Trump Has Broken the West in Two

The world stage looks completely different to a small country. Large global powers may set the tectonic shifts of geopolitics in motion, but the other players have always had to figure out how to survive in the cracks in between.

In two months, the Trump administration has threatened allies with tariffs and trade wars, dismantled foreign aid and silenced Voice of America. President Trump scolded the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office and withheld military aid and intelligence sharing. America joined Russia, North Korea and Belarus in opposing a resolution in the U.N. General Assembly that demanded Russia immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has treatedPresident Vladimir Putin of Russia as a reliable partner for discussion.

A Trump foreign policy doctrine is becoming clear, at least in outline. Mr. Trump’s America seeks to lead a world in which the great nuclear powers take what they can. They choose their spheres of influence, the size of their territories and the shape of their borders. To other big powers Mr. Trump’s approach may be understood as transactional or realist. But to many of the smaller democracies of Eastern Europe and South and East Asia, which have for decades hitched their fate to an America that they thought would enable them to continue to exist near the border of Russia or China, the Trump doctrine is the foreign policy of betrayal.

Since the fall of Communism, many of the small and medium-size countries in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic States, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, adapted to meet the demanding standards of liberal democracy. Those countries wrote and amended constitutions, democratized political life, built market economies and signed trade agreements. Some even agreed to the installation of