During the Cold War, the US was the pre-eminent Western power. It forged an inter-connected set of formal and informal alliances to confront and eventually defeat the totalitarian Soviet Empire. An essential element of the US-led West’s victory was that, in the main, most of the US’s friends and allies wanted to be our friends and allies. Contrariwise, though the leadership of many of the countries in the Soviet Union’s imperial network may have cooperated with their Soviet overlords, most of the people of those nations did not want to be part of a Soviet Union-dominated, freedom-denying network. Ultimately the West’s Cold War victory was founded on its imperfect and imperfectly expressed commitment to liberty over the Soviet Empire’s constant, though too often lately recognized, commitment to domination and control.

Now the US is on the threshold of squandering that hard-fought victory by alienating our friends and Allies. Worst of all, we stand poised to become the most useless of allies – an unreliable one.

President Trump sprinkles many of his discourses on US relations with other powers in terms of victimhood. He complains that the US has been taken advantage of by others, that we have been played for suckers, that we have rescued nations from oppression, restored prosperity to Europe and other regions, and gotten no thanks for our many great and decent deeds. This ahistorical litany of mistreatment is disconnected from reality in at least two ways: 1. no other........

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