ANALYSIS: The Collapsing Coalition — Trump Stands Alone Against Iran as His Allies Walk Out

Ammunition Supplies Under Extreme Pressure

The U.S. logistics crisis is not a rumor or an alarmist extrapolation. It is documented by the U.S. Congress’s own reports, by analyses from the Congressional Budget Office, and by the worrying signals that have been coming regularly from the Pentagon since high-intensity operations have increased. The airstrike campaigns against the Houthis have consumed considerable quantities of Tomahawk missiles, JDAM precision-guided bombs, and air-to-ground munitions—and U.S. production lines are not replacing them at the same rate as they are being used on the ground. U.S. defense contractors are operating at full capacity, but production lead times for certain critical systems are measured in months, sometimes years. A major escalation against Iran—with its air defense capabilities, strategic depth, and arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones—would require a volume of munitions that current stockpiles cannot guarantee over the long term.

Military analysts who closely follow these issues highlight a striking paradox: the United States possesses the most powerful and expensive military in human history, with a defense budget exceeding $900 billion annually, and yet it finds itself facing logistical strain after less than two years of intensified regional operations. This is the result of a decade of misaligned priorities, budgetary choices that favored sophisticated systems at the expense of basic stockpiles, and a defense industrial base that simply had not been scaled for a prolonged, high-intensity war.

There is something deeply ironic about the fact that the nation that spends the most on defense finds itself running out of ammunition in its own wars. This is not a problem of money. It is a problem of choices—and these choices reveal a great deal about the true nature of contemporary American military power.

Forward bases insufficient for the scale of the Iranian challenge

Iran is not Yemen, nor Afghanistan, nor even Iraq in 2003. It is a country of 85 million people, with considerable strategic depth, a domestic military industry that has developed formidable asymmetric capabilities, and a network of regional proxies that can open multiple fronts simultaneously if Tehran gives the order. To conduct an effective military campaign against such an adversary, one would need robust forward operating bases, extensive in-flight refueling capabilities, and well-stocked logistics depots in the region. However, several of the countries hosting U.S. bases—Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar—have made it known, through discreet diplomatic channels, that they do not wish for their territory to be used as a platform for direct strikes on Iranian soil. They draw a distinction between supporting defensive operations and supporting a direct offensive against Tehran. And that distinction changes everything.

An Unbalanced Dynamic of Mutual Dependence

At the heart of this crisis lies a relationship that must be discussed frankly: the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv. For years, Israel has been pushing for decisive military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose domestic political calculations compound his strategic ones, has every interest in ensuring that the United States bears the bulk of the burden in a confrontation with Iran. The Trump administration, in its 2025–2026 iteration, has shown a willingness to align with Israeli priorities that goes beyond what has been seen in any other U.S. administration. But this willingness creates a dangerous asymmetry: the United States bears the bulk of the operational, logistical, and diplomatic costs, while Israel pulls the strings behind the scenes. European and Arab allies observing this dynamic from the outside are not fooled—and this is also one of the reasons why they refuse to embark on an adventure whose real objectives seem to be defined elsewhere than in Washington.

We must be clear on this point: this is not a question of the legitimacy of Israel’s security concerns. These concerns are real and well-documented. A nuclear Iran would radically alter the regional balance of power, and this prospect rightly worries many actors. But the way U.S. policy under Trump is handling this issue—through maximum pressure, military escalation, and the rejection of any parallel diplomacy—does not build a coalition. It shatters it. And the consequences of this fragmentation are now evident in the refusal to provide logistical support, diplomatic silence, and the gradual distancing of allies who conclude that their national interests no longer align with U.S. strategy.

When a superpower’s foreign policy is perceived by its own allies as dictated by the priorities of a regional partner rather than reflecting a coherent vision of U.S. national interest, something fundamental is broken. And that cannot be fixed with tweets or tariff threats.

