The meeting in Helsinki between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wasn’t the only international summit that took place on Monday. In Beijing, Chinese leaders gathered with those from the European Union at a China-E.U. summit, where, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “China courted the European Union as an ally in its trade conflict with the US, offering to improve access for foreign companies and work with the EU on reforming the World Trade Organization.”

The Beijing meeting didn’t lead to any immediate agreement: many E.U. governments are almost as suspicious of China’s mercantilist practices as they are of the current incarnation of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. But the two sides issued a statement listing areas of agreement, and there is now a genuine prospect of them coming together, in some way, to oppose the Trump Administration’s tariffs. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, who led the European delegation, said, “The architecture of the world is changing before our very eyes.”

This was part of the context for Trump’s abject performance at his press conference with Putin. From one perspective, Trump didn’t do or say anything very novel. We already knew that he admires Putin and wants warmer relations with Russia. We also knew that he rejects the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that Putin’s regime interfered in the 2016 election. We knew that he’s still obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. What was shocking was Trump’s willingness to reaffirm these things in full view of the world, with Putin at his side. Some of his longtime enablers in the G.O.P., such as the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, and Senator Tom Cotton, were moved to distance themselves from him as he flew home to Washington. But much of the rest of the world saw Trump’s performance on Monday as further confirmation of something they figured out a while ago: the White House is occupied by a determined international wrecker, a person who may have hidden obligations to Moscow.

When Trump was elected, many overseas governments, particularly those of America’s traditional allies in Europe, hoped that the office of the Presidency and the famed checks and balances of the U.S. political system would limit his isolationist and unilateralist tendencies. Yet even before he departed Washington for Europe last Tuesday, his record on the environment, Iran, Israel, trade, and NATO had disabused America’s allies of this notion—and his behavior during the seven days he spent in Belgium, Britain, and Finland only confirmed their worst fears. “We can no longer completely rely on the White House,” Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister, told a German newspaper group, on Monday. “To maintain our partnership with the USA we must readjust it.”

Maas’s statement was made before Trump and Putin’s press conference, at a time when Trump’s biggest scandal of the week was merely saying, “Germany is totally controlled by Russia.” In the lead-up to his meeting with Putin, Trump had also said, when asked by an interviewer to identify the United States’ biggest foe, “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.”

As Maas’s quote indicated, many foreign leaders now believe that Trump doesn’t give a fig about America’s allies or that he actively dislikes them. Throughout his trip, he seemed determined to cause trouble for NATO and the E.U., the two transnational institutions that have helped define Europe for decades. He also meddled, with what seemed like malign intent, in the domestic politics of individual countries.

In his now notorious interview with the Sun, a British tabloid, he criticized Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, for being too soft in negotiations with the E.U. about Brexit. And, in another dig at Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, he criticized the immigration policies of European countries, saying, “I think you are losing your culture.” The governments of May and Merkel are both threatened by nationalist, anti-immigrant political insurgencies. “It is now evident that Mr Trump is not intent simply on defending American interests, as he perceives them,” the Financial Times commented in an editorial. “Instead, he is actively intervening in European politics—to promote the agendas of nationalist parties that are his ideological soulmates.”

Many of these far-right parties whose arguments Trump has been echoing have received support—directly and indirectly—from Russia. Until Monday’s happenings in Helsinki, it could be argued, not entirely convincingly, that this was merely a coincidence. Now it appears to be all of a piece with Trump’s efforts to cozy up to Putin.

So where do things go from here? In Eastern Europe, particularly, there will be concern that Trump’s verbal appeasement of Putin will encourage the Russian leader to engage in more adventurism. Defenders of Trump point out that, for all his harsh rhetoric about NATO, he has encouraged a buildup of the alliance in countries bordering Russia. Despite this, though, there are doubts about how Trump would respond to Putin repeating the tactics he used in Ukraine in the Baltics or elsewhere.

America’s allies will be monitoring what happens in Washington over the next few days, and whether there is any real pushback against the President. They will also be looking out for any resignations among the members of Trump’s national-security team. To many Europeans, the continued presence at the Pentagon of James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, who is a staunch supporter of NATO, has been somewhat reassuring.

But even if Mattis stays on, other countries will step up their efforts to defend their own interests. Initially, their efforts will focus on economics. Eventually, if Trump’s policies are sustained, there will be military implications, too. In most parts of Europe, there is still a lot of good will toward the United States as a country. But, remarkable as the idea would have sounded a few years ago, many Europeans now regard the American President as a serious threat. After the events of the past week, can you blame them?