Typically, a president would assemble an international coalition of the willing, so to speak, before the outset of a fraught military campaign against a hostile adversary, not after. That is not this president’s style. But for all his willingness to test the staid parameters of conventional wisdom in Washington, Donald Trump seems to be learning that gratuitously antagonizing your allies can invite undesirable consequences.

As is his habit, the president is soliciting America’s allies’ assistance in opening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic in the most unnecessarily aggressive way possible.

“We have a thing called NATO,” Trump told the Financial Times ...

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