Fox News’ MAGA stars, unable to acknowledge that the war in Iran that President Donald Trump launched with their support is spiralling into a strategic defeat, have landed on a scapegoat: NATO and its member states, which were not consulted by the United States before it joined Israel in starting the war and have since refused participation.

Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity respectively denounced NATO on Wednesday as “kind of a meaningless ally” that “we’ve had it with” for purportedly “abandoning us.” Hannity and Ingraham each suggested that Trump should withdraw the U.S. from the alliance (which he is barred from doing unilaterally under a bill Secretary of State Marco Rubio cosponsored in the Senate that became law in 2023).

Trump has spent the last several weeks raging over the refusal by U.S. allies to send their navies into the active war zone to escort oil tankers and other commercial ships after Iran, in an obvious strategic countermeasure to the U.S. attack, closed the Strait of Hormuz. Over the weekend, Spain, Italy, and France refused to allow their military bases or airspace to be used by U.S. or Israeli aircraft involved in the war, triggering a new wave of vitriol from the president and his top aides.

Trump claimed in a Wednesday interview to be “beyond reconsideration” of the U.S. role in NATO after “they weren’t there for us” in Iran. (NATO is a defensive alliance — in response to the 9/11 attacks, its members deployed forces alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan but are not bound by the treaty to participate in offensive wars.) In an address from the White House that night, the president urged the “countries of the world” to “build up some delayed courage. … Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.”

The looming strategic failure of the U.S. war in Iran — its regime is intact and in control of its uranium stockpile and the strait, and altering those circumstances that would likely require a risky escalation involving American ground troops — has placed Fox’s hosts in a bind. They have assured their viewers that the war is an historic success and appear unable to break with Trump due to his support among their viewers. That makes our NATO allies an appealing target as the war grinds on.

The president regularly tunes in to Fox to guide his communication and policy decisions. If he was watching before or after his speech on Wednesday, he heard vigorous support for pivoting from his inability to defeat America’s foes to punishing its friends.

Hannity: NATO is “a one-sided alliance,” by leaving “we'll probably save a lot of money”

Hannity, of the network’s three major evening hosts, is the one most committed to the U.S. war in Iran (which he had demanded for decades), the closest personally to Trump, and the loudest voice currently denouncing NATO.

Following Trump’s speech, he panned NATO as “a one-sided alliance where we only go and protect Europe” and suggested its member states had become too culturally Muslim. In response, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) uncorked a screed in which he called for the redeployment of U.S. forces from Europe because “when we needed them the most and when the world needed them the most to stop a religious Nazi regime from having a nuclear breakout, they took a pass.”

“I think that there's going to be a reevaluation and I believe America's contribution just went down dramatically, and we'll know more in the weeks ahead as this now begins to wrap up,” Hannity replied.

Later in the broadcast, the host said it was “unimaginable to me that the NATO alliance would shatter” thanks to the purported refusal by its members to agree to what “should not be a controversial assist on their part.”

“I've got to imagine the ramifications of them abandoning us in this effort is going to — this is going to be deep, profound, and long-lasting,” he added.

Fox contributor Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state in Trump’s first administration, characterized NATO as “feckless, not to be able to convince their own people” of the importance of the Iran war, while retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, another former Trump administration figure, said the U.S. should withdraw from the alliance and form a new one.

“Yeah, I think you're right and we'll probably save a lot of money,” Hannity replied to Kellogg. “But the fact that they did not have a moral clarity when you're dealing with the No. 1 state sponsor of terror potentially this close to acquiring nuclear weapons is breathtaking to me. And this will have reverberations, I believe, going on for decades to come.”

Ingraham: NATO is “kind of a meaningless ally” due to “weakness in Europe”

Ingraham had recently warned about potential downsides of the war, but quickly pivoted back in line with her colleagues. While previewing Trump’s speech on Wednesday’s broadcast, she claimed that “NATO turned out, in this case at least, to be what Donald Trump had predicted: kind of a meaningless ally, if allies at all.”

Her guest, the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano, responded with the evening’s most vigorous defense of the alliance. “I don't think NATO is the problem,” he said, instead pointing to “some very weak leaders inside NATO who have made some very cowardly decisions” and “look like complete yahoos.”

“What we're going to see is not NATO disbanded,” Carafano. “That's nuts. But what we're more likely to see is NATO step back up to the plate under pressure from Donald Trump, and countries throw out their own leaders because they’re weak-kneed yahoos.”

But Ingraham responded by saying that disbanding NATO should be on the table.

“Well, I'm not sure I agree with that,” she replied. “I think there's just a lot of weakness in Europe, period. Period, there's weakness. … We're so lucky we have Donald Trump as president of the United States.”

Watters: “We’ve had it with these people”

Watters joined in the NATO criticism on Wednesday, albeit in a somewhat less aggressive tone than his colleagues.

“The NATO allies, I put allies in quotes,” he said. “I mean, it's been a great alliance over the years. It's really kept the Russians off the continent until the Ukraine invasion. But it's been really one-sided, and now a lot of people are looking around at them saying no, you can't use the airspace. You can't use the base.”

“They've had it,” he added. “We've had it with these people. We love them, but we've had it.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters