If it were easy or doable, the United States Navy would have done it by now. He wants a sacrificial lamb for the justification of a ground assault.

Rule 10 Submission Statement: Donald Trump is pissed that NATO saw through his thinly veiled bullshit.

Just being honest – the United States doesn't need NATO navies to help them reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States Navy is the best in the world. If it was easy or doable, they would have already done it already. The reason it's still effectively closed is because it was never a question of naval power – it's about the IRGC missile batteries dug into the mountains along the Iranian shore. To solve that equation, you need ground forces.

What Trump really wanted (and why NATO told him to pound sand) is for one of them to be dumb enough to sail their ship in there and get sunk. He wanted to be able to rebrand the war in Iran from being an illegal war of aggression meant to distract from the Epstein Files and help Israel achieve Greater Israel, to an attack on NATO. With a hypothetical news headline like "UK Type-45 Guided Missile Destroyer sunk, almost two hundred sailors dead or wounded" he could have pitched the ground assault to a wider envelope of countries; and given himself domestic political cover in the process.

The moment conventional ground troops are deployed onto Iranian soil, the United States has committed to that conflict for the long term. It'll be another decade long war. Trump knows he can't go in by himself without immense political backlash from citizens in the United States. He needs it to be a US-led coalition so he can sell it to the Americans as "we had no other choice".