After Donald Trump’s predictable confrontation with NATO leaders in Brussels Wednesday, one can easily imagine the chummy deliverance Trump will find next week in Vladimir Putin. The tweet will come early Monday, perhaps 4 or 5 A.M., Helsinki time, shortly after their private, one-on-one meeting. “Great meeting with President Vladimir Putin who is much loved by his people! Talked in depth about Syria, Crimea, and Trade. Good things will happen!” Western press will be kept away, but a single photograph will be released, via TASS or RIA Novosti or some other state media outlet, showing the American president glowing and submissive next to his stony Russian counterpart.

The commentariat in Washington and New York and the whole of Europe will wet itself. Trump Sells Out NATO! Ex-K.G.B. Agent Runs Rings Around Trump! Trump, Confronted with Nudie Pics, Green-Lights Massive Russian Oil Pipeline! And then nothing. Because the president can’t do that much on his own, at least while there is Congress and the courts and reporters and a federal bureaucracy that knows how to stall and sabotage Trump’s alignment with Russia. Democrats are loath to admit as much, because they insist on viewing Trump as a radical departure from Barack Obama. Republicans feel the same way for the same reason. But the reality is that despite two Supreme Court opportunities bestowed upon him, this president isn’t a man of action so much as a creature of provocation.

If there’s any danger here, it’s that the Trump-Putin summit, like the Trump-Kim powwow, undermines the idea of the summit qua summit. It erodes yet another norm. It expedites our self-imposed marginalization, and it does so in the service of this president’s ratings, and at the expense of all future presidents’ capacity to lead.

One wonders what comes next. We prefer to imagine that the 46th president, Republican or Democrat, will return us to a more conventional trajectory, that America will automatically be restored to its former status, that the ethical breaches and endless stupidities of the 45th president will be bulldozed and forgotten. But that can’t happen. Nothing can be undone. Every impertinence and miscalculation subtly, metabolically reorders the sprawling, interconnected configuration of interests and powers that undergird American hegemony. Come January 2021 or 2025, we will inhabit a new world. The question is: when will the loyal opposition start proposing big ideas, instead of simply sniping at the president?

Next week, in the wake of the Trump-Putin meeting, would be a brilliant moment for some entrepreneurial Democrat, some senator or governor, some politically astute Silicon Valley chieftain, to articulate the beginnings of a new American foreign policy. This foreign policy would have to start by acknowledging everything that Trump has gotten right: our NATO allies should boost their defense budgets. The White House ought to seek a working rapport with the Kremlin. Reimagining many of the orthodoxies that have constrained Establishment thinking about our most intransigent challenges—North Korea, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—is smart. We might deplore Trump’s style, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the substance.

This will be tough. It’s a bad idea to talk about big ideas in an election year. But we should be talking about big ideas. Someone has to. Our president is incapable of as much. This is the contradiction most progressives seem not to intuit: Yes, of course, Trump is hopelessly shallow, but he often says things—always with that rambling, slightly demented, stream-of-consciousness cadence—that are nevertheless on point. Archie Bunker didn’t go to Harvard, but he understood that the best and the brightest, who had bequeathed to America the Vietnam War and then told us we couldn’t win it, were not as smart as they thought they were.