Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanna Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about Iran again about Donald Trump's threats about NATO.

He said that the US won't be there to help you anymore.

About Mark Rubio's statement that after the, the US will re-examine its relationship

with Europe and especially NATO. We'll discuss the decision which seemed to be coordinated by

several European governments to deny certain requests by the United States in respect of

overflight rights, use of joint

basis. And we'll discuss the long-term implications this war will have on Europe, both for its

security arrangements and its economic security. Jack, where are we on the basis?

Is this conflict that the US is now sort of taking very seriously, if you look at the tweets by Trump and Rubio's TV interview, the decision by various European countries, Poland, Spain,

Italy, France, even Poland and Italy, which were on Team Trump here, seemed to be having

doubts about the strategy and seem to be denying certain requests by the United States.

Do you get a sense that the Europeans know what they're doing? And do you think this is causing

real damage? I think to answer that question a little bit more, I'd like to focus a bit more on Italy

specifically, because that's the incident that's attracted, I think, the most attention.

And I think it's the one that shows how complex this issue is and potentially where this is

and isn't going.

So initially, we all found out about this because the Corriara de la Cera

an Italian daily newspaper had reported that Italy had denied the United States permission for

an airmission of unspecified size to land at the Cigonella airbase in Sicily. So Cigonella is one of the airbases that the United States and

Italy jointly run in the country. So this mission was supposed to be going onwards to the Middle

East. Now, later on it transpired that Italy had apparently denied the request because they

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