British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gathered more than 40 nations by video link on Tuesday to discuss reopening the Strait of Hormuz. NATO allies, Gulf monarchies, Asian energy importers, African and Latin American states whose budgets depend on the price of crude. The agenda was ambitious: coordinate political and diplomatic measures to restore freedom of navigation, guarantee the safety of trapped ships and seafarers, and resume the movement of vital commodities.

The United States did not attend.

Commentary in London and Brussels treated this as a damning indictment of American leadership. The world's largest naval power, sitting out the most important maritime diplomacy in a generation. The standard narrative writes itself: Washington has retreated, the allies are stepping up, multilateralism endures.

The narrative is wrong. It confuses a press conference with a policy. Forty nations on a video call cannot clear a single mine from the shipping lanes. They cannot suppress a single Iranian coastal missile battery. They cannot escort a single tanker through a strait that is 21 miles wide and bristling with IRGC fast attack craft. The summit produced statements. Statements do not reopen straits. Navies do.

What the Summit Actually Produced

Communiques. Working groups. Diplomatic channels that will operate independently of Washington. Some of these may prove useful for coordinating insurance frameworks or establishing shipping protocols once the strait is actually open. None of them address the operational problem, which is that Iran has spent 40 years preparing to close Hormuz and has now done it.

Reopening the strait requires minesweeping in waters where the current runs at three knots through channels barely a mile wide. It requires sustained air patrols to suppress mobile coastal missile batteries that can relocate between strikes. It requires anti-submarine warfare against Kilo-class diesel boats in shallow, acoustically cluttered water. And it requires the logistics chain to sustain all of this for weeks or months.

The Royal Navy can send a frigate or two. France can deploy a task group from the Indian Ocean. Japan and South Korea can contribute Aegis-equipped destroyers. Combined, this is useful. It is also, without the U.S. Navy's minesweeping capability, carrier aviation, and logistics infrastructure, entirely insufficient. Britain knows this. Every nation on that call knows this. The summit was not a substitute for American power. It was a demonstration of how little the world can accomplish without it.

Why Washington Stayed Home

President Trump has spent recent weeks berating allied governments for declining to join the Iran campaign. He told them to "get your own oil." He floated withdrawing from NATO. He threatened to suspend weapons deliveries to Ukraine unless Europe fell in line on Hormuz.

The tone is wrong. Alliance management through public humiliation is bad strategy, and the administration's inability to distinguish between legitimate pressure and counterproductive bullying has been a recurring problem.

But the underlying complaint is correct, and has been correct for decades. European allies have chronically underinvested in the naval capabilities that would let them contribute meaningfully to Gulf security. Germany cannot deploy a single operational submarine to the region. Spain's navy is configured for coastal patrol, not expeditionary operations. The continent that depends most on Gulf energy has done the least to secure it.

The American absence from Starmer's summit was petty. It was also, in a deeper sense, a reflection of a legitimate frustration: Washington has been securing the strait since 1949, and the allies who benefit most from that security have never built the capacity to share the burden in any meaningful way. A summit is not burden-sharing. Ships are.

The "Europe Steps Up" Fantasy

A certain kind of foreign policy commentary treats European self-organization as inherently virtuous. The allies are finally taking responsibility. Europe is growing up. Washington should welcome this.

The problem is that Europe is not growing up. It is holding a meeting. Growing up would mean building the mine countermeasure vessels, the maritime patrol aircraft, the logistics ships, and the carrier aviation necessary to keep Hormuz open against a determined Iranian campaign. Europe does not have these things. It is not building them at the scale required. And no summit, however well-attended, is a substitute for the capabilities that do not exist.

When European commentators celebrate the Starmer summit as proof that the world can organize without America, they are celebrating a press release. The U.S. Fifth Fleet is in Bahrain. The carrier strike group is steaming south of the strait. American minesweepers are the only vessels in the region capable of clearing the Iranian mines that are actually keeping the strait closed. The summit happened in a conference room. The strait will reopen in the water.

What Actually Matters

The strait will reopen one of two ways. Either the war ends through negotiation and Iran lifts its closure as part of a ceasefire agreement, or American and allied naval forces clear the mines, suppress the coastal defenses, and escort convoys through by force. The first option is faster, cheaper, and more durable. The second is feasible but slow, expensive, and incomplete, because Iran can re-mine faster than anyone can sweep.

Neither option is advanced by a 40-nation video call. Both options require American participation. The administration's refusal to attend the summit was diplomatically clumsy, but the summit itself was substantively empty. The real diplomatic action is happening through Pakistani and Egyptian intermediaries, in back channels that involve Washington and Tehran directly. The real military action involves the U.S. Navy.

Starmer's summit will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as the moment Europe demonstrated both its ambition and its impotence simultaneously. Forty nations agreed that the strait should be open. Zero of them can open it. That is not a new chapter in international security. It is a familiar one, and it ends the same way it always has: with a phone call to Washington.