Leak of intelligence report on Iran bombing setback for Trump as Nato summit gets under way

US President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on the way to the Nato summit in the Netherlands. Photo / Andrew Harnik, Getty Images

As United States President Donald Trump landed in the Netherlands for the annual meeting of Nato allies, he was desperate to hold together the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran, cursing and cajoling to make sure that history would remember him for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend and brokering a peace deal days later.

But just hours after he landed, the leak of a new US intelligence report has cast doubt on his repeated claim that the American strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programmes.

Trump started using the word “obliterated” before he received his first battle damage report, and since then, he has closely monitored which members of his Administration have used the same language.

The report’s finding, while preliminary, was particularly damaging because it emerged from inside the Pentagon, which had carried out the strikes, and it concluded that the military action had only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a number of months.

Trump had been eager to celebrate his success at Nato and revel in the fact that he had conducted an attack that none of his predecessors had dared to launch.

His view was backed up by Mark Rutte, the Secretary-General of the alliance, who wrote Trump a private message thanking him for his “decisive action” in Iran.

“That was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do,” Rutte wrote. “It makes us all safer.”

The note, addressed to “Donald”, appeared to be a private correspondence, but Trump posted a photo of it on his social media account.

Rutte went on to tell Trump that he was “flying into another big success in The Hague this evening”, citing the alliance’s agreement that each nation would spend 5% of its gross domestic product on defence or defence-related spending, though they have a decade to reach the mark.

That is a major victory for Trump, who has pressed for the past decade for Europe to pay for more of its own defence.

While the commitments increased under the Biden Administration, Rutte has leveraged the concerns about Russia’s ambitions beyond Ukraine to convince countries to spend at levels that even six months ago they could not have imagined.

And Trump’s unsubtle threats in his first term that he might abandon the alliance proved successful, even if they came at the price of diplomatic breaches with some of America’s closest allies.

By any measure, Trump’s actions in the past 72 hours underscored to those countries, however, how advanced the US military was compared with the other forces that make up Nato.

No other nation represented in the alliance has a military capable of flying halfway around the world to strike a distant, hardened target under a mountain in north-central Iran.

But the subtext of the meeting that opened in The Hague today was clear: The other 31 Nato nations must adjust to an era in which they can no longer count on Washington as the linchpin of the 76-year-old alliance.

The biggest source of tension at the session is Trump’s unwillingness to commit more military aid to Ukraine, and his frequent communications with President Vladimir Putin of Russia make the allies nervous.

Trump woke up in a surly mood, as the ceasefire between Israel and Iran he had just eagerly announced hours before appeared to be collapsing.

As he was leaving the White House, he berated Israel and Iran, saying they “don’t know what the f*** they’re doing” as the two sides launched missiles as the truce was set to begin.

Trump then called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and later announced the ceasefire was back in place.

He was in a much better mood then, posting a series of laudatory messages from others, including calls for him to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The upbeat demeanour crumbled once the intelligence reports started to leak out, with Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, blasting them as “flat-out wrong” and a “clear attempt to demean President Trump”.

At The Hague, the President will face an alliance that he has long disdained in a setting — an international summit — that he has shown little interest in.

For that reason, Rutte bent over backward to try and appease Trump. Rutte shortened the programming, corralled the alliance to meet Trump’s spending demand and worked to keep the policy communique as short as five paragraphs.

In total, Trump is expected to spend less than 24 hours on the ground in the Netherlands.

He attended a dinner with other world leaders and spent the night at Huis ten Bosch, one of the Dutch royal palaces.

He will have breakfast with the country’s king and queen (tonight NZT) and then participate in the plenary session and hold bilateral meetings and a news conference before returning to Washington.

Even before he arrived, though, Trump further unnerved European allies, playing coy on whether he was committed to Article 5, the part of Nato’s treaty that stipulates an attack on one ally would be defended as an attack on all.

During his first term, Trump edited out mentions of Article 5 from a major speech at Nato. Today, the President said his commitment “depends on your definition” of Article 5.

“I’m committed to saving lives,” he said. “I’m committed to life and safety, and I’m going to give you an exact definition when I get there. I just don’t want to do it on the back of an airplane.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Tyler Pager and David E. Sanger

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