An American walks into a bar.
We're in Madrid, in the late 1960s. The American turns to the man on the adjacent stool and asks, a little too loudly, "So, what do you think of General Franco?"
"¡Silencio!" the Spaniard commands. "Follow me."
The American follows the man through the back door and into a car. They drive until they reach a remote mountain lake, find a rowboat and paddle far from shore. It's dark and still.
Leaning into the American's ear, the Spaniard whispers: "I like him."
It's an old joke, but I'm reminded of it as the non-disaster that has been Donald Trump's first foray overseas winds to a close. Those who feared the outcome of this presidency would be global thermonuclear war should take considerable comfort in the prospect that it might amount to something less.
Man-shake contests, for instance. Or intelligence nondisclosure disclosures.
It could be so much worse. Trump campaigned for office promising a radical break with postwar U.S. foreign policy. The liberal international order was out. He was against free trade; in favor of nuclear proliferation. Old allies were his new deadbeats. Old alliances were dead. Russia, the old enemy, would be our new best friend.
In its place: the Mar-a-Lago international order. If you don't pay your dues, you don't get in. If you do, it's no questions asked. Food, golf, party access and spa services are extra, of course.
There was still a touch of Mar-a-Lago-ism