LONDON — U.S. President Donald Trump says he’s strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO, ratcheting up his criticism of European allies and exposing a wider rift in the trans-Atlantic alliance — this time over the Iran war .

While Trump’s talk of a possible NATO pullout dates back years, the comments to The Telegraph newspaper in the U.K., published Wednesday, were among the clearest and most disparaging yet — suggesting that the fracture has deepened perhaps to a point of no return.