US President Donald Trump on Tuesday (March 17, 2026) slammed NATO allies for not supporting the American military operations against Iran and claimed it won’t take him long to secure the Strait of Hormuz for cargo traffic.
Trump also moved anti-ship cruise missiles closer to the Hormuz Strait, even as a key official in his administration resigned, protesting the US-Israel attacks on Iran without provocation.
In his latest outburst against NATO, Trump accused it of a lack of support for the US strikes on Iran, even as he claimed the American forces had “decimated” Tehran’s military capabilities and hence, needed no support from his Western allies.
Posting on Truth Social, the US President said the NATO nations had informed him about not joining the American Israeli military operations against Iran, calling Tehran a “terrorist regime.”
“The United States has been informed by most of our NATO ‘Allies’ that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran…despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot… be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon,” he wrote.
Claiming he was “not surprised” by the NATO response, he went on to raise the issue of “burden-sharing” tensions with the transatlantic military bloc.
“I always considered NATO… to be a one-way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,” he said.
His remarks came amidst an escalation in the military hostilities in the Gulf region after a joint US-Israel airstrike on Iran killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28.
European foreign ministers had met in Brussels over the weekend and decided not to expand their Red Sea-based naval mission focusing on the Ukraine war to the Gulf region, where Iran has imposed a blockade on “enemy” cargo movement in the Hormuz Strait, spiking oil prices to hit the roof.
Taking his rhetoric a notch higher, Trump also claimed sweeping success to the US forces against Iran, noting that the military operations had dismantled Tehran’s armed forces capabilities
“Fortunately, we have decimated Iran’s Military — Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their Anti-Aircraft and Radar is gone… and… their Leaders… are gone, never to threaten us… again!” He argued that the American military success rendered the NATO support irrelevant, but raised a long-standing disagreement on burden sharing among NATO members, with the US viewing its funding of the Western military bloc as unfair.
Trump was also sure that the Hormuz Strait would be opened for all cargo traffic, and that “it won’t be…too long” to achieve, even without NATO’s help.
“It won’t be, I don’t believe, too long. We’re knocking the hell out of the coast. It’s basically the coast and the water. And it won’t be too long,” Trump told reporters, without providing any timeframe to achieve success on the Hormuz Strait freedom of navigation.
Meanwhile, the US Central Command announced Tuesday (March 17) that it had employed multiple 5,000-pound deep penetrator munitions on hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz. “The Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles in these sites posed a risk to international shipping in the strait,” it said, justifying the use of deep penetrator munitions, also called bunker busters.
In 2021, the US Air Force successfully tested the GBU-72/B bunker buster bombs, a 30,000-pound class weapon with a 5,000-pound warhead. The bunker busters are used to target hardened and deeply buried infrastructure, and their use against Iran may be to take out their defence systems along the Hormuz Strait.
This came amidst a major setback for Trump’s military action against Iran after his administration’s National Counterterrorism Centre’s director Joe Kent, a former US Army Ranger, resigned in protest against the Iran war and accused Israel of orchestrating the American forces’ involvement in its decades-old conflict with the Islamic Republic.
Kent, who served 11 combat tours and whose wife was killed in the line of duty in Syria in 2019, wrote in his resignation letter to Trump that Iran had “posed no imminent threat” to the US. “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” his letter read.
“Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation,” Kent wrote.
He blamed the “high-ranking Israeli officials” and “influential members of the American media” for running a “misinformation campaign” that undermined Trump’s ‘America First’ platform and instigated the pro-war sentiments that led to the war with Iran.
“This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that, should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory,” Kent wrote. “This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
Kent, before joining the Trump administration, ran for Congress from Washington state in 2022 and 2024 as a Republican. He later became the Chief of Staff to National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard. Later, the US Senate confirmed his appointment as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in July 2025.