President Trump Is a Wrecking Ball. And He’s Only Getting Started.

Mr. Calabresi, an Opinion editor at large, wrote from Munich.

Behind the high-profile speeches about shared values and strategic interests at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, a different, more profit-oriented set of conversations was taking place. At breakfast, a German official advised a French defense contractor on how to get into business with the military in Berlin. At lunch, a senior executive for a major Asian arms manufacturer ticked off for his table mate the advantages his company has over European and American competitors. In the crowded halls of the Bayerischer Hof hotel, which hosted the conference, American defense contractors were everywhere, networking in search of deals.

A bristling military buildup is gaining momentum in Europe and everyone is trying to get a piece of the action. It’s a race for real money — Germany alone plans to double its military spending by 2029 to as much as $190 billion per year.

But European rearmament is more than a business story. Something bigger is underway. Whatever the difference, if any, between the good cop routine delivered at Munich this year by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the bad cop version by Vice President JD Vance at the event last year, the effect of American policy is the same: The world is changing, for real, and the primary driver of that change is Donald Trump.

It took a long time for many Americans to realize just how disruptive Mr. Trump is, but by now it is painfully obvious. The United States is in many ways unrecognizable from what it was 10 years ago when he was first elected. During his first term, Mr. Trump latched onto real, longstanding problems like a broken immigration system, deindustrialization and increasing economic inequality that politicians on the left and right had identified but failed to fix. After failing to fix them himself, Mr. Trump’s second-term answer has been an increasingly brazen attack on the rule of law, civil liberties and constraints on the presidency.

Now, as is often the case with second-term presidents, Mr. Trump is turning his attention abroad. He is determined, he says, to tackle old problems like China’s trade cheating, the Iranian nuclear program and countries that don’t spend enough on their militaries. The outlines of Mr. Trump’s international disruption are already clear: the collapse of multilateralism, a shift away from the liberal democratic values established after World War II and an embrace of a might-makes-right approach to national security. Those may sound like abstractions, but the changes they engender are just as likely to be felt on the streets of America as Mr. Trump’s domestic upheavals.

For all the complaints about the Trump administration at Munich — and there were plenty — even Democrats admitted behind the scenes that some good is coming of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy approach. After years of trying, America will not only get a fairer division of the costs of NATO from Europe’s rearmament, but a more dynamic defense industry for the alliance that can innovate at a time when the nature of war is changing fast.

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