It is proof of how low our standards are for judging Trump’s competence that he got high marks for delivering speeches more or less accurately, if woodenly, from teleprompters and scripts. He did not declare war on Islam. He spent only 15 minutes at Yad Vashem and left a semi-literate note there, but at least said nothing egregiously stupid. He was polite to the Pope. He said that the Germans were “bad, very bad” on trade but admired Egyptian president Sisi’s shoes. His motorcade was not stormed by angry European leftists. But what did he accomplish?

Normally, a president’s first overseas trips are to America’s immediate neighbors Canada or Mexico. Maybe to Europe, to engage with close allies like Britain or Germany. A daring move might have been to meet with similarly close partners like Australia and Japan; it might have been more audacious yet to go to India, whose burgeoning cooperation with the United States is the biggest geopolitical fact in our favor in Asia. In any case, the purpose is to cement the relationships that are our greatest source of international strength.

Instead, some tin-horn Talleyrand in the president’s entourage thought that this serial and unrepentant swindler, fornicator, and prevaricator was the man to bring together the three Abrahamic faiths by going to Riyadh, Jerusalem, and the Vatican. This conceit must strain Christian charity, let alone more austere Jewish and Muslim moralism.

It was foolish to begin the trip in Saudi Arabia, of all places. It is an ally, to be sure, but was also the home of roughly three-quarters of the 9/11 terrorists, and the source (from private funding) of terrorist financing, and far worse, of the teaching of Wahhabi doctrines inimical to the moderate forms of Islam that once prevailed around the world. Saudi and Gulf-funded religious schools, preachers, textbooks, and travel are a critical part of the story of the last several decades of violent jihad. The kingdom represses non-Muslim faiths and women, and it tolerates the barbarous treatment of foreign nationals. We forget those facts at our peril.

While there Trump, in effect, put the United States squarely in the camp of Arabs against their Persian enemies. This also largely put the U.S. in the camp of Sunni versus Shia Islam, which is profoundly unwise. Like the Saudis, the Gulf kingdoms, too, are indeed our allies, but it is not in America’s long term interest to take sides in the bitter sectarian divide that is now afflicting Islam. Iran is hostile, but in the long-term—although only after the revolutionary regime collapses or is overthrown—Iran will probably be more important to us than the Arab states, as it was before Khomeini toppled the shah. A quiet set of diplomatic missions would have sufficed.

The visit to Israel was merely silly. President Trump declared that he had not mentioned the word “Israel” in his now infamous session with Messrs. Lavrov and Kislyak in which he blew Israeli secrets to the Russians. In so doing he acted like the 8-year-old who, his hand caught in the jar filled with chocolate-chip cookies, adamantly insists that he has not filched a single oatmeal cookie. The Israelis welcomed his protestations of friendship, shrugged their shoulders at his chumminess with Bibi Netanyahu, quietly resolved to be more judicious in the future about what intelligence they share with the Americans, and after likely heaving a sigh of relief when Trump’s plane took off, went about celebrating the 50th anniversary of their 1967 victory.