WASHINGTON—This was going to be Donald Trump’s “infrastructure week.” Trump’s administration was going to be a mediator between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The administration was going to stand in solidarity with the people of London.

No, no and no.

In another flurry of morning tweets, a president who struggles with impulse control once again undercut his team’s best-laid plans for normalcy — complicating rather than calming the Gulf clash, creating a quarrel with the United Kingdom out of thin air and doing more harm to the international credibility of his top lieutenants.

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One more time, Trump had followed the public statements of his senior officials by doing the opposite of what they had pledged to the world.

“Trump is a big baby who thinks the White House is like a candy store and he can do whatever he wants,” said Henri Barkey, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center think tank. “The guy does so many of these things in unsupervised moments. I think the American taxpayers should get together and spend money to hire a bunch of nurses or whatever to have 24-7 round-the-clock care for him so he doesn’t do stupid stuff.”

Trump, whose aides have long tried to curtail his tweeting, angered much of the U.K. on Sunday and Monday by insulting London’s mayor in the wake of a terror attack. On Tuesday, he created a new diplomatic mess.

Over three tweets before 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Trump took the Saudi side in a regional dispute between two U.S. allies. He did so less than 24 hours after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called for a mending of ties and said the U.S. would be happy to broker a solution.

“I certainly never had to face anything remotely like this from George W. Bush,” said Chase Untermeyer, Bush’s ambassador to Qatar from 2004 to 2007.

Untermeyer called Trump’s intervention “disappointing.”

“It’s clearly a neighbourhood spat, and our interests need to be protected by encouraging them to work it out rather than to take sides,” he said.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen cut off diplomatic ties with Qatar on Monday. Saudi Arabia closed its border with its tiny but wealthy neighbour of 2.5 million.

Their move, which they said was prompted by Qatari support for terrorism, put the U.S. between two partners. Saudi Arabia is more powerful, but Qatar hosts a U.S. airbase that is home to more than 10,000 military personnel.

Trump was given the royal treatment by the Saudis during his visit in May. As Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis attempted Tuesday to end the standoff, Trump not only hailed the Saudi decision but suggested he was responsible for it.

“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar - look!” he wrote.

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“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism.”

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, who studies the Gulf as a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said the Saudis might take Trump’s tweets as a “green light” for further escalation. Trump’s remarks, he said, suggest he was unable to see beyond Saudi flattery “to identify all the agendas that were trying to co-opt him.”

“They read him like a book. They gave him exactly what they wanted, with all the pomp and circumstance, treated him like a king, and it’s worked,” he said.

The Pentagon, State Department and even Sean Spicer, Trump’s own press secretary, tried to ignore the tweets and carry on as if they were serving a conventional president. The Pentagon praised Qatar for its “enduring commitment to regional security.”

But Spicer acknowledged that Trump’s tweets are “official statements,” and the damage was done. Trump killed any chance U.S. diplomats had “to try to mitigate the situation,” said Ilan Goldenberg, director of the Middle East security program at the Center for a New American Security.

“You’re going to call up your colleague in Saudi or the UAE or Egypt,” he said, “and say, ‘Hey guys, you know, we really need to find a way to get you guys together and talk to try to de-escalate.’ They’re going to look at him and say: ‘Why? The president just said we don’t have to do that.’”

Trump has repeatedly exposed his cabinet secretaries’ promises as hollow. Two weeks ago, he refused to make good on their assurances to NATO allies that he would publicly commit to the alliance’s policy of defending any member under attack — deleting a sentence from his speech at the last minute, Politico reported.

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