Trump and his team of America’s bluntest and briskest can look funny. Their demands are so bracingly direct; their threats so refreshingly frank. It’s almost as if they are mightily enjoying themselves as they rub in the facts of brute American power: We, the US, are the best-armed, richest mobster family in town, and the new Don is greedier than Scarface and crasser than Tony Soprano!

Europe – buy more overpriced LNG from us or we’ll wreck your economy even more! Canada – just get with the program, any program, really, or we’ll recall that we’d like a land bridge to Alaska, sort of the shape of your state (pardon, country, chuckle, chuckle)! Panama – remember we own you and everything you think you own is ours, too! Or we’ll drop in – literally, with the 82nd Airborne and AC-130 gunships – to remind you (again). And this time we won’t even name it “Operation Just Cause.” “Operation Just Because” will do fine. Denmark, listen up: You think Greenland is yours, but we know better. It’s really ours, and the only question is whether we do this the nice way or the hard way, because: Important Arctic and bad, bad China and Russia! Just take our word for it.

Note, all of these objects of Trump’s bullying are, officially, Washington’s “allies.” In Canada’s case, the rough handling alone has already been enough to, in effect, topple its prime minister: Hapless Justin Trudeau couldn’t save his skin even by a groveling trip to the new boss’s court at Mar-a-Lago. Regime change by trash talk; that’s a new one. And once again, that old lesson: it’s safer to be a respected adversary than a disrespected friend.

Trump’s gripes and demands, in any case, are extremely ill-founded. If the US were a country that had to argue its case, no one would even pay attention. Canada is a sovereign country; the preponderant majority of its 40 million people have no interest in joining the US as its 51st state. Period.

The whiny complaints that Trump and his team have made about bad treatment at the Panama Canal don’t withstand scrutiny, as the by-no-means unpatriotic Wall Street Journal has detailed in a podcast: No, the US is not “being........

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