http://archive.today/2026.03.07-102210/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/world/europe/europe-iran-trump-war-dilemma.html

A week into the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran, Europe’s leaders remain united in their misgivings about an operation they never asked for. But the reality is, they are being dragged into it more by the day, and that is causing political and diplomatic headaches from London to Berlin.

The tensions are visible in the growing gap between the words of European leaders and the orders they are giving their military commanders to send warships, planes and other combat equipment into the Middle East.

“We are not at war,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media Thursday. “We don’t want to go to war,” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy told broadcasters the same day. “We are not joining the U.S. and Israeli offensive strikes,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said in Parliament on Monday.

Yet France scrambled Rafale fighter jets over the United Arab Emirates after a drone attack hit a French naval base in Abu Dhabi. And Mr. Macron has ordered the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, where it could take part in a French-led effort to keep open strategic shipping lanes. On Thursday, France said it would supply Lebanese armed forces with armored transport vehicles to help combat Hezbollah.

In Italy, Ms. Meloni agreed to deploy air-defense forces to Persian Gulf countries to defend them from Iranian missiles and drones. Italy has also allowed American planes to use its bases, though Ms. Meloni emphasized that it was for logistical support, not offensive operations.

It fell to the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to sum up Europe’s predicament after he sat next to Mr. Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, listening to the president’s bullish briefing on the military campaign.

“We don’t know if the plan will work and whether the military strikes from abroad will enable political change from within,” Mr. Merz said. “This plan is not without risk, and we too would have to bear its consequences.”

Despite expressing those doubts, Mr. Merz has faced a backlash at home, partly because he offered no defense when Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Starmer and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, both of whom had denied U.S. planes access to their countries’ bases. Mr. Merz said later that he stuck up for them over lunch with Mr. Trump.

For Europe’s leaders, there is no perfect way to thread the needle between assuaging Mr. Trump and limiting domestic outcry. A week into the war, Britain has now quietly provided the United States with significant military support. But that has failed to insulate Mr. Starmer from Mr. Trump’s ire, perhaps because the prime minister, likely wary of criticism at home, has not matched that private support with public endorsement.

Europe is caught in a deepening dilemma. On the one hand, its leaders need to protect their citizens stranded in the region, honor defense pacts with Arab states and, in some cases, allow the United States to use their military bases to avoid antagonizing President Trump.

On the other, they need to avoid too overt a show of support for American actions, to avert a military backlash from Iran as well as electoral consequences from their restive publics, which are anxious to avoid the quagmire of another Middle East war.