And what of the military muscle flexing? The Tomahawk cruise missiles fired on a Syrian airfield in response to President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons was the right response years too late but became a meaningless gesture because it was divorced from any strategy to increase pressure on Assad. A big bomb on Afghanistan also looked, in the end, more like showmanship than anything. In North Korea, there’s another showman with hair: Kim Jong-un (whom Trump says he’d be “honored” to meet). Trump’s brinkmanship with him has succeeded so far in being at once dangerous and ineffective. What matters to this president is the news cycle, not strategy or principle.

The toll is considerable. France and Germany are no longer asking themselves whether they have been cast loose between a hostile Moscow and a hostile Washington, as they did in the first weeks of the Trump administration, but nor have they forgotten the experience. The suspicion remains, with Trump, of shared Russian-American sympathy for the weakening or breakup of the European Union.

In many places, Trump’s valueless foreign policy has provoked such uncertainty bordering on dismay. Trust has been eroded. The State Department, led by a cipher, has been consistently undermined.

When I covered the war in Bosnia more than two decades ago, I got to know an honorable Foreign Service officer — I have known many over the years — named Ron Neitzke. He had been troubled by America’s attempt to ignore genocide and done all he could to right that. Reflecting later on the experience, Neitzke wrote: “One must, in essence, be guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed.”

What Trump is attempting is no less than the destruction of America’s “national conscience.” This must be resisted by all means.