The Issue of Bases and Airspace

In practical terms, conducting sustained air operations against Iran from the Middle East requires either direct access to Saudi and Emirati airspace or logistical support from countries willing to host aircraft in transit. Several of these countries have quietly signaled their reluctance. Saudi Arabia, which has been engaged in a cautious normalization process with Iran since the 2023 Beijing agreements, has no interest in allowing its territory to be used as a launching pad against Tehran. Riyadh needs oil flows to remain stable, the Gulf to remain navigable, and the massive investments of Vision 2030 not to be threatened by regional turmoil. This calculation carries significant weight. And it inevitably leads to signals of distancing that Washington interprets—probably with good reason—as refusals disguised as neutrality.

Negotiating through maximum pressure has its physical limits

The Trump administration built its foreign policy on a simple principle: maximum pressure leads to concessions. This approach worked in certain limited contexts—on bilateral trade issues with partners who lacked the means to resist for long. But against Iran, maximum pressure was tested during Trump’s first term, from 2018 to 2021, with mixed results: Iran’s nuclear program advanced, not retreated. Tehran expanded its proxies, strengthened its missile capabilities, and enriched uranium at levels unseen before the sanctions. The pressure did not break the regime. It hardened it. Repeating the same approach while hoping for a different outcome is the classic definition of a strategic error.

Today, the policy of maximum pressure faces a constraint that Trump cannot ignore: his allies refuse to provide him with the logistical capabilities he needs for the pressure to have any military significance. A bluff is effective only if the adversary believes the threat can be carried out. If Iran—and its strategic analysts are perfectly capable of reading the signals emerging from allied capitals—perceives that Washington lacks the support necessary for a prolonged military campaign, the threat loses its credibility. And an uncredible threat does not elicit concessions. It elicits contempt.

A bluff works in poker because no one can see your cards. But in geopolitics, the cards always end up being revealed. And when your allies publicly say no to you, your opponent counts those refusals and adjusts their strategy accordingly. Trump may have just lost his hand without even knowing it yet.

American Public Opinion and the Trap of Endless Conflict

There is a domestic dimension that geopolitical analysis cannot ignore. American public opinion is deeply reluctant to engage in another war in the Middle East. Two decades of involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of deaths, trillions spent—all for results that history has harshly judged—have created a deep sense of war fatigue among the American electorate. Trump himself built part of his political appeal on the promise to bring the troops home and stop paying for other people’s wars. To now engage in a high-intensity conflict against Iran—without a solid coalition, without a clear exit strategy, and without precisely defined political objectives—is to take a considerable electoral risk on top of the military risk. White House policy advisors must weigh this tension every day.

Tehran understands the situation better than Washington realizes

Tehran is not an irrational actor. The caricature of a fanatical regime that fails to weigh its interests is false and dangerous, because it leads to strategic miscalculations. Iranian leaders—military, religious, and technocrats—fully understand the workings of American politics, electoral cycles, logistical constraints, and diplomatic limitations. They analyze their allies’ refusals to provide support with the same scrutiny as analysts in Washington. They know that every additional refusal erodes the credibility of the American threat. And they have developed a strategy that relies on the long haul, on attrition, and on the ability to absorb blows while preserving the essential elements of their power—notably the nuclear program, which remains their ultimate lifeline.

Iran’s strategy of active resistance—striking without crossing the threshold that would justify a full-scale response, supporting proxies without assuming direct responsibility, negotiating quietly while projecting toughness in public—is a sophisticated strategy that has worked for four decades. It has survived Reagan, Bush, Obama, and the first Trump administration. It is designed to survive this administration as well. And Washington’s growing diplomatic isolation gives Tehran further reason to believe that patience will ultimately pay off.

It takes a great deal of arrogance—or a great deal of ignorance—to believe that a regime that has survived forty-five years of sanctions, proxy wars, and international isolation can be brought to its knees simply by applying a little more pressure. Iran is playing a different game on a different timeline—and it’s playing that game better than many are willing to admit.

