Maine Bans Large Data Centers in U.S. First

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American allies start imagining a European NATO should President Trump exit the alliance. Plus, Maine becomes the first state to block construction of large AI data centers in a largely party-line vote opposed by many Republicans.

Richard Rubin (0:33)

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Luke Vargas (0:37)

And we'll look at why more Americans are preparing to cheat on their taxes after the Trump administration cut IRS enforcement staff. It's Wednesday, April 15th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM Edition of What's News. The top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

NATO is accelerating a fallback plan to defend its member nations without the US as tensions over the Iran War fuel anxiety over American reliability. That's as President Trump has restarted criticism of NATO since the war began, calling for alliance members to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Though with Europe reticent to join the war, our chief European political correspondent Ojan Ponchevsky says that leaders are now reluctantly planning for a future without US security guarantees.

Boyan Pancevski (1:26)

America is the core of NATO's deterrence because the American nuclear umbrella is protecting most of Europe from basically Russia. And so they will never do anything to alienate Trump further. But what they're trying to do is make contingency plans of how to kind of take over NATO institutions within Europe, how to staff the top jobs with European officers, with generals and so on, how to move European assets and troops in the place of American assets and troops that are kind of slowly dissipating or have been announced for pullback. For now, there's no real solution as to what you do when the American nuclear umbrella is no longer available, if that happens. So there have been some conversations with France and Britain who have independent nuclear deterrence. So they are kind of scrambling for solutions in all of these departments.

Luke Vargas (2:20)

And Boyan added that Europe's plan is gaining traction after getting buy-in from Germany, which had long been an opponent of a go-it-alone defense approach.

Boyan Pancevski (2:28)

The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz realized at one point that Trump is willing to potentially let Ukraine drop.

Then came Greenland, and Trump essentially threatened to invade a piece of European territory. And that was the kind of straw that broke the camel's back. Ever since, they've been working around the clock to figure out how to make NATO viable in Europe, even if America pulls out entirely, or the more likely scenario doesn't necessarily come to Europe's aid when the need arises.

Luke Vargas (3:02)

The US military says its blockade of Iranian ports is in full force, and that ships trying to leave the country, including eight oil tankers, have turned back after being instructed to do so by US forces.

Meanwhile, US officials say that more than 20 commercial ships that didn't visit Iran's ports have passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the last day. But Middle East correspondent Jared Malson told me that Iran is likely to make continued enforcement difficult.

Jared Malsin (3:28)

What we've seen so far is that the blockade is in place. You have some ships that have left the Strait of Hormuz and then turned around. It's also going to be complicated going forward for the Americans to decide which ships to stop, which is what we're reporting on today is Iran's so-called shadow fleet of tankers that it uses to sell its oil, which is obviously heavily sanctioned by the US and other countries. These are ships with dubious registration that fly under flags sometimes that are used to evade sanctions. And so they are masters of disguise. They send out signals of where they're coming from. They transfer oil from one ship to another. And so for the Americans to decide which ships really are subject to the blockade, that's kind of a complex question. However, at the moment, what we're seeing is that Iran isn't moving a whole lot. They are, however, testing the limits of the blockade. They are pushing the envelope by sending some of these ships out. One that we've been watching is called Rich Stary. That's a Chinese owned tanker that left the Strait of Hormuz and then went back into the Gulf.

It's sanctioned by the US for working with Iran and that is something to watch as this situation unfolds in the coming days.