President Obama is doing Europe no favor by taking its side against an American president-elect who even Hillary Clinton reckons ought to be given a chance to lead. Yet ahead of his visit to Athens and Berlin this week, Mr. Obama gave to a Greek newspaper an interview that the Bloomberg News characterizes as a “staunch defense of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization amid lingering doubts about the commitment of his successor Donald Trump to maintaining ties between the U.S. and its closest allies.”

It warms the cockles of irony to hear this kind of talk from a tribune of the liberal camp that, at the height of the Cold War, set down as an act of madness and escalation President Reagan’s deployment in Europe of cruise and Pershing missiles. They were all too eager for formal articles of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Now a generation and a half later, the president who picked up their cause is seeking to palm off on a noble public the idea that theirs is the ideology that’s for taking a firm stand in Europe.

Good luck with that claim. The thing for Europeans to mark is that it was Donald Trump who, in this election, campaigned for reversing the decline in the American defense budget. A robust American military, fully manned, armed, and equipped, is by far the best guarantor of peace, in Europe and Asia. Let the Europeans wrestle with the fact that Mr. Trump was lofted to the presidency by a vote in the very industrial American heartland that, when Europe was last in trouble, arose to become known as the Arsenal of Democracy.

Millions of Americans are disappointed in the Europe that was our treaty partner against Soviet communism. Why was Germany a party to the appeasement of the Iranian regime? Why was Israel not a party to those talks? There are those of us who have heard from the European chancelleries just one too many scoldings of Israel and one too many apologies for the Palestinian Arabs. What possible interest could America have in a European Union that stands for statism and dirigisme and standing athwart the one member, Britain, that holds out for liberal principles?

Even the Europeans seem to be having their doubts about the EU, we see from the Japanese global business newspaper, the London Financial Times. “France and UK snub emergency Brussels talks to discuss Trump,” crows its page one headline. The snub of a “contentious EU emergency meeting to align the bloc’s approach to Donald Trump’s election,” the FT says, exposes “rifts in Europe” over the American election. The meeting was, the FT says, “hailed by diplomats as a chance to ‘send a signal of what the EU expects’ from Mr. Trump,” but fell into disarray after Britain and France declined to attend.

British officials were quoted by the FT as suggesting the meeting conveyed a sense of panic and Hungary’s foreign minister as labeling some leaders “hysterical.” The Europeans were also kerflustered over the fact that Mr. Trump met over the weekend with the ex-head of the United Kingdom Independence Party, Nigel Farage. The FT quotes a former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, as harrumphing via Twitter: “If Trump wanted to look statesmanlike to Europe, receiving Farage was probably the worst thing he could [do].”

That’s the word from Sweden, which stood neutral during both the Second World and Cold wars and where, in some precincts, Jews are not free to walk down the street. Our own opinion is that the worst thing the Europeans could do is underestimate the American people or gainsay the decision we made November 8. Even Mr. Obama, in his interview with the Greek paper, Kathimerini, said that on both sides of the Atlantic “we face the task of ensuring that our political institutions and economic policies are responsive to our people, many of whom feel that they have been hurt by globalization and trade.”