When the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti, met privately with members of Congress at the Munich Security Conference, last weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham finished the meeting with a blunt question. Graham asked Scaparrotti what impact President Trump’s order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria by April would have on America’s allies there. A participant in the meeting told me, “Lindsey asked him, ‘Is it fair to say if this is carried out to the end, we will not have any allies? Would it be fair to say it would lead to a disaster?’ ” The answer was equally blunt: “ ‘Yes, sir.’ ” After I expressed surprise at the stark reply from a uniformed commander, the participant reminded me that military officials are obliged to advise members of Congress appropriately, under a provision in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. “Lindsey said, ‘Would it be fair to say this would be a disaster?’ Not a problem, but a disaster. Answer: ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

The striking exchange, not previously disclosed, between one of America’s most senior military officers and one of the Republican Party’s most senior political figures, captured the growing alarm among members of the G.O.P. establishment and leading national-security officials about key aspects of Trump’s foreign policy. Their shared assessment of impending disaster was all the more striking because it came during a congressional trip to Europe meant to reassure worried allies about Washington’s commitment to global leadership. It failed to do so. “Europeans are sick to death of this Administration,” another senior Republican, who has advised Trump in the past, told me. “They’re frustrated and pissed off.”

They are also, almost certainly, confused, in no small part by the many, many conflicting messages received from Republicans like Graham since Trump took office. A hawkish internationalist and longtime disciple of the late Senator John McCain, in whose honor he was leading the delegation of more than fifty lawmakers to Munich, Graham has been particularly incensed over the President’s recent decision to unilaterally pull U.S. forces out of Syria. In another private meeting in Munich, Graham dropped an F-bomb on the acting Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, when Shanahan told the members of Congress that Trump had ordered him to make sure all forces were out by April. Graham recounted their clash to Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, insuring his displeasure would get out. Since Trump abruptly made the Syria decision, in December, prompting Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to quit in protest, Graham and other Republicans have been lobbying the President to reverse course, or at least to leave a token force behind. But Graham’s importuning of Trump seemed to have failed, and the senator was none too happy to be confronted with evidence of it. “He had to face the stark reality in Munich that, no, Trump actually means what he says,” the participant in the congressional meetings told me.

If Graham was exasperated with Trump, however, it wasn’t evident in public the next day, when he appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” from Munich. On the show, Graham was once again the over-the-top Trump loyalist, the faithful Presidential golf partner who has reinvented himself in recent months as a high-profile public defender of a man he formerly called “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party.” In this particular appearance, Graham, in fact, presented himself as especially in synch with Trump. Commenting on the news, from the former acting F.B.I. chief Andrew McCabe, that some officials had worried so much about Trump’s fitness for office that they considered invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove him, Graham told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that Trump was the victim of a contemplated “administrative coup” by the F.B.I. The senator vowed to investigate the President’s investigators from his perch as the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Graham also supported Trump’s controversial declaration of a national emergency to get funding to build his wall at the southern border, despite objections, from many Republicans and Democrats, that it usurps Congress’s spending authority. Graham even concluded the interview with praise for Trump on Syria and pressed for some U.S. troops to remain, even though the closed-door meetings had made it clear that that was not the Pentagon’s current marching order. “Congratulations, Mr. President,” he said. “The job is not yet done, but we’ve done a hell of a job destroying the caliphate.”

Slavishly praising Trump in public, of course, is a signature tactic of his advisers and others who seek his favor. This week, though, Presidential flattery as a tool of foreign policy seemed particularly prominent. In Japan, a mini political uproar broke out when a newspaper reported that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had secretly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, at Trump’s request. (Abe, who eagerly flew to New York for a Trump Tower session only days after the 2016 election, did not deny the reports.) Among Trump’s men in Munich, the performance of Vice-President Mike Pence, who has always been an especially avid practitioner of public boss-praising, stood out. He admiringly mentioned President Trump at least thirty times in his Saturday address to the conference (far more attention, tweeters quickly pointed out, than the vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, who spoke later, gave to his boss). In a separate appearance meant to honor McCain, Pence paused for applause after he uttered his usual boilerplate line, “I bring greetings from the President of the United States.” Even in a room that included a couple dozen Republican members of Congress, Graham among them, no one clapped. Not surprisingly, the video of the moment, which the Pence and Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio described to me as “self-emasculating,” went viral on Twitter, a perfect metaphor at an annual forum that has, for decades, both celebrated and ratified America’s leadership in the West.

This wasn’t just a matter of a speech that flopped, though. This latest dance of the Republicans overseas was a reminder of why the bipartisan effort to convince the rest of the world that America’s commitments are unchanged, even under its America-First President, just doesn’t work. The U.S. may be the world’s leading power, but its foreign policy has become contorted, and essentially overtaken, by the toxic court politics of Trump. There’s a reason, after all, for all that over-the-top flattery, and it’s not just that Graham and Pence are particularly brazen in their use of this political art. Telling the truth in public can have real consequences in Trumpworld, and those who surround him are under no illusions about it. Just this week, reports continued to emanate from the White House that Trump was considering firing the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, whose sin was to have testified truthfully about the contradictions between Trump’s foreign-policy assumptions and the conclusions of Trump’s own intelligence agencies.

Contrast his standing with that of Lindsey Graham, whose public obsequiousness once again appears to have paid off. By this Thursday evening, Graham’s office was sending out a delighted press release, headlined “Graham Applauds Trump Decision to Leave Troops in Syria,” as wire services reported that the President had apparently conceded to lobbying by Graham and others, deciding to leave around two hundred troops in Syria after the April pullout. At least for now. But there was no ambiguity in Graham’s praise for the modest move. “Well done Mr. President,” his statement concluded.