⛔️“Dire Straits” Edition

Having launched a war that promptly shut down one of the most important oil chokepoints on Earth, President Trump set out to do what comes naturally in moments of crisis: ask all the allies he’s spent the last year insulting to help fix it.

The pitch was simple: join a coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, protect global energy supplies, and maybe, just maybe, help the Trump declare victory in a war that currently can’t end because all the oil is stuck.

The response from much of the world was also simple: kindly, f*** off.

Germany declined. Italy declined. Japan declined. The European Union collectively took a look and said, in diplomatic language, “this is not our war,” which loosely translates to: you broke it, you bought it.

Undeterred, Trump began grading allies like a disappointed teacher. France was apparently “8 out of 10” on willingness, though in practice that turned out to be closer to a polite shrug. The U.K. drafted a plan, shared it with some countries but not others, and everyone involved agreed on one thing: no one quite knew what the plan was.

Behind the scenes, diplomats described the effort with the kind of clarity usually reserved for disaster movies: “It’s a mess.”

Meanwhile, Trump expressed shock—shock—that countries he had recently hit with tariffs, threatened, or publicly berated were not racing to deploy their navies on his behalf. He warned that this lack of enthusiasm could be “very bad” for NATO, which is one way of saying: please help me fix the problem I created, or I will throw another ketchup-splattering tantrum.

And so the coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz currently exists in the same place as the war’s exit strategy: vaguely described, widely doubted, and still waiting for someone else to show up and make it work.

Graeme MacKay - cagle.com/mackay

Rob Rogers - Tinyview Comics and Andrews McMeel

Robert Ariail - Andrews McMeel

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Jeff Koterba - cagle.com/koterba

Joel Pett - Tribune Content Agency

Michael Ramirez - Creators

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Nick Anderson - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

For 80 years, the United States painstakingly built a global system to prevent war, grow the economy, and keep itself on top—the “rules-based-order”—alliances, trade rules, institutions, the whole “let’s not have another world war” package.

Donald Trump has taken a look at this historically successful arrangement and decided, essentially: what if we just… burned it all down?

So out go the climate agreements, the health organizations, the trade rules, defense alliances, and in comes a bold new strategy best described as “nineteenth-century vibes,” where big countries shove smaller ones around and hope nothing spirals out of control (spoiler alert: it does).

The pitch is that America will be stronger without all these pesky rules. The reality is that the U.S. is trading a system it designed—and dominated—for a free-for-all where other powers are more than happy to step in.

In short: after spending decades building the operating system of the modern world, the United States is now rage-quitting its own software and now throwing a tantrum because things might crash.