Trump doubles down on damage U.S. strikes caused to Iran’s nuclear sites : NPR

President Trump speaks during a press conference at the NATO summit in Hague, the Netherlands on June 25.

Matthias Schrader / AP

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Matthias Schrader / AP

President Trump used a press conference at the NATO summit on Wednesday to expand its insistence that the United States is strongly damaged by Iran’s nuclear operation, despite a preliminary American intelligence report which said it was a more limited impact.

“It was very, very successful,” he told journalists. “He was called” obliteration “. No other soldier on earth could have done so.”

The press conference came while global watches to see if a ceasefire between Israel and Iran will continue. Citing this ceasefire, Trump compared his bombings to nuclear bombs that helped end the Second World War.

“It was so bad that they ended the war. It ended the war,” he said. “Someone said, in a way, that it was so devastating, in fact, if you look at Hiroshima, if you watch Nagasaki, you know, it also ended a war. It ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating.”

Trump went to the summit in the morning after announcing this ceasefire, which occurred a few days after the United States joined Israel’s attacks on the main Iranian nuclear installations. THE Evaluation of American -classified American information said that strikes have delivered the Tehran nuclear program “a few months”.

Trump said that he had not challenged the assessment of the initial report – but said that it was only an early overview of damage caused by American strikes out of three of the main Iranian nuclear installations, including a Fordo, built inside a mountain. He criticized the media to us, specifically appointing CNN and the New York Timesfor their relationship to this subject. He also quoted a declaration by the Israeli atomic energy commission, which indicated that the American strikes had “backed away the ability of Iran to develop nuclear weapons of many years”.

Like Trump, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has exclaimed the desk for their reports on the evaluation of American information, calling it “spin” aimed at harming the president. “They want to run it to try to make it look bad according to a leak,” said Hegseth.

“If you want to do an assessment of what happened, you would better get a big shovel and go very deeply, because Iran’s nuclear program is erased, and someone, somewhere tries to flee something to say:” Oh, with weak confidence, we think it may be moderate “,” he said.

Trump said that his reflection on NATO had changed at the top

At the top, NATO allies agreed to commit 5% of their GDP for defense expenses by 2035, compared to 2%. Trump has long since called for increasing its expenses, saying that the United States paid more than its fair share. The United States contributes around 3.5% of its GDP to NATO.

Before the summit, Trump told journalists that the new objective would not apply to us. “They are in Europe. We are not,” he said. And he also expressed a certain ambivalence in article 5, the mutual defense clause in the NATO treaty which says that an attack on a member is considered an attack on all, adding to the longtime fears among the European allies that Trump did not support them in the event of an attack.

During the press conference, Trump seemed to suggest that the NATO summit had changed his reflection.

“I came here because it was something that I am supposed to do, but I left a little different here,” he said. He added later: “I left here saying that these people really like their country. It is not a scam, and we are here to help them protect their country.”

Immediately before the press conference, Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump said they hadn’t discussed a ceasefire in the war of this country with Russia.

“I’m just, I wanted to know how he was going. He was very nice, in fact,” said Trump. “I took from the meeting that he would like to see the end. I think it’s the perfect time to end it. I’m going to talk to (Russian president) Vladimir Putin, see if we can end it.”

He later added that he had not yet finished putting an end to this war, in part because Putin is “difficult”.