If the ability to stand apart from the crowd is one mark of a leader, President Trump certainly burnished his brand in respect of Europe. That’s what we take from the fact that America declined at Sicily to join in the full final communiqué of what is, chimerically, called the Group of Seven. After the fray at Taormina, it may well be called Group of Six — Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Italy. They all stood with President Obama in favor of the Paris Accord on climate.

Mr. Trump reserved judgment, saying, in a telegram on his Twitter account, that he’d make a final decision next week. On verra. It has been clear for months that Mr. Trump was being given the bum’s rush on climate. The Bloomberg-Washington Post dispatch quoted an aide of the Union of Concerned Scientists as carping that Mr. Trump was in “stark isolation.” Chancellor Merkel, ordinarily an admirable figure, pronounced Mr. Trump’s refusal to be buffaloed “difficult, or rather very unsatisfactory.”

The outcry among the bien pensant leaders reminds us of the uproar at the final debate in our presidential election, the one where Mr. Trump declined to declare in advance that he would accept the result of the election. Secretary of State Clinton called his refusal “horrifying,” and there was speculation that the editorial board of the New York Times would require medication. In the event, it was Mrs. Clinton who, having lost the election, refused to accept the result and announced the resistance.

Our own estimate is that Americans like to see in their president a person prepared to stand apart. Mr. Trump also did that in respect of NATO in the alliance’s summit at Brussels. Mr. Trump pointedly marked the fact that most of the treaty’s members had failed to live up to their commitments on defense spending. A “troubling debut” is how the London Financial Times described it in an editorial rushed out this morning, before the pink-sheet’s editors had taken the time to address its own contradictions.

On the one hand they complained that Mr. Trump sees NATO not as a “group of nations bound by common causes and values” but rather as “largely a transactional relationship.” It reckons his “concern” is “money and past dues,” noting that he “scolded the other members for ‘chronic underfunding’ of the organization,” which, it noted he said, is “not fair to the people and taxpayers of the U.S.” Yet in the next sentence, the Financial Times admits that “the president has a point.”

Indeed. The FT itself notes that a number of NATO countries, including France and Germany, fail to meet the commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense. It concedes that President Trump is not the only one irked by this (it cites Secretary of Defense Gates). Lest anyone think the FT has sympathy for the American forgotten man, in the next sentence, the pink sheet windles yet again by trying to palm off on its readers the claim that “NATO is not an organization of freeloaders and deadbeats.”

Mr. Trump has one thing going for him in such situations. He laid down a clear line in the election that raised him to office. He did that on climate. He did that on NATO. Why would anyone suppose that those positions were not among the reasons so many states sent to the electoral college such a high proportion of delegates pledged to Mr. Trump? The danger for Mr. Trump is not that he will stand apart but that he will cave (as he did, at least so far, in respect of Jerusalem). The truth is that the only way to lead is to stand apart.