While the Trump circus blazes a path of destruction through London on its way to Helsinki, NATO is still reeling from the president’s blunt-force attack on the decades-old military alliance. Expectations had been low following a disastrous G7 summit in Canada last month, during which the American president threw candies at Angela Merkel, left early, refused to sign a joint communique, and spent his departing flight tweeting insults at Justin Trudeau, before arriving in Singapore for a chummy photo op with Kim Jong Un. The nightmare scenario for the NATO summit, diplomats told me afterward, would be a repeat performance in Europe, with Trump’s planned meeting with Vladimir Putin as the coup de grâce. Even so, dignitaries at Wednesday’s convocation in Brussels were left stunned by Trump’s perceived threat to withdraw from NATO if other members didn’t increase their defense spending, prompting Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to convene an emergency meeting. And they were shocked again when Trump emerged from the meeting to declare, as if nothing had happened, that “the United States commitment to NATO is very strong.”

“This was a very Trumpian summit. I have been to every summit since 1999—never have I seen something like this. . . . He turned this NATO summit into a reality-TV show,” Damon Wilson, the executive vice president of the Atlantic Council who was in attendance, told me. “He helped to sort of elevate and, to some degree, fabricate a sense of crisis. He created a sense of friction between characters and used it to create a situation in which he could basically solve the problem, come in, and declare victory.”

The trouble had begun Wednesday, when Trump turned an introductory breakfast meeting into a vessel for an on-camera rant about how America’s allies had been “delinquent” in supporting NATO, how they should double their defense spending commitments, and why he believes Germany is “captive” to Moscow because of its reliance on a Russian natural-gas pipeline. “I think to have him immediately launch into this attack on Germany specifically really took the NATO secretary general by surprise,” said Julianne Smith, who led NATO policy at the Pentagon and served as national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. “I guess they didn’t expect it to happen so early, right at the breakfast with the secretary general. But there’s a level of frustration there, and particularly given the fact that he’s about to go see Putin,” she continued. “Putin would love nothing more than to have a divided alliance.”

More worrisome for NATO veterans was the perception that the U.S. president had gone into the meeting planning to derail the summit. “He obviously has come to this meeting with the intention of dividing the alliance and in creating a negative story he appeared to have no interest in creating a positive outcome,” remarked former U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns. “Every president since Truman has thought of himself as the leader of the NATO alliance. Trump obviously doesn’t.” The only question, for Burns, is whether Trump’s misbehavior was driven by ego or by some more sinister purpose. “I have been trying to decide if it is more Orwellian or Alice in Wonderland, in the sense that he is now acting and talking as if the NATO allies are our adversaries and that he doesn’t ever criticize Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un in similar terms.”

As the dust cleared from Trump’s initial clash with Stoltenberg and Merkel, summit-watchers braced for another outburst. “It’s always the same thing with Trump,” grumbled a Senate aide, watching the melee unfold from Capitol Hill. “I mean carbon copy, take his M.O. and put it onto any policy issue. Whenever it’s the choice between a hammer or a scalpel, he chooses the hammer every time.” The aide conceded that everyone in Washington wants their NATO allies to reach the funding level they had agreed to under Barack Obama, “but there’s more diplomatic way to go about it.”