With friends like these: One real virtue of the Iran war is how it exposes once-hidden disloyalties.

That goes for the various cranks on the right we considered the other day, most prominently podcaster Tucker Carlson, formally “evicted” from MAGA by President Donald Trump and sadly now claiming the CIA is out to frame him.

Other big-ish righty names — Steve Bannon, Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene — are also denouncing Operation Epic Fury, marginally undermining a mission that has strong support among GOP voters and even more so among MAGA ones.

They’re not so much dividing the right, in other words, as declaring themselves unbalanced (or perhaps overly reliant on a fringe audience for their clicks).

A far bigger deal are the US “allies” declining Trump’s call for help, even if just symbolic, to open the Strait of Hormuz.

Even though little oil or natural gas flows through there to America, both are vital to the global markets Europeans and others now scrambling for rocks to hide beneath depend on.

“This is not our war, we have not started it,” squirms German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.   

“It’s never been envisioned to be a NATO mission,” flutters UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Trump’s not asking for help in the war; he’s suggesting that countries that benefit from oil and gas that goes through the Strait should help get it flowing again.

Much as many of these same nations did join in NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield and the European Union’s Operation Atalanta to counter Somali piracy a decade or two back — with the navies of India and China playing an important role, too.

Then again, most of our European “allies” have let their navies shrink to almost nothing since then, with Starmer’s Britain especially pathetic.

Such cowardice now is a reminder of just how impotent these countries have become.

As Trump fumed on Truth Social, it seems NATO has become “a one way street – We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us.”

Or even for themselves — since they’re at risk now thanks to their climate-cult foolishness: Shunning fossil-fuel extraction and even shutting nuclear plants left them utterly at the mercy of the flow of foreign gas and oil.

More, their governments (especially left-wing ones) are ever more captive to increasingly powerful Muslim voting blocs after enormous waves of immigration and failed attempts at societal integration. 

Sending even a few ships would matter, letting Iran know its gambit is failing to divide the West.

Trump says he asked for help from some countries “not because we need them” but to show he was right in predicting that “if we ever did need them, they won’t be there.”

It all brings to mind Winston Churchill’s remark after Britain and France joined Israel to recapture another key waterway, the Suez Canal, from Egypt in 1956 — only to be slapped down by Washington: “I would never have dared,” but “if I had dared, I would certainly never have dared stop.”

Trump’s bid to completely defang the Islamic Republic (which had managed to accumulate enough enriched uranium for 11 nuclear bombs) was long overdue.

Western leaders don’t have to endorse his actions, but now that he has acted, they owe it to America to stand by him — and step up.

This is a global problem, if ever there was one. It needs a global response.