NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told Newsmax on Wednesday there is "widespread support" among alliance members for President Donald Trump's campaign targeting Iran's nuclear and missile capabilities, even as some European leaders have voiced public criticism of the operation.
"NATO is not involved," Rutte told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "But obviously allies are basically, on a massive scale, supportive of what the president is doing and are also enabling what the U.S. is doing now in the region, taking out this nuclear capability of Iran and, of course, the missile capability."
Rutte said European allies have strong security concerns about Tehran, pointing to threats and assassination plots tied to the Iranian regime.
"Here in Europe, we know the impact of Iran and the negative impact they can have," he said. "Look at the assassination attempts in many NATO countries here in Europe, the Iranian diaspora. My own country [the Netherlands] being under constant threat from the regime in Tehran."
Despite criticism from some leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Rutte said NATO countries are providing "key enabling assistance" to the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran.
He also emphasized that NATO forces remain prepared to defend alliance territory as tensions escalate in the region.
"What we are doing at the moment as NATO is making sure that we, in a 360-degree way, defend every inch of NATO territory," Rutte said.
He pointed to a recent incident involving a missile threat toward Turkey, a NATO member and part of the alliance's collective defense system.
"You saw that this morning when news came in of a missile which was heading for Turkey and potentially impacting on U.S. interests in Turkey, taken out by NATO anti-missile systems," he said. "So, this is working. We are vigilant."
Rutte also addressed questions about NATO's mutual defense clause, known as Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.
"For good reasons, we always will stay very ambiguous about when Article 5 is triggered," Rutte said. "We keep it very ambiguous because we don't want to make our enemies, our adversaries, any wiser."
He added that if Article 5 were invoked, the alliance would make that clear immediately. Until then, he said the ambiguity is intentional, designed to force adversaries to think carefully about the risks of attacking NATO interests.
"Our supreme allied commander, our senior military, but also, of course, all our men and women in uniform, we make sure that we can defend and will defend every inch of territory of NATO," Rutte said. "And in the meantime, we are very much with our friends and partners in the Middle East because we see these indiscriminate attacks against the UAE, against Bahrain, against Oman, against Saudi Arabia, against Kuwait, against other countries in the region. And we are very much with them.
"I'm in constant contact with them because we want to make sure that whatever we can do for them to stay safe, we will help them with."
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