What did Donald Trump do today?

He said the catastrophic mess he's made of his Iran war was for other countries to clean up.

From its beginning nearly a month ago, Trump has been unable to stick to a single story about his war on Iran for more than a few seconds. In consecutive sentences, he might switch from the war lasting months to being already over. He's said the war was fought to embolden the Iranian people to overthrow the ruling regime, then spoken warmly of that same regime's commitment to peace as he promises to launch attacks against electrical grids that will kill civilians. 

Incredibly, Trump hasn't even been able to commit to how he feels about Iran punching back: for the most part he seems completely incapable of understanding that it's even possible, but at times he's come right out and endorsed Iranian counterattacks against US allies.

But Trump spent most of today hammering what may be the first consistent talking point of the entire Iran war: the war he launched without consulting allies isn't his fault, and dealing with the consequences of his failure isn't his problem.

Speaking at a Saudi-sponsored conference in Miami, Trump tried once again to shift blame to NATO, the United States' most important military alliance, whose members he deliberately deceived about his attack plans:

NATO made a terrible mistake when they wouldn't send a small amount of military armament, when they wouldn't just even acknowledge what we were doing for the world and taking on Iran. They just weren't there. Why would we be there for them if they're not there for us? They weren't there for us. That sounds ‌like a breaking story? Yes, sir. Is that breaking news? I think we just have breaking news, but that's the fact. I've been saying that. Why would we be there for them if they're not there for us? They weren't there for us. …We would have always been there for them, but now, based on their actions, I guess we don't have to be, do we?

Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a separate statement, connected the dots. He conceded that Iran was likely to emerge strong enough from the war to do something it had never dared to do before, control the Strait of Hormuz and force other nations to pay multi-million dollar tributes to it. But Rubio insisted that it was "the world" that needed to "have a plan" for how to deal with that, and not Trump.

Blaming the rest of the world, and the United States' most essential military allies above all, is yet another turn in Trump's war that has worked to the advantage of the Putin regime in Russia. Giving Iran a stranglehold on oil markets drove up prices for Russian oil, and Trump's decision to cancel sanctions on Russia made it even easier to sell. The war has caused a sharp drawdown in critical military equipment like interceptors, making the United States less able to project force elsewhere. And Trump's attempts to destroy the United States' relationship with the rest of NATO is a success beyond all measure for Putin, the leader of the state it was created to contain. 

Why does this matter?

• The safety of Americans and the world at large is more important than Donald Trump's ego. 

• Being completely incapable of admitting mistakes is a serious mental disorder and a particularly terrible one to have in a president who is thinking about a ground invasion of a country six times bigger than Afghanistan. 

• Most Americans don't like to think of themselves or their nation as a spoiled child who won't clean up after itself.