Intel Report on Iran Upends Victory Lap Trump Was Hoping for at NATO

As President Trump landed in the Netherlands for the annual meeting of NATO allies, he was desperate to hold together the fragile cease-fire 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 U.S. intelligence report cast doubt on his repeated claim that the American strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programs. Mr. 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 program back by a number of months.

Mr. 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 Mr. Trump a private message thanking him for his “decisive action” in Iran.

“That was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do,” Mr. Rutte wrote. “It makes us all safer.” The note, addressed to “Donald,” appeared to be a private correspondence, but Mr. Trump posted a photo of it on his social media account.

Mr. Rutte went on to tell Mr. 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 percent of its gross domestic product on defense or defense-related spending, though they have a decade to reach the mark.

That is a major victory for Mr. Trump, who has pressed for the past decade for Europe to pay for more of its own defense. While the commitments increased under the Biden administration, Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Trump’s actions in the past 72 hours underscored to those countries, however, how advanced the U.S. military was compared to 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 on Tuesday evening 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 Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to commit more military aid to Ukraine, and his frequent communications with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia make the allies nervous.

Mr. Trump woke up on Tuesday morning in a surly mood, as the cease-fire 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 fuck they’re doing” as the two sides launched missiles as the truce was set to begin.

Mr. Trump then called Mr. Netanyahu and later announced the cease-fire 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 demeanor 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, Mr. Rutte bent over backward to try and appease Mr. Trump. Mr. Rutte shortened the programming, corralled the alliance to meet Mr. Trump’s spending demand and worked to keep the policy communiqué as short as five paragraphs.

In total, Mr. Trump is expected to spend less than 24 hours on the ground in the Netherlands. He attended a dinner with other world leaders on Tuesday night 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 on Wednesday morning and then participate in the plenary session and hold bilateral meetings and a news conference before returning to Washington.

Even before he arrived, though, Mr. 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, Mr. Trump edited out mentions of Article 5 from a major speech at NATO. On Tuesday, 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.”