Countries Ditch NATO Summit After Trump Decision to Bomb Iran

Key allies are shunning the U.S. after it bombed Iranian nuclear sites with Israel.

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Monday both announced their intentions to skip the upcoming NATO summit at the Hague. South Korean sources confirmed that Jae-myung’s decision was in part due to Trump’s attack on Iran, while the Japanese prime minister has cited “various circumstances.”

“Despite the pile of issues to deal with on the home front, the administration had seriously considered attending this year’s NATO summit,” South Korea’s presidential office told reporters on Sunday. “However, considering various pending national issues and uncertainty in the Middle East, the president has decided not to attend the summit.”

Japan’s leader has attended every NATO summit since 2022, making this a significant snub.

This move shows that the U.S. is growing increasingly isolated due to its support of Israel and its unprovoked aggression towards Iran. This escalation shows our allies that the U.S. is no longer as committed to the traditional principles and customs of the Western world.

Japan and South Korea aren’t the only ones. Trump’s demands for increased NATO defense spending and his sweeping retaliatory tariffs have caused other traditional European allies like Britain, France, and Canada to draw closer together and work without the United States. It’s clear that U.S. diplomatic power is eroding on a worldwide scale with each passing day, as our leadership is viewed as unserious and unreliable.

A judge in Tennessee eviscerated the government’s case for keeping Kilmar Abrego Garcia detained ahead of his trial for criminal charges alleging that he transported undocumented immigrants around the country.

Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes in Nashville said Sunday that “the government failed to prove” that Abrego Garcia had endangered any minor victim, a claim not included in the official charges but that was used to justify his ongoing detention.

In a 51-page ruling, Holmes explained that not only had the government’s evidence included “double hearsay” but that some of it also defied logic.

Holmes wrote that Special Agent Peter Joseph of ICE Homeland Security Investigations had presented “hearsay statements of cooperating witnesses” to establish that Abrego Garcia had endangered minors, including one cooperator who was “a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation” who’d cut a deal for early release from the government. Testimony from a second cooperator was similarly unreliable because “his requested release from jail and delay of another deportation depends on providing information the government finds useful.”

The government had not been able to prove that Abrego Garcia transported immigrant minors, but both male cooperators had claimed that he had endangered his own children.

“Both male cooperators stated that, other than three or four trips total without his children, Abrego typically took his children with him during the alleged smuggling trips from Maryland to Houston and back, some 2,900 miles round-trip, as often as three or four times per week,” Holmes wrote.

“The sheer number of hours that would be required to maintain this schedule, which would consistently be more than 120 hours per week of driving time, approach physical impossibility. For that additional reason, the Court finds that the statements of the first and second male cooperators are not reliable to establish that this case ‘involves a minor victim.’

“There is no dispute the offenses of which Abrego is charged are not crimes against children and the involvement of a minor child is not an element of the charged offenses,” Holmes wrote, disputing the government’s claim that Abrego Garcia’s alleged criminal activity technically “involves minor victims.”

Holmes scheduled another hearing for Wednesday to discuss the conditions of Abrego Garcia’s release, but the government is expected to detain him upon release. The government has already filed a motion to appeal Holmes’s decision and asked her to stay her order, arguing without evidence that Abrego Garcia could be deported in the future.

Donald Trump is kicking Representative Thomas Massie out of the MAGA tent for daring to object to war with Iran.

“GET THIS ‘BUM’ OUT OF OFFICE, ASAP!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday, re-sharing a lengthy screed he had posted about Massie the day before.

Trump had written that “Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky is not MAGA, even though he likes to say he is.” “Actually, MAGA doesn’t want him, doesn’t know him, and doesn’t respect him. He is a negative force who almost always Votes ‘NO,’ no matter how good something may be,” the far-right leader posted on Truth Social Sunday.

The sudden rift followed accusations by Massie that war with Iran was “not constitutional.” Massie also chastised House Speaker Mike Johnson for practically handing over Congress’s sole authority to declare war to the White House, questioning online why the leading Republican lawmaker did not “call us back from vacation to vote on military action if there was a serious threat to our country.”

Massie offered Trump a full-throated endorsement in the 2024 race on the basis that he would prevent “needless wars abroad.”

