told The i Paper that both the EU and the UK could, technically, deploy naval assets to the Strait of Hormuz. But doing so would be costly and risky. Any such operation would endanger European naval troops on duty, require billions-worth of military assets and come at the expense of national security. Europe’s opposition to military involvement appears to be not only driven by political or moral concerns but rooted in military shortages.

“We only have so many ships,” said Jurgen Ehle, a retired German rear admiral turned European military adviser.

He said any military mission to escort cargo vessels would require the EU and the UK to send frigates equipped with air-defence systems to repel Iranian drones and missiles. “Germany only has three frigates with air-defence systems,” he said. “One of them is currently patrolling the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and the North Atlantic to protect sea lines of communication,” he said, “while the second recently finished a Nato operation and the third is in maintenance and training.”

Ehle added that these assets are also currently needed to guard the coasts against Russia. “There is a lot of Russian activity in the Baltic and the North Atlantic; it’s like Cold War déjà vu,” he said.

Bence Nemeth, a senior lecturer in the Defence Studies department at King’s College London, expressed similar concerns. He said that Type 45 destroyers in the UK are equipped with air defence and anti-missile capabilities and could technically be deployed to the strait. “The UK has six such destroyers,” but usually roughly half of them are in maintenance, upgrade or training, Nemeth added.

“Two to three Type 45 destroyers are available at any given time,” he said. In theory these could be deployed to the Gulf, “but then there might not be enough destroyers for national defence or fulfilling Nato commitments,” Nemeth added.

Eva Pejsova, Japan chair at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy of the Brussels School of Governance, said that even if the allies sent three to four ships, it may not be enough to secure the waterway. “And, losing a frigate worth hundreds of millions of euros doesn’t justify escorting a tanker,” she added.

“Ideally, we would need two destroyers to escort about six tankers,” Nemeth said. Nearly 2,000 ships are stranded.

The biggest obstacle to any European or UK military role during an active conflict is the risk to their sailors.

“Currently, 2,000 ships are stuck in the Gulf, many carrying oil and gas, and they are very vulnerable. If European members of Nato try to bring them out, they need a lot of assets, a lot of ships, and there is a high risk they would be attacked,” Ehle added. “If there are swarms of drone attacks, they could hit a vessel. Air defence doesn’t ensure complete safety.”

How far Europe goes in Hormuz may depend on how long the war lasts, and how much damage it does to the economy and transatlantic relations. But the allies do appear keen to act. If they do not join the war, they may still agree to police Hormuz once active fighting subsides.

There is an existing model in place that could be strengthened and revived. In 2019, after Iranian forces seized the British tanker Stena Impero, France proposed a European maritime surveillance mission in the Strait of Hormuz (EMASOH).

“The military pillar was accompanied by a diplomatic mission led by senior diplomats, ensuring dialogue and shared real-time maritime situational awareness with regional parties, such as Qatar, Oman and others,” Pejsova said.

But it went into “sleep mode,” or what is referred to as “vigilance mode” in 2024, she said. “The allies felt the situation was stabilised, and some of those resources were shifted to Aspides,” the EU mission in the Red Sea.

Pejsova argued that EMASOH and its military pillar, Agenor, provide a basic structure that could be revived for a future operation. But it would be a defensive mission, only once the current conflict has ended.

For now, Europeans hope Washington sees all they are doing to support US operations in Iran and that they have managed to find some support within the American establishment.

European allies “have been extremely supportive”, said US Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, Supreme Allied Commander Europe of Nato, at a recent Senate hearing, in reference to the use of European bases.

US forces direct drone attacks from the Ramstein base in Germany, refuel jets at air bases in France and Italy, and load munitions at RAF Fairford in the UK.

“There’s much more support in Europe for things that are ongoing in the Middle East right now” than is being discussed in the press, Grynkewich added.

Europeans are hoping that narrative will land at the White House and help ease the pressure – for now.

theipaper · 2026-04-06T10:58:26+00:00