What the columnists said

With this president, it’s hard to pinpoint “where exactly his loyalties lie,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. His call for Russia to be let back in the G-7 “was a bizarre suggestion, given that Russia is not only an international outlaw but also an economic pygmy whose GDP does not even rank in the top 10.” And Moscow has done nothing since 2014 to deserve re-admittance. In fact, its aggressions—meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, committing war crimes in Syria—“demand more punishment.”

Trudeau and other G-7 leaders are angry only because Trump is shaking up “a trade system that holds the U.S. at a disadvantage,” said Christian Whiton in FoxNews.com. France and other EU countries, for example, levy a 10 percent tariff on imported U.S. cars, but we charge only 2.5 percent on European autos. Canada has tariffs of about 270 percent on U.S. dairy. Yes, our allies are guilty of protectionism—but so are we, said Jordan Weissmann in Slate.com. Our sugar industry, for example, is “protected by an elaborate system of price supports and tariffs” that puts competitors at a disadvantage. Not incidentally, the U.S. had an $8.4 billion goods and services trade surplus with Canada last year. We’re hardly getting robbed.

So what exactly is Trump’s foreign policy doctrine? asked Jeffrey Goldberg in TheAtlantic.com. A senior White House official told me it’s “We’re America, bitches.” To Trump’s supporters, such an approach “could be understood as a middle finger” to a world “that no longer respects American power and privilege.” Yet by “pursuing policies that undermine the Western alliance” and empower rivals such as Russia and China, the Trump Doctrine will only make the U.S. weaker, “perhaps permanently.”