“He’s a simple minded ‘grandstander’ who thinks it’s good politics for Iran to have the highest level Nuclear weapon, while at the same time yelling ‘DEATH TO AMERICA’ at every chance they get,” Trump continued in his brutal laceration of Massie on Sunday. “We had a spectacular military success yesterday, taking the ‘bomb’ right out of their hands (and they would use it if they could!) but, as usual, and despite all of the praise and accolades received, this ‘lightweight’ Congressman is against what was so brilliantly achieved last night in Iran.”

But Trump’s framing defies the reality of Iran’s nuclear program. For months, American intelligence officials have asserted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” In a June report, the Congressional Research Service underscored that “Tehran has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons at some point, but has halted its nuclear weapons program and has not mastered all of the necessary technologies for building such weapons.”

Instead, Iran has argued that it is seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East is presumed to be Israel, which will not confirm or deny possessing what the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates are approximately 90 nuclear weapons.

But American intel is apparently disposable to the Republican president. Instead—just as his campaign had promised prior to the election—loyalty remains his chief internal interest. In his Truth Social post, Trump attempted to tear Massie down as “weak, ineffective,” and “disrespectful to our great military, and all that they stand for.”

“Massie should drop his fake act and start putting America First, but he doesn’t know how to get there—he doesn’t have a clue!” the president continued, calling on Massie to advance the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that would gut Medicaid, make the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer, increase the deficit by nearly $2 trillion over the next four years, and raise it much more in the years after that, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate. Massie was one of two Republican lawmakers to vote against it last month.

“MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump added, threatening to unseat Massie in the midterms. “I’ll be out in Kentucky campaigning really hard.”

By the end of the day, Trump and his extraordinarily well-funded political machine had formed a super PAC aimed at kicking Massie out of national politics for good.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday condemned Israel and U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.

Iran sent Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to Moscow on Monday to lobby Putin for more support against Israel’s act of war. 

“The absolutely unprovoked aggression against Iran has no basis and no justification,” Putin said to Araghchi during the meeting. “We have long-standing, good, reliable relations with Iran. 

Russia and Iran are old allies. And while Putin has offered mediation and rhetorical reassurance, he has stopped short of fully joining the war or offering more concrete assistance, likely due to fear of further alienating President Trump and the U.S. in the midst of his own war on Ukraine.

On Sunday, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a top Putin ally, noted in a series of X posts that “a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.” This news, if true, could have cataclysmic implications. 

Iran is reportedly still weighing retaliation options against Israel and the United States. And how much actual support Russia can and will provide remains to be seen.  

Donald Trump’s major edge, per his administration, is that he’s not “dumb” like our other presidents.

Speaking with NBC News’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Vice President turned war salesman JD Vance attempted to sway Americans on the America’s sudden involvement in attacking Iran by asking for more blind faith in its most powerful convicted fraudster.

“I simply empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” Vance said. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

The war, Vance continued, “is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing.”

“We’ve got in, we’ve done the job of setting their nuclear program back,” he said. “We’re going to now work to permanently dismantle that nuclear program over the coming years, and that is what the president has set out to do. Simple principle: Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

For the record: The majority of Americans do not want to be at war with Iran. Just last year, that lot would have likely included the vice president.

Vance is possibly the most unlikely person to pitch the war effort. In 2023, the Ohio lawmaker spoke effusively about Trump’s aversion to global conflict during his first presidential term, and endorsed Trump in the 2024 race under the pretense that the MAGA leader wasn’t “starting any wars.”

Vance’s own sales pitch comes with a heaping dose of delusion: “We’re not at war,” he told NBC. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”

Iran has argued that it is seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East is presumed to be Israel, which will not confirm or deny possessing what the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates are approximately 90 nuclear weapons.

War with Iran goes against the recent advice of America’s intelligence officials. Speaking with lawmakers in March, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard left no room for doubt: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,” she said. In a June report, the Congressional Research Service underscored that “Tehran has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons at some point, but has halted its nuclear weapons program and has not mastered all of the necessary technologies for building such weapons.”

But Trump flagrantly disregarded his own appointee’s intel ahead of the attack.

“I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters on Tuesday on Air Force One. “I think they were very close to having one.”

Meanwhile, Trump has tapped Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old fan with no national security experience, to run America’s counterterrorism hub, along with an $18 million grant program to combat extremism, ProPublica reported.