The carnival manner and flippant bombast of President Trump are frequently highly entertaining and generally delight his devoted following of scores of millions but they don’t travel well. He is often in clangorous contrast to previous and long-established standards of American presidential decorum. The release of an AI depiction of Trump as a pope wearing a golden miter and with an upraised bejeweled right hand of pontifical authority has offended millions and caused millions to question not only the president’s good taste but even his sanity.

Mr. Trump’s intervention in the Canadian election, which undoubtedly was chiefly responsible for the defeat of the most pro-Trump main political party in any large country in the world except for the Republicans, has enraged the majority of the normally well-disposed Canadians and caused a good deal of consternation among countries accustomed to thinking of themselves as American allies. If the United States can so shabbily treat so reliable and unoffending an ally as Canada, where might the caprices and inadvertencies of this American president strike next?

It is also easy to forget that the stylistic infelicities of this president and his aptitude for spontaneous abrasions, also disguise extraordinary cunning. He has had remarkable success in the pursuit of objectives designed to revolutionize the strategic position of the United States. Mr. Trump has shifted the somewhat collegial leadership of what has been called the Free World for the last 75 years, although it has often included a good many dictatorships, to be incomparably the greatest power in the world, with many allies, but not many with whom he is prepared to share decision-making. 

President Trump has been confused by many for a Paleolithic conservative quasi-isolationist, on the Pat Buchanan model, but he is not an isolationist at all, but rather more of a unilateralist. He believes the United States is certainly strong enough to maintain the hallmarks of American national security policy enunciated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his State of the Union message in January 1941, when he warned against appeasement, and by his war message in December 1941, when he stated, of the attack on Pearl Harbor, “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again dangers us.” No country has dared to attack the U.S., so terrorists do that.

The American quest for alliances arose from Roosevelt’s accurate conviction that if there were not an American presence in Western Europe and East Asia there would be a constant danger of the entire Eurasian landmass falling into the hands of enemies of democracy and of America and that the future of democratic civilization would be at risk every generation.

The Western Alliance was created to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet communist threat. It has been a defensive alliance and has been the most successful alliance in history because it accomplished its objective without a shot being fired between the great protagonists, and the Union of Soviet Socialist republics, along with international communism, fell like a soufflé.

Mr. Trump is correct that many of America’s so-called allies have been picking its pocket commercially. There is no earthly justification for a $1 trillion trade deficit. Again, a strong case could be made for the theory that he should have taken on the designated offenders one or a few at a time in discrete diplomatic discussions rather than creating the impression of a complete upheaval in world trade patterns with astronomical tariff increases amidst a lot of Trump hyperbole about a “Day of Liberation.”

Yet approximately 130 countries are now in various stages of discussion with the United States about alteration to the trade status quo. It is not conceivable that any of those countries imagines that what is afoot will be an improvement in their own position. It is hard to find the basis for the Wall Street Journal’s dismissal of the Trump tariff policy as a “disaster.”

Foreign trade is only approximately 21 percent of the United States economy and only about 60 percent of that is imports and a great deal of them could be produced in the United States, albeit at a higher cost, or if necessary for the United States at prearranged prices in cheap-labor countries. It is going to be almost impossible for the United States to lose in the widespread trade discussions that are now underway and given the president’s undoubted talents as a negotiator, and the competence of the secretaries of the treasury and of commerce and the trade representative, Americans need not fear that the national commercial interests are going to be under-defended or mishandled.

The Communist Chinese began with angry words and strong measures but on reflection, have been waving olive branches around. It must be clear to them, as to every other informed observer, that the United States is causing the advanced countries of the world to choose between their commercial relations with China and with the United States. 

There is zero possibility that China can win this contest and all the usual arm-flapping worriers like the domestic anti-Trump media and the Financial Times and the Economist and others farther afield who were shrieking from the rooftops that Mr. Trump is bringing a disaster down on the United States and chaos on the world are gradually puzzling out that it is almost inevitable that the United States will gain from this initiative, however annoying it has been to countries that deserve better, (quite annoying, especially to unoffending Canada, which should never have been likened to Mexico).

Ukraine is another area where Mr. Trump is being goaded for simplistic overconfidence. The president exempted the Russians from tariff increases as part of his ambition for a general agreement with Russia that would end the Ukraine war and put Russian-American relations on a more positive footing and begin the enticement of that country back into the Western world where it belongs.

President Putin has overplayed his hand and substantially squandered the reservoir of goodwill that his country, if not he personally, enjoyed in the West. Russian writers and composers are much admired and those Russians who have been well disposed to the West from Peter the Great to Gorbachev and Yeltsin had been admired in the West.

By refusing to be reasonable in his terms for peace in Ukraine, Mr. Putin will have to face the likelihood of an escalation of the destructive potential of weapons advanced from the United States and the West generally to Ukraine. He cannot subdue Ukraine and with the human and economic losses that he is suffering in a demoralized and shrinking population in a country with a GDP smaller than Canada’s, Mr. Putin will find that Mr. Trump is able to bring him seriously back to the conference table quite soon.

President Trump’s methods are often disconcerting and in questionable taste, but he knows America’s strength and he knows how to exploit it.