Iran’s Nuclear Program: The Issue That Trumps All Others

Behind all the tactical maneuvers, behind the strikes on the Houthis and the naval skirmishes in the Gulf, looms the fundamental issue: Iran’s nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has documented Iranian advances that are bringing Tehran closer to the threshold of military nuclear capability. It is this very issue that haunts Tel Aviv, worries Riyadh, and concerns Western capitals—even those that refuse to support the U.S. military approach. But precisely because the stakes are so high, so too are the consequences of mishandling the situation. A preemptive strike that does not completely destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities—and many experts doubt that such a strike is technically feasible, given the depth and dispersion of the facilities—risks accelerating the program rather than halting it, while triggering a regional escalation with unpredictable consequences.

Trust That Has Been Eroding for Years

What is happening with the Iran issue is not an isolated incident. It is the most visible manifestation of an erosion of trust that has been gnawing away at the Atlantic alliance for years, and which has accelerated with Trump’s return to power. Unilateral U.S. decisions—on tariffs, on withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, on refusing to strengthen NATO guarantees, and on the dismissive treatment of European partners in trade negotiations—have created a climate in which European allies have learned not to automatically rely on Washington. They are developing their own capabilities, their own strategies, and their own diplomatic networks. European strategic autonomy, long a hollow slogan, is beginning to take on concrete form—precisely because the transatlantic relationship no longer guarantees what it once did.

This fundamental shift will not be reversed with the end of the Trump administration. The habits that have been formed, the capabilities that have been developed, and the alternative partnerships that have been forged—all of this creates a new geopolitical reality that will endure. The Europe that emerges from this period will be different from the one that existed before 2016. It will be less reflexively Atlanticist, more protective of its autonomy, and more selective in the military ventures it agrees to support. This is not necessarily a bad thing for long-term global stability—but it is a profound transformation whose effects are already evident today in the mounting refusals to comply with U.S. requests for assistance regarding the Iran issue.

The Atlantic alliance is not going to die from a single blow. It is being hollowed out from within, slowly, decision after decision, refusal after refusal, humiliation after humiliation. What is happening with the Iran issue is one of those moments when the void becomes visible—when we realize that what we thought was solid had in fact been hollow for a long time.

China and Russia are watching—and learning lessons

It would be naive not to mention the two players watching this situation with the greatest interest: Beijing and Moscow. For China, every crack in the Atlantic Alliance is an opportunity. Every time an ally refuses to comply with U.S. demands, it serves as proof that the U.S. hegemonic model is reaching its limits. Beijing has every interest in seeing Washington bogged down in a costly Middle Eastern confrontation—this diverts resources, political attention, and the capacity to project power away from the Sino-American rivalry in the Pacific, which is the central strategic issue of the 21st century. Russia, for its part, has every interest in seeing NATO allies divided and distracted by a regional conflict that is not their own. In recent years, Moscow and Tehran have developed deep strategic ties—including military cooperation, mutual support in international forums, and technological exchanges. The current crisis only reinforces the logic of this alliance.

Uncontrolled escalation: the worst-case scenario

The most alarming scenario—which strategists call unintentional escalation—is one in which a series of decisions made in haste, under pressure, and with incomplete information leads to a confrontation that no one had truly planned for in its full scope. Military history is full of such spirals—wars that began as limited incidents and turned into continent-wide catastrophes. Iran, with ballistic missile and drone capabilities capable of striking targets within a 2,000-kilometer radius, can simultaneously trigger crises in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and the Persian Gulf—and even threaten critical energy infrastructure. A U.S. response to one of these crises could trigger others. And without a strong coalition, adequate logistics, and allied support, the U.S. ability to manage multiple fronts simultaneously quickly reaches its limits.

