President Trump had been eager to celebrate the U.S. strikes on Iran, but a new report indicates the attack set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.
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.
