W. J. Hennigan (<—gift link):

Thanks to Mr. Trump’s words and actions, the perceived value of acquiring nuclear weapons among allies appears to have quickly gone up, while the confidence in extended deterrence has gone down.

To once again quote Charles Krauthammer in 2016, this time at length:

We are entering a period of unprecedented threat to the international order that has prevailed under American leadership since 1945…

At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.

Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies who are here to dispatch tribute to their imperial master in Washington.

It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.

Predictable and predicted, as they say. Yet has any of this required even the slightest prophetic vision?