US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has chastised Britain once again for its failure to support America’s offensive in Iran.<\/p>\n
In a damning written statement to Congress, Mr Hegseth said allies’ refusal to join in was “unconscionable” – and warned: “We will remember.”<\/p>\n
He then threatened “consequences” would follow for Nato members which “do not step up”.<\/p>\n
Mr Hegseth said Nato had become “beset by free-riding” in the wake of the Cold War, and called on allies to “step up and make good on their commitments to our collective defence”.<\/p>\n
“Not all allies have gotten the message, and where they do not step up, there will be consequences,” he said.<\/p>\n
“In recent weeks, for instance, far too many of our Nato allies showed that they could not be relied upon to support our nation\u2019s operations against Iran – despite the fact that they themselves are far more reliant on Middle East energy markets than we are, and also share our interest in denying Iran a nuclear weapons and otherwise degrading Iran\u2019s power projection capabilities.<\/p>\n
“This is unconscionable – and we will remember.”<\/p>\n
Mr Hegseth then notably left Britain and France off a list of “model allies” which included Israel, South Korea, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states.<\/p>\n
He has previously dismissed Anglo-French efforts to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz once the war ends as “silly”.<\/p>\n
He continued: “Americans want partners – not dependencies. And, thanks to President Trump’s visionary leadership, that is what we are building. Real partnerships and alliances based on hard power.<\/p>\n
“Our allies aren\u2019t powerless. They are nations capable of doing far more for themselves than they have. It’s time they stood up, and some of them are.”<\/p>\n
More to follow…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has chastised Britain once again for its failure to support America’s offensive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,1815,24,94,18,14,20,1827,5552,1574,462,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-35871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-defence","10":"tag-iran","11":"tag-keir-starmer","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-uk-politics","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-us-news","17":"tag-us-politics","18":"tag-war","19":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116570735426381480","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}