Former British foreign secretary William Hague has argued the attack made it more likely that Iranian leaders would develop weapons in secret and the West would “wake up one morning” to discover Iran had a nuclear bomb.
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US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, flanking Trump at the NATO press conference, berated the media for reporting the leaked assessment from the Defence Intelligence Agency that the damage was only a setback for Iran.
One of the targets, Fordow, was estimated to have 3000 centrifuges to enrich uranium to make it suitable for weapons, in a facility said to be 80 metres underground.
“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” Hegseth said.
European leaders avoided any criticism of Trump over his unilateral decision to order the bombing, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer declaring the US to be a reliable ally that gave the UK notice of “all of its intentions” last week.
French President Emmanuel Macron, however, left room for doubt about Trump’s claims about the destruction of the Iranian facilities.
“We are in the process of finalising our own analyses, and will then compare them with those of other interested countries, including Americans, Europeans and Israelis,” he told reporters.
As expected, the NATO meeting concluded with a formal pledge from member states to more than double defence spending from 2 per cent of gross domestic product to 5 per cent by 2035.
Starmer came to the summit with a promise to buy a dozen F-35A stealth strike fighters from Lockheed Martin and equip them with nuclear bombs, in the most direct message to Russian President Vladimir Putin about European deterrence.
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Trump appeared to moderate his criticisms of NATO in the wake of the spending pledges, saying the outcome was “monumental” and adjusting his language about whether the US believed in mutual defence with NATO allies.
“We’re with them all the way,” he said of NATO. One day earlier, on his flight to The Netherlands, he had questioned the definition of a central section of the NATO pact that required all members to come to the aid of a fellow member being attacked.
While Australia was represented at the summit by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, there was no mention of the Indo-Pacific in the concluding statement and the top leaders from Japan and South Korea chose not to attend.
Marles met his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov, and stepped up Australian support for Ukraine with the deployment of a Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft – a military variant of the Boeing 737 – to conduct surveillance from a base in Poland.
The RAAF aircraft will operate for three months to November and will be supported by 100 crew.
“We are obviously focused on the Indo-Pacific in terms of our own strategic landscape, but what’s happening here in Europe is having an influence on the strategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific,” Marles said in The Hague.
“And as we seek to focus on the Indo-Pacific, we really need to have an eye on what’s occurring here.”