This scenario is not inevitable. But it is possible. And the likelihood of it occurring increases with every allied refusal, with every unaddressed logistical shortfall, and with every sign of weakness that Tehran detects and factors into its calculations. The diplomatic safeguards that help prevent catastrophic miscalculations—discreet communication channels, mutually understood red lines, and de-escalation mechanisms—require a minimum level of multilateral trust to function. And that trust is precisely what is lacking today in the U.S. handling of the crisis.

Not all of the most devastating wars in modern history were intentional. Some were stumbled into by actors who thought they were in control of a situation that had spiraled out of their grasp. The combination of diplomatic isolation, military pressure, and unpredictable decision-making that we are seeing today creates exactly the kind of environment in which accidents turn into catastrophes.

The Diplomatic Way Out: Is It Still Possible?

There is another scenario—less spectacular, less suited to today’s media cycles, but infinitely more rational from the perspective of all parties’ interests: negotiated de-escalation. It would require Washington to agree to resume direct dialogue with Tehran on the nuclear issue, abandoning the “maximum pressure” strategy that has proven its limitations. It would require Israel to accept that its legitimate concerns be addressed within a multilateral framework rather than through bilateral confrontation. It would require Iran to demonstrate a genuine willingness to impose verifiable limits on its nuclear program. None of these conditions are currently met. But they could be, if the parties involved chose to focus on real interests rather than symbolic posturing. Diplomacy is not a sign of weakness. It is the rational management of conflicts of interest among parties who must continue to coexist on the same planet.

The End of Unchallenged Hegemony

Beyond the Iranian issue, what is at stake here is a broader and more fundamental question: What is the true extent of American power in today’s world? The United States remains, by far, the world’s leading military and economic power. Its technological superiority, its capacity for military projection, its network of alliances, and its dominance of international financial institutions—all of this remains a reality. But power is only valuable insofar as it can produce concrete results. And what the Iranian crisis reveals is that U.S. power is encountering growing limits: logistical limits in its ability to sustain protracted wars, diplomatic limits in its ability to build coalitions, and political limits in the coherence and predictability of its strategy.

These limits did not appear overnight. They have been built up over decades of decisions—the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which destroyed the credibility of U.S. power in Arab and European capitals; the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which shook confidence in U.S. commitments; the trade wars that turned allies into economic adversaries, and the withdrawals from multilateral agreements that left vacuums others have filled. Trump did not create these limitations, but his policies have made them more visible and deepened them.

Twentieth-century American hegemony was founded on two pillars: military superiority and the credibility of its commitments. The first pillar remains partially intact. The second has cracked considerably. And a power whose allies doubt its commitments and refuse its requests for support is no longer quite hegemonic—even if it still possesses the world’s largest missiles.

A Pivotal Moment for the World Order

We are experiencing a moment of systemic transition in the international order. The post-1945 American liberal order—built on multilateral institutions, formal alliances, shared norms, and American power committed to guaranteeing them—has been under pressure for several years. It is not dead. But it is seriously weakened. What will replace it is not yet clear: a multipolar world with several competing great powers? A fragmented regional order? A new form of transactional bilateralism without a solid institutional framework? The answer to these questions is taking shape in decisions like those we are seeing today—allies saying no to Washington, a superpower improvising a strategy without a coalition, and a regional adversary playing for time with growing confidence. It is the small, concrete actions that bring about the collapse of grand structures. And this shift is underway, right before our eyes, in the logistical refusals that allied capitals are directing at the Trump administration.

Iranian Civilians Caught in the Crossfire Between a Regime and a War

Amid all this geopolitical analysis, amid all these calculations of power and strategy, we must pause to consider a reality that official discourse tends to gloss over: the Iranian civilian population. Eighty-five million people living under an authoritarian regime that not all of them chose, who have endured the devastating economic effects of international sanctions for decades, whose young people are protesting at the risk of their lives for fundamental freedoms, and who now find themselves in the crosshairs of a military conflict decided by actors located thousands of kilometers away. U.S. sanctions have certainly affected the Iranian regime, but they have also impoverished an educated and globally-minded Iranian middle class, destroyed family livelihoods, degraded the healthcare system, and made access to essential medications impossible. The suffering of ordinary Iranians does not factor into the strategic calculations of Washington or Tel Aviv. It should.

