The streak was on display in the United Kingdom, when Trump actively encouraged defection from the European Union by offering Britain a trade deal with the United States only on the condition that it make a clean break with the EU. “We are cracking down right now on the European Union,” he told The Sun, in reference to the raft of tariffs he has imposed or threatened to impose on the bloc. He argued, as he has since the 1980s, that in certain ways traditional U.S. allies pose a greater threat to the country than longtime adversaries because they are essentially friendly pickpockets: exploiting America’s military protection and preferential treatment on trade to get rich at the expense of the United States. “The European Union is a foe” because it takes “advantage of us” on trade and “many of those countries are in NATO and they weren’t paying their bills,” Trump explained to CBS, before adding that “Russia is a foe in certain respects” and “China is a foe economically.”

And it was on display in Finland, when Trump tried to team up with Russian President Vladimir Putin to address the world’s top problems—from terrorism and nuclear proliferation to the nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea and the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine—without any apparent regard for history or concern about the challenges that Putin’s revisionism has posed to the international system. At a joint press conference, the American president refused to take Russia to task for interfering in democratic elections, or even to call out any specific instance of Russian bad behavior—be it committing and abetting atrocities in Syria or allegedly ordering the poisoning of a former Russian spy with a nerve agent in Britain. (In his interview this week with Carlson, Trump described NATO’s newest member, Montenegro, not as the victim of an alleged Russian-supported coup plot in 2016 but as an “aggressive” nation that could drag the United States and other NATO members into “World War III.”) Instead, Trump blamed rotten relations with Russia on “many years of U.S. foolishness.” Remarkably, it fell on Putin, not Trump, to state at the press conference America’s policy that Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea was illegal. Trump “stands firmly by” that position, Putin said. If Trump does have a problem with the first seizure of territory by one European country from another in decades, he didn’t mention it in Finland.

While “American presidents since the 1940s have primarily sought to conserve the post-World War II order,” the international-relations scholar Walter Russell Mead recently observed in an article on the president’s revisionist tendencies, Trump “wants to alter the terms of the world system in America’s favor” and use “military and economic tools to persuade other powers to accept” his modifications. In Mead’s telling, these adjustments include leveraging China’s dependence on the U.S. economy to rectify trade imbalances between the two countries; “disrupting the status quo” in Europe, and fashioning a “revised model” of the transatlantic relationship so that it stops being “more valuable to Germany than to the U.S., even as America contributes most to its upkeep”; and no longer placing the containment of Russia at the center of U.S. strategy in Europe, since Trump does not consider Russia “a significant economic or military threat to vital U.S. interests.”