With President Trump set to meet in Beijing this week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the U.S. war with Iran still unsettled, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified before Congress on Tuesday and faced questions about the planning, cost, efficacy and ultimate goals of the U.S. military action in Iran. Also contributing to the backdrop was the administration’s criticism of U.S. allies and NATO members for failing to help open the Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely shut down as a result of the war.
Beginning with a question about Hegseth’s own combat experience in Afghanistan, and whether allies had been helpful to U.S. forces there, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) proceeded to argue for a new path, urging the Defense Secretary to give greater support to Ukraine and to “our treaty” allies, and to recognize that this is a “moment when Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are coming closer together.”
Coons: Our president said that we never asked for and never received anything from our NATO allies. Was that your experience in Afghanistan?
Hegseth: I’ve written extensively about that, and the vast majority of my experience was frustration with the limits of what those troops… pic.twitter.com/R0kjXprjku
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026
Despite Hegseth’s expressed “frustration with the limits” of what allied troops in Afghanistan “were able to do” in combat because of rules of engagement, Coons emphasized that “about a third of all the combat casualties in our war in Afghanistan were our NATO partners and allies,” making a point that, contrary to assertions by President Trump, NATO allies have made sacrifices and answered the call when the U.S. has asked them to.
[NOTE: Coons quoted Trump as saying the U.S. “never asked for and never received anything from our NATO allies.”]
Coons told Hegseth: “At a moment when Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are coming closer together and delivering a bedeviling lethality for this ongoing war in Iran, for which we don’t have a clear strategy or clear answers, our better strategy would be to partner more closely with Ukraine, dig in deeper with our real values-based allies, our treaty allies, in the Western Pacific and in Europe, and together find a path out of this, rather than berating them and bullying them for not coming along in a war they were not consulted about or briefed on before it began.”
[NOTE: The link to Ukraine Coons references is not purely values-based, but also military, as Ukraine has gained vast experience fighting against the Iranian-designed Shahed drone, which is Russia’s most-used weapon. The China-Iran link Coons mentions is multifaceted, with a key component being that China is the world’s largest importer of Iranian oil, buying nearly 80% of Iranian production.]