We must also speak of the people of Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon—all these countries that have been turned into proxy battlefields in a conflict whose root causes lie elsewhere. For a decade now, Yemen has been experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet, with millions of people facing famine and civilian infrastructure destroyed. U.S. strikes against the Houthis add another layer to this catastrophe without addressing the political causes that brought it about. Every missile fired, no matter which side it comes from, takes a human toll that official statements never honestly quantify.

One can analyze the geopolitics of the conflict with all the rigor in the world. We can understand the strategic calculations of each actor. But if we retain even a modicum of humanity, we cannot forget that behind every strategic map, behind every deterrence calculation, there are real human beings—with families, hopes, and bodies that bleed. These people deserve better than to be the invisible pawns in a geopolitical chess game.

Regional Stability as a Threatened Public Good

Stability in the Middle East is not merely an abstract matter of geopolitics. It directly influences global energy prices, migration flows to Europe, the economic balance in dozens of countries, and the security of maritime routes through which trillions of dollars’ worth of goods pass each year. When the Strait of Hormuz is threatened—and Iran controls part of this strategic strait through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes—the entire global economy is shaken. Consumers in Europe, Asia, and the United States feel the impact in their energy bills. Businesses feel it in their transportation costs. Developing countries, which depend on food and energy imports, feel it in their ability to feed their populations. Regional stability is a global public good. And it is currently under serious threat from a chain of decisions whose logic seems closer to a zero-sum game than to cooperation.

The Price of Unilateralism in Times of Crisis

History may remember this period for something that is both ironic and terrible: the administration that claimed to be the strongest embodiment of American power—the one that promised to make America great and feared once again—is the one that finds itself most diplomatically isolated at the very moment it needs it most. Allies are refusing to provide logistical support. Regional partners are keeping their distance. Adversaries are exploiting the weaknesses and adjusting their strategies. This is not the result of an external conspiracy. It is the result of choices: the choice of arrogance over consultation, of pressure over dialogue, of transactional relationships over alliances based on shared values. These choices come at a price. And that price is being paid now, in the form of mounting refusals, growing isolation, and eroding credibility.

American power remains immense. The United States can still accomplish a great deal in the world. But it has learned—or should learn—that even the greatest power is not enough to compensate for a lack of legitimacy, coalition, and coherent strategy. Wars in the 21st century are not won solely with missiles and aircraft carriers. They are won with strong coalitions, clearly defined political objectives, domestic and international public opinion that understands why we are fighting, and allies who believe you will honor your commitments. On all these fronts, the Trump administration is racking up deficits.

A superpower that can no longer count on its allies for basic logistics, that enters into a conflict without an exit strategy, that confuses force with wisdom and pressure with diplomacy—that superpower is not winning. It is losing something more precious than any battle: the trust that others have placed in it. And that is not something that can be regained with missiles.

What We Need to Watch for in the Coming Weeks

The situation is not set in stone. Several developments are possible, and several signals deserve special attention. Behind-the-scenes diplomacy—the discreet channels between Washington, Tehran, and mediating capitals such as Oman, Qatar, or Switzerland—can yield results that won’t immediately make the headlines. Pressure from financial markets and oil prices can create incentives for de-escalation that purely military calculations do not produce. How the situation on the ground in the Red Sea and the Gulf unfolds will determine whether the current tensions remain manageable or escalate into something more serious. And the reaction of the American public—which remains wary of new military adventures in the Middle East—will be a political factor that even the Trump administration cannot ignore indefinitely. We are at a time of great uncertainty. And in times of great uncertainty, the choices made in the coming weeks will have consequences that extend far beyond what anyone can foresee today.

Signed, Jacques Pj Provost