Last week, we found ourselves in an unexpected place: in the very back of the top balcony in the Stockholm Concert Hall, watching as King Carl XVI Gustaf awarded medals to this year’s Nobel laureates — in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economics. As Americans spending the year in Sweden, we were honored and surprised to learn that we had been invited. While we were inspired by the pageantry of the celebration of human achievement, we were simultaneously sobered by the realization that the Trump administration is attacking the very institutions that make Nobel Prize-winning careers possible. In doing so, our country is charting a path to its own irrelevance.

The Nobel ceremony takes place each year on Dec. 10, and tickets to the 1,800-seat hall are hard to come by. Each laureate gets 35. The royal family and political figures get their share. Some tickets are given by lottery to students, who wear sailor caps with their universities’ insignia. The remaining invitations are issued according to some unknown hierarchy. Most Swedes end up watching it from their living rooms. Befitting our low rank in the hierarchy, we found out only in late November that we would be attending. We dressed as best we could — a boring suit and tie instead of tails, a borrowed cocktail dress instead of a ball gown — and made our way to the ceremony.

As Americans, this was an especially good year to attend. An impressive eight of the 12 individual laureates were American. Watching the ceremony, it was easy to feel patriotic. The laureates on stage represented decades of persistent, innovative work. They showed the intellectual power of the United States’ educational system and the transformative research it produces. We thought about the thousands of students who had passed through their labs, classes and office hours. While the awards are given to only a select few, we know well that each laureate represents an entire intellectual community.

But this year, the American Nobel laureates were shunned by President Trump. Breaking with recent tradition, he refused to invite them to the White House. This is difficult to understand. If you’re interested in building up and blaring out American greatness, why not show off what’s already great about the country? In this scenario, the laureates are like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine. The contrast between their warm celebration in Stockholm and their cold reception back home is a harbinger of the United States’ future irrelevance.