Untangle this knot. Country A is approaching a deadline it has set to decide whether to impose aluminum and steel tariffs on Trading Bloc B, which is being urged to take a hardline against Country A by Newspaper C, which is published in Country D but owned by the premier financial publishing house in Country E, which is in its own negotiations for a bilateral deal with Country A, as is Country D, which is in the midst of quitting Tariff Union B.

Got it? If so, you’ll be able to decipher the editorial in the London Financial Times urging a hardline against the United States by the European Union, which Britain is trying to quit. God bless them all, we say, but the only one who seems to have his country’s interests clear is freely elected President T. Also clear to him is the illogic of Europe forsaking its relations with America in service to articles of appeasement with the Iranian camarilla.

That is also clear to — we are delighted to discover in our email this morning — one the finest journalists ever to pass through the Sun newsroom, James Kirchick of the Brookings Institution. He’s no apologist for Mr. Trump. A conservative, he’s been an assiduous critic of the President. Yet his latest column warns that the “constant, unfounded assertions as to the death of the transatlantic relationship” could well become “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

What a level head compared to, say, the New York Times. The Gray Lady issued an editorial the other day characterizing the Trump administration’s European policy as “An Indecent Disrespect.” It fretted about a “rare fury in Europe.” Rare? They should have been in Brussels back in the 1980s, when the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, was complaining about America’s “savage” economy. Or in Berlin during the George W. Bush presidency.

In any event, Mr. Kirchick reckons that Mr. Trump has taken “many steps to rankle Europeans.” He lists not only the Paris climate shenanigans and the tariffs but also our recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Jerusalem to which the Jews who managed to escape Europe rallied. It was Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the articles of appeasement with Iran, though, that Mr. Kirchick reckons is leading many to write off the transatlantic relationship as dead.

A marvelous list of panicky pieces is cited by Mr. Kirchick. Our favorite is the one by two former aides to President Obama who in the New York Times, as Mr. Kirchick sums it up, “floated the idea of European governments recalling their ambassadors from Washington and expelling American diplomats from their own capitals.” What a perfect distillation of the Democrats’ foreign policy in the Age of Trump — siding with Europe (and Iran) against America.

“Declaring the bond between America and Europe kaput exaggerates both the severity and suddenness of the current predicament,” says Mr. Kirchik. He grasps that our election was only partly about Europe. There was, we would note, a sense that the solicitousness of President Obama toward the Europeans (how they cheered him at Berlin) contrasted with the Democrats’ solicitousness toward, say, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Mr. Kirchick’s view is that it is “far too soon to declare something so extensive and enduring as America’s seven-decade-long political, economic, strategic and military relationship with Europe dead just because of one man’s election.” He describes as a “false impression” the notion that transatlantic relations were “simply peachy” until Mr. Trump. Remember the “pivot” to Asia that everyone was so all-fired hot about during the Obama years.

Which brings us back to President Trump’s imminent decision in respect of the tariffs on steel and aluminum. These columns thrill to the critique on trade being articulated by, among others, Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek. The cost of tariffs, like that of taxes, is born by Americans. Net-net, though, our guess is that Mr. Trump’s policies will be less of a burden than those of the Democrats. That’s a knot the European press has yet to untangle.