Even when a moment designed to affirm some of America’s basic principles is dangled before him, President Donald Trump has a way of batting it aside. In Brussels on Thursday, as he stood at a rostrum at a ceremony in front of the new NATO headquarters, Trump had, to his left, a mangled girder from the World Trade Center; to his right, broken slabs of the Berlin Wall, both of which were being dedicated as memorials; and, behind him, the leaders of the twenty-seven other countries in the alliance. One of them, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had just delivered remarks that served as a reminder that, until she was thirty-five years old, she had lived behind that wall, and had been part of the civic movement that peacefully reunified Germany. Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO, who had introduced Merkel, noted that she had been among the crowds filling the streets of East Berlin on the night the Wall came down. A few minutes later, when Stoltenberg introduced Trump, he summoned a personal connection for him, too, noting that the 9/11 terrorists “struck at the heart of your own home town, New York.” That attack marked the only time that NATO has invoked Article 5 of its charter, the mutual-defense provision, which the new headquarters’ 9/11 memorial was also supposed to commemorate. In what may have been an attempt at Trump-friendly sloganeering, Stoltenberg summed up Article 5 by declaring, gamely, “All for one, and one for all!” But Trump had come to praise other ideals, other lands, and other leaders.

He had just come from Saudi Arabia, Trump told the NATO leaders, in a brief speech. “There, I spent much time with King Salman, a wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly.” That meeting had been “historic,” Trump said. The “leaders of the Middle East” had promised him that they would “stop funding the radical ideology that leads to this horrible terrorism all over the globe.” So that should take care of the problem. He did not define “radical ideology,” or acknowledge that he was praising a monarch in what seemed to be an attempt to put the assembled elected leaders of democracies to shame. Trump’s world view seems to combine a distaste for Islam with a predilection for monarchs of any background—for anyone with a decent palace, really. In viewing his world travels, that mixture can be confusing, but it should not be mistaken for a sign of budding tolerance. (As has been widely noted, Trump once called Brussels a “hellhole,” on account of its large number of immigrants—many of whom came from countries whose repressive leaders had joined him at the summit in Riyadh. He has said similar things about Paris: “No one wants to go to Paris anymore.” When Trump was in Riyadh, though, he couldn’t stop talking about how fancy the new buildings were.) He did express his sympathy to Prime Minister Theresa May, of the United Kingdom, who was also in attendance, for the Manchester attack (“terrible thing”), and called for a moment of silence to honor the dead. But he quickly moved to chastising the leaders for not having taken seriously enough the need for building walls, rather than taking them down.

“Terrorism must be stopped in its tracks, or the horror you saw in Manchester and so many other places will continue forever,” Trump said. “You have thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries and spreading throughout, and in many cases we have no idea who they are.” He seemed to suggest that the “tracks” that terrorism was on were the same paths that refugees followed, or perhaps just the roads that ran through the deliberately unpoliced borders of the European Union. “We must be tough. We must be strong. And we must be vigilant,” he continued. The other leaders watched him, with whatever sort of vigilance each thought necessary, as he went on to tell them that they needed to spend more money on defense, and offered his explanation for why.

“The NATO of the future must include a great focus on terrorism and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and on NATO’s eastern and southern borders. These grave security concerns are the same reason that I have been very, very direct with Secretary Stoltenberg and members of the Alliance in saying that NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations.” (It is worth noting that “immigration,” without any qualifying phrase, is on Trump’s list of “grave security concerns,” which raises the question of where and when he thinks that immigration, including to America, makes a country stronger.) Twenty-three NATO countries were not meeting the alliance’s target of spending at least two per cent of their G.D.P. on defense, he said, while the United States was exceeding that number. “This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States,” Trump said. The idea that other things might be unfair to the American people—that, for example, the level of defense spending might be too high at a time when the Trump Administration’s budget is cutting money meant to help children and the disabled—had not seemed to enter his mind. Still, the NATO members had already agreed to spend more money.

Merkel, in her remarks, expressed her country’s unending gratitude toward NATO for the role it played in German reunification. But she also focussed on the people of Central and Eastern Europe, whose “courage,” she said, was one of the reasons that pieces of the Berlin Wall were now just “a memento.” Their courage included crossing borders and, in some cases, risking and even losing their lives in dashes across the no man’s land that separated East and West Berlin. Ronald Reagan’s 1987 Berlin speech, in which he demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” expressed values—openness and democracy among them—that Trump seemed to shrug at. But, as important as Reagan’s message may have been at the time, and as well as it has stood up in the judgment of history, the moment two years later, when the Wall was brought down not by a Soviet official but by crowds of ordinary East Germans, caught NATO by surprise. The force of the aspiration for freedom, and the will to move to where it can be found, often comes upon governments unexpectedly. But Reagan’s voice had been one of leadership. Trump’s was not, unless you define leadership as always getting to be the one in front. A video caught Trump winning that position by shoving aside the Prime Minister of Montenegro, and then seeming not to notice him. (During the campaign, Trump had wondered why Americans would want to defend countries whose names they couldn’t even remember.)

European leaders were reportedly hoping for an affirmation of Article 5 in Trump’s remarks; they didn’t get it. In general, the approach of his hosts on this trip seems to have been to hope very much that he doesn’t actually break anything. Remarks have been kept short, flattery long—a reminder, as with the international and unmerited fêting of Ivanka, of how Trumpism lowers the level of dialogue all around. Trump does like it when people give gifts (though he may not have appreciated it when Pope Francis, at the Vatican, handed him a copy of his encyclical on climate change), and so he thanked the 9/11 Museum, in New York, which had donated the girders, and Merkel, as a representative of Germany, for donating the slabs. He spoke a few sentences about the memorials’ symbolic power. But, as he looked around at the new headquarters, he seemed, again, to be dwelling on a different definition of a value.

“And I never asked once what the new NATO headquarters cost,” he said, as if he should be thanked for that act of restraint. “I refuse to do that. But it is beautiful.” It was not, perhaps, what Trump would have built. But what would have been the price of that?