The Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union ended Sunday in Brussels with no joint statement on the American naval blockade of Iran. Germany was prepared to endorse the operation. France was prepared to oppose it. Italy was prepared to send ships. The rest were prepared to wait. Seven hours of debate produced an exchange of views. The high representative briefed reporters Sunday evening that the bloc would continue to coordinate. That is the formulation European foreign ministry officials use when nothing has been agreed and nothing is in immediate prospect.

The Washington response should not be disappointment. The response should be recognition. The Atlantic alliance, as it operates in 2026, is a one-way arrangement. The United States provides the military instrument. Europe provides the commentary. When American operations align with European preferences, the commentary is supportive. When they do not, the commentary is qualified. When the commentary becomes inconvenient, it is withheld. Sunday in Brussels was the withholding.

This is not new, and it is not surprising. The American foreign policy establishment has spent thirty years pretending otherwise, and the pretense has been costly. The Atlantic Council has filled libraries with monographs on alliance management. The State Department has staffed an entire bureau on transatlantic coordination. Successive American presidents have organized their foreign policy around the proposition that European backing is a prerequisite for serious action, and that the principal task of American statecraft is to secure that backing through patient consultation. The Iran air campaign was conducted on a different premise. The Iran blockade has been conducted on the same different premise. The premise has been vindicated. The pretense has not.

The instructive comparison is to the Gulf War of 1991, which is the high-water mark of the alliance-management theory of American foreign policy. The first Bush administration spent six months building a thirty-nation coalition that included France, Italy, and what was then West Germany. The coalition was financially and diplomatically valuable. It was operationally marginal. The Iraqi army was driven from Kuwait by American air power and American armor, with British and French ground contributions whose strategic effect was a fraction of their political effect. The lesson the foreign policy establishment took from 1991 was that coalitions were essential. The lesson that should have been taken was that they were ornamental.

American capability is the operationally essential element of any serious Western response to a serious threat, and American capability is also the operationally available element. The thirty-five years since the end of the Cold War have produced a strategic environment in which the European militaries that mattered to NATO planning in the 1980s have been hollowed out, the political institutions that emerged in the 1990s have proved incapable of coordinating action on questions that cut across the interests of their largest members, and the public opinion that animates both has settled into a posture in which any American use of force is presumed problematic until it is over. Europe wants the bargain it has made for two generations: American security guarantees, European autonomy on the questions that follow. The bargain is defensible from Berlin and Paris. Washington has no continuing reason to validate it with the deference of a junior partner.

The Sunday meeting in Brussels was an opportunity for the bloc to demonstrate that the deference was warranted. The bloc declined. The German foreign minister arrived prepared to back the blockade. The French foreign minister arrived prepared to oppose it. The Italian foreign minister arrived prepared to commit naval forces. The high representative arrived prepared to manage all three. None of them was prepared to ask what American policy actually requires of European partners at this moment, and to provide it. The omission tells you something useful about what the alliance can deliver. Plan around it.

Planning around the limits of an alliance is the foreign policy of any serious power, not the foreign policy of an isolationist one. The British plan around European disunity. The Indians plan around their neighborhood's disunity. The Chinese plan around the contradictions inside their own bloc, which are more pronounced than they admit. The country that does not plan around European disunity is the United States, which has spent the post-Cold War period operating on the polite fiction that the alliance functions as advertised. The fiction has produced specific costs. It has slowed American decision cycles. It has narrowed American options. It has provided ammunition to domestic critics of every American operation by signaling that allied approval was the relevant test of legitimacy. The Iran air campaign succeeded in part because the administration was willing to act before that approval had been secured. The blockade will succeed or fail on the same basis.

The conservative tradition on this is more useful than the establishment tradition. John Quincy Adams's 1821 address to the House, which the foreign policy literature has been quoting selectively for two centuries, contains the sentence that gets cited and the sentences around it that do not. America, he said, does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. The last clause is the operative one, and it is the one the alliance-management theory has spent a generation trying to soften. American foreign policy is conducted on behalf of American interests. Where those interests align with the interests of allies, cooperation is useful. Where they do not, cooperation is impossible. Sunday in Brussels was a case of the second kind.

The immediate implication for the next four weeks of the Iran operation is that the administration should stop calibrating the Muscat track to imagined European positions. The Iranians have correctly read the European silence as a constraint on American leverage, and the Iranian opening proposal communicated through Omani intermediaries last week was designed for an administration the Iranians believed to be operating under that constraint. The administration is not operating under that constraint. The constraint exists only in the heads of American negotiators who have been trained to assume it. Removing the assumption is free. It produces a stronger American negotiating position at no cost in alliance friction the alliance itself has already withdrawn from preventing.

The longer horizon matters more. The American foreign policy establishment should stop spending the country's diplomatic capital on the project of European coordination. The bilateral relationships that have remained operationally serious through the post-Cold War period are the British, the Australian, the Japanese, and the Israeli, and those are the relationships that should be cultivated and expanded. The European relationship, as it functions through the institutions in Brussels, is durable in name and operationally marginal in fact. American policy should reflect the difference. The alliance will continue to exist on paper. Washington should stop organizing its strategy around the proposition that the alliance can do work it has demonstrated it cannot do.

Europe will continue to issue communiques. American policy should continue to be made in Washington. The Brussels Council will reconvene on June 16. The blockade will continue to operate, or to wind down, on a schedule the foreign ministers in Brussels will read about in the morning papers along with everyone else. That is the correct distribution of responsibility, and the country should stop apologizing for it.