President Trump’s growing frustration with NATO members’ refusal to join U.S. efforts to either unblock or block the Strait of Hormuz has become a defining feature of the current crisis. European governments are indeed economically dependent on Gulf oil and LNG, but they also believe the United States initiated a war of choice without consultation, without a coherent diplomatic strategy, and without an accurate assessment of the risks such a conflict would pose to the global economy. The result is a widening gap between Washington and its allies at the very moment when alliance cohesion should be the United States’ greatest strategic asset. Instead, the President’s rhetoric — escalatory, improvisational, and often directed at allies themselves — has produced a backlash that makes NATO members even less willing to join the military campaign against Iran.

The sequence of events matters. The U.S. attacks on Iranian desalination plants and other infrastructure came on the heels of the President threatening to “invade” Greenland, a territory of a NATO ally. That episode, dismissed domestically as political theater, was interpreted in Europe as a signal that the President was willing to use coercive rhetoric against allied territory for domestic political effect. When combined with subsequent statements threatening to “destroy Iranian civilization” — language widely viewed by legal experts as describing a war crime — the credibility of U.S. strategic judgment came under renewed scrutiny. Allies were forced to ask whether joining a U.S.-led operation would implicate them in actions that violated international law or crossed long-standing legal and ethical boundaries.

The pattern did not stop there. The administration issued thinly veiled threats against........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)