President Donald Trump contended Wednesday that weekend U.S. military strikes on Iran had “ended the war” between Israel and the Islamic republic, pushing back on reports of an early Pentagon assessment that the attacks set back Tehran’s nuclear program by only a few months.
Trump announced moments before departing the NATO summit in the Netherlands that his administration would meet with Iranian officials next week. But Trump said he does not believe a peace agreement or a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program would be necessary because the two sides “had a war, they fought, now they’re going back to their world.”
“I don’t care if I have an agreement or not. The only thing [we] would be asking for is what we were asking for before … we want no nuclear,” Trump said.
Earlier Wednesday, as a ceasefire between Israel and Iran appeared to be holding, Trump said the U.S. was getting along “very well” with the Iranian government.
“I think they’re going to take their oil, they’ll have some missiles, and they’re going to have some defense. I think they’ve had it. I mean, they just went through hell,” he said. “The last thing they want to do is enrich [uranium].”
Trump went so far as to liken the U.S. military action — which included dropping bunker-busting bombs and firing Tomahawk missiles at three Iranian nuclear facilities — to the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in World War II.
“That hit ended the war. I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing,” he said. “That ended that war.”
The remarks follow Trump’s recent public musings about deserving the Noble Peace Prize for his peace efforts. He ignored shouted questions aboard Air Force One on Tuesday about whether he should win the award if the Israel-Iran ceasefire continued to hold. (His odds of winning, though, have increased, according to one handicapper.)
Here are four takeaways from Trump and his team at the NATO summit after the historic Iran strikes.
‘Severe’ vs. ‘total obliteration’
Team Trump was defiant about the Iran strikes, slamming reports that an early Defense Intelligence Agency assessment had concluded that Iran’s nuclear program did not suffer the kind of significant setback the president and a handful of senior aides had publicly described since Saturday night. And they offered differing assessments of the damage done.
Sitting with Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the summit, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the Iran mission “flawless” and said the administration had already begun an investigation into the leaks of the report, which he called a “low-confidence” initial analysis.
“It was devastation underneath Fordo,” he said of the Iranian enrichment facility built deep underground and into a mountain range. “Any assessment that tells you it was something otherwise is speculating with other motives.” Hegseth told reporters that the internal Pentagon assessment found “moderate to severe” damage at Fordo “and we believe, far more likely, severe and obliterated.”
The latter conclusion was slightly milder than offered by his boss moments earlier, with Trump asserting that the U.S. military had achieved “total obliteration” at Fordo, saying, “If that thing wasn’t devastated, [Iranian officials] wouldn’t have settled.” He also contended that Tehran’s nuclear arms ambitions had been delayed “basically decades.”
Some Democrats, however, weren’t taking Trump at his word. Senate Foreign Relations member Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut called the president’s remarks “incoherent and embarrassing,” while former House Intelligence ranking member Jane Harman of California told NewsNation that “’obliterated’ isn’t an intelligence term.”
Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s acting national security adviser, criticized the leaked intelligence report, saying an Iranian conversion facility had disappeared from the map.
“We can’t even find where it used to be, because the whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone,” the former Florida senator said.
“They are way behind where they were just seven days ago,” in terms of nuclear capabilities, Rubio added. “Now, anything in the world can be rebuilt, but now we know where it is, and if they try to rebuild it, we’ll have options there as well. … These leakers are professional stabbers. … They go out, and they read this stuff, and then they tell you what it says — against the law, but they characterize it for you in a way that’s absolutely false.”
‘Start soon’
After stating in an interview Monday night with NBC News that the dicey Israeli-Iran ceasefire he pushed would last “forever,” Trump speculated Wednesday that fighting could begin again almost at any moment.
“They’re both tired, exhausted. They fought very, very hard and very viciously, very violently, and they were both satisfied to go home and get out,” he said. “Can it start again? I guess someday it can. It could, maybe, start soon.”
“I think a big tell-tale sign was when, as you know, Iran, somewhat but not much, violated the ceasefire. And Israel [on Tuesday] had the planes going out that morning, and there were a lot of them, 52 of them,” he said. “And I said, ‘You’ve got to get them back.’ And they brought them back.”
Trump also rejected reports that Iran had removed enriched uranium and other weapons materiel from the Fordo facility prior to the American strikes.
“They didn’t get it out,” he told reporters. “It’s very, very hard to move.”
Mutual defense
For the second consecutive day, Trump appeared to soften his long-critical view of NATO and its members.
“It’s not a rip-off,” he said after years of saying the opposite about member countries’ respective contributions to the alliance. He did rip Spain for “wanting a little bit of a free ride,” saying that Madrid would have to “make it up” to Washington via a new trade arrangement.
Asked Wednesday if he supports the alliance’s mutual defense pact, Trump said: “I stand with it. That’s why I’m here. If I didn’t stand with it I wouldn’t be here.”
A reporter then asked if that meant the U.S. would defend other NATO members should they be attacked, to which Trump replied, “Yeah. Why would I be here [otherwise]?”
Those remarks came after alliance leaders had agreed to pursue country-specific defense budgets that devoted at least 5 percent of their gross domestic products to military expenditures. Trump said the pact would be called the Hague Defense Commitment.
“A major focus of our conversations at the summit was the need for other NATO members to take up the burden of the defense of Europe, and that includes the financial burden,” the president said at the news conference. “As you know, it was 2 percent, we got it up to 5 percent. And (NATO nation leaders) said, a couple of them came up to me, one in particular, said, ‘We’ve been trying to get it up to 3 percent for 20 years … and you got it up to 5 percent.’
“The United States accounts for two-thirds of all NATO defense spending. Since I began pushing for additional commitments in 2017, believe it or not, our allies have increased spending by $700 billion,” he said. “I don’t know if I did it, but I think I did.”
Earlier Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte lauded Trump for pushing alliance leaders toward the 5 percent pledge: “I want to state it, without President Trump this would not have happened.”
F’n historic
Meantime, Trump appeared alongside other alliance leaders one day after dropping an F-bomb during an exchange with reporters as he departed the White House.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing,” Trump said on the South Lawn. “Do you understand that?”
According to a review by Roll Call’s Factba.se of its data and official presidential records going back to President Herbert Hoover, it was the first public usage of the expletive by a sitting American president.
While some, like Richard M. Nixon, were caught on tape using the word, no previous commander in chief had uttered the word in an on-the-record setting. It was a historic moment for Trump and a country that went 249 years without an official presidential F-bomb.
But Trump’s use of the expletive, Harman said, “doesn’t mean both sides are going to say, ‘OK, we’re not going to attack each other ever again.’”
Bill Frischling contributed data reporting.
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