Hard time for soft targets as Trump’s “America First” posture has left ‘America alone’

Since the end of February, nearly three hundred attacks have been recorded against American diplomatic facilities, but the violence has not remained safely overseas. Iranian retaliation has come home. Micheál Martin avoided the trap that snared Germany’s chancellor by politely pushing back as Donald Trump slammed Keir Starmer, NATO and migration to Europe.

There is an old saying that a man is judged by the company he keeps, but perhaps more accurately, a nation is judged by the friends who show up when the lamps go out. By that measure, the United States of America is sitting in a very dark room tonight, and there does not seem to be anybody home next door willing to bring a candle.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” wrote US National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who resigned over President Donald Trump’s war against Iran. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

For eighteen days now, the thunder of American and Israeli bombs has rolled across the Iranian plateau. The targets are military, we are told. Missile installations, nuclear sites, the machinery of a hostile regime. But war, as it always does, has a nasty habit of missing the mark.

The deadliest single moment of this campaign occurred not at a Revolutionary Guard barracks but at an elementary school for girls in the city of Minab, where more than 170 children and staff now lie beneath the rubble.

Hospitals in Tehran have been hit. Oil refineries burn. And the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow throat through which a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, sits closed like a locked door.

The retaliation has been fierce and far-flung. Iranian missiles and drones have arced toward Israel. They have struck at American military installations across the Gulf. They have set Saudi refineries ablaze. And crucially, for the first time in this long and troubled history, they have turned their attention to the symbols of American presence that were once considered untouchable.

The American embassy in Baghdad has been struck not once but twice, most recently by a drone that started a fire inside the compound just yesterday. The consulate in Toronto was rattled by gunfire. An explosion near the embassy in Oslo has Norwegian authorities hunting for connections to Iranian proxies.

In Riyadh, parts of the embassy have been deemed unrecoverable after a drone strike collapsed a roof. Even diplomatic personnel in Israel were not safe; an apartment building housing American staff was hit by the warhead of an intercepted Iranian ballistic missile.

These are soft targets, chosen precisely because they are symbols. They are the places where a nation plants its flag and says, “I am here.” And right now, those flags are taking fire.

The trouble, as it so often does, arrived not in a single thunderclap but in a series of shocks that have left the country jumping at shadows. Within twenty-four hours of the opening strikes, a man walked into a bar in Austin, Texas, wearing a shirt in the colors of the Iranian flag.

Before the night was over, three people were dead and more than a dozen lay wounded. It was a sign of things to come, though few recognized it at the time.

A week later, in New York, two teenagers from Pennsylvania who had been consuming Islamic State propaganda tried to detonate an explosive device at a public protest, according to prosecutors. They were caught, but just barely, and the plot served as a warning that the call to violence was reaching the youngest and most impressionable among us.

Then came March 12th, a day that will live in the memory of those who track such things as a dark milestone in this new and unwelcome chapter of American life. At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, a man named Mohamed Bailor Jalloh walked into a classroom where ROTC cadets were studying.

Jalloh was a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone, a man who had spent eleven years in prison for attempting to provide material support to ISIS and had been released just three months earlier. He shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire, killing Army instructor Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shah and wounding two cadets before he was stopped.

The FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism, though they caution that Jalloh’s hatred of Iran—ISIS considers the Shia regime a mortal enemy—complicates any simple connection to the current conflict.

Less than two hours later and nearly seven hundred miles away, a man named Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove a pickup truck through the front doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, the largest Reform synagogue in the nation. In the bed of the truck were fireworks and flammable liquid.

The resulting fire trapped 140 children inside. Ghazali, a Lebanese-born American citizen, had learned just days before that an Israeli airstrike in his home country had killed two of his brothers—both reportedly members of a Hezbollah rocket unit—along with a young niece and nephew. In the hours before the attack, he posted images of their bodies on WhatsApp. He died in a gunfight with security guards.

These were not coordinated operations directed from Tehran. They were something perhaps more frightening: the spontaneous combustion of overseas conflict in the hearts of men already primed for violence. Experts who study such things call them “lone offenders,” and they warn that they are the hardest to stop. You cannot track what you do not know. You cannot disrupt what you cannot see.

And the calls for such violence are growing louder by the day. Researchers at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate documented more than 25,000 posts on X containing Islamophobic content in the first week of the war alone. In pro-ISIS spaces online, the Old Dominion shooter was celebrated as a “lone lion” answering the call to strike.

The group’s propaganda has been explicit: the war proves that Western “Crusaders” and “Jews” are at war with Islam, and retaliatory attacks on civilians in their homelands are a religious obligation. Synagogues and churches are singled out as especially desirable targets.

The question that hangs in the air, unanswered by those in power, is whether the machinery built to prevent such attacks is still up to the task. Over the past year, some 800 FBI agents have been laid off. The counterintelligence team responsible for tracking threats from enemies like Iran was cut in half.

Thousands of agents within the Homeland Security and Justice departments have been shifted from counterterrorism to immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down. A 22-year-old with no apparent professional background was appointed to oversee terrorism prevention programs.

Counterterrorism expert Colin Clarke, who runs the Soufan Center, put it bluntly: “Many of this administration’s moves have been myopic—shifting counterterrorism resources to immigration, firing FBI agents working counterintelligence, etc. A week before the U.S. went to war with Iran, the FBI director was off gallivanting in Milan at the Olympics when he should have been preparing for the potential for an Iranian response on U.S. soil.”

The president, when asked by Time magazine whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, offered a response that was remarkable in its candor or its carelessness, depending on one’s view. “I guess,” he said. “We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren called the comments “deranged and dangerous.” Senator Chris Murphy said they proved that “totally unserious, completely incompetent people” were taking the nation into war. But the words hang there nonetheless, an acknowledgment from the commander in chief that the violence overseas will have a price at home and that some of that price has already come due.

One might expect, in such a moment, that the company of allies would prove its worth. That the dozens of nations that have spent 75 years under the American security umbrella might step forward and say, “We are here, too.” But that is not the scene unfolding across the Atlantic.

Trump stood in the Oval Office on St. Patrick’s Day, hosting the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, and delivered a remarkable admission on St Patrick’s Day on March 17, 2026.

Most of America’s NATO allies, he said, have informed the United States that they do not wish to be involved in this fight. They agree with the mission, he insisted, but they will not help with the doing of it.

The president called it a “very foolish mistake.” He expressed disappointment. He took to his social media platform to note that the alliance he has long characterized as a one-way street appears to be exactly that.

But the truth of it runs deeper than disappointment. The Europeans are not merely reluctant; they are actively disentangling themselves from an American adventure they view with increasing alarm. And they are doing so while staring down a separate threat from the very nation asking for their help.

Trump’s “America First” posture has left ‘America alone’ by alienating longtime U.S. allies so much that NATO is not rising to support the Republican’s Middle Eastern military misadventure.

The trouble over Greenland has not gone away. Throughout the early months of 2026, while the Pentagon planned strikes on Iran, European NATO allies were busy planning for a different kind of contingency: a potential military confrontation with the United States over a chunk of Arctic real estate. Germany, France, Sweden, and Norway have deployed personnel to Greenland for joint exercises with Danish forces. They have reinforced the garrison in Nuuk. They have done this as a signal of unity against American territorial ambitions, a signal that the alliance was designed to handle external threats, not internal land grabs. The president has threatened tariffs. He has refused to rule out the use of force. And his allies in Europe have responded by treating him as they might treat any other power with designs on sovereign territory: they are building up their defenses.

It is a strange sort of war, is it not? American diplomats are ducking drones in Baghdad while American soldiers are being shadowed by Norwegian troops in the Arctic. The nation that spent decades binding the Western world together has, in the space of a few short months, managed to pry it apart. The president says he does not need the help of anyone. He says the United States is the most powerful country anywhere in the world and that Japan, Australia, South Korea, and NATO can all stay on the sidelines. He says this even as Iranian missiles rain down on Gulf states and American embassies burn, even as the bodies are counted in Texas and Virginia and Michigan.

But the men who built the alliances after the last great war understood something that seems to have been forgotten. They understood that power is not just about what you can do alone but about what you can do together. They understood that when your embassies are under fire, it matters whether other nations consider those embassies their embassies, too. They understood that a superpower without friends is just a very large target.

The Qataris have been great, the president says. The UAE has been absolutely great. Saudi Arabia has been terrific. And perhaps that is true. But there is a difference between a transactional partner and a treaty ally. There is a difference between a country that helps because it shares a neighborhood and a country that helps because it shares a soul.

Right now, the United States is fighting a widening war across a dozen countries. Its diplomats are under fire. Its bases are being targeted. Its ships are dodging missiles in the Gulf. Its citizens are dying at home. And the nations that have called it friend for three generations are sitting this one out, nursing their grievances over Greenland and wondering whether the America they once knew is ever coming back.

The former assistant director of the FBI, a man named Chris Swecker, said recently that the general threat level across the country “has been about as high as it’s been since 9/11, and that’s saying something.” He was not being alarmist. He was stating a fact. And the fact is that the war the president started without an exit strategy, without allied support, without the intelligence apparatus fully staffed, has come home in ways that are only beginning to be measured.

The president says we will be leaving Iran in the very near future. He says that if we left right now, it would take them ten years to rebuild. Perhaps that is true. But it will take longer than ten years to rebuild the trust that has been shattered in these past few months. It will take longer than ten years to convince the Europeans that an alliance is not a one-way street when they have spent the winter preparing for the possibility that the United States might try to seize a piece of Denmark by force.

The dead in Austin. The wounded in Norfolk. The children trapped in a burning synagogue in Michigan. The foiled plot in New York. The embassies burning from Baghdad to Riyadh. These are not abstractions. They are the cost of conflict, paid not in some distant land but in the places where Americans live and work and pray.

There is a lesson in all of this, and it is an old one. A nation that goes it alone had better be prepared to stay that way. Because when the embassies start burning and the friends stop answering the phone, when the violence comes home and there is nobody to stand with you, there is nobody left to call but yourself. And that, as any man sitting alone in the dark will tell you, is a very lonely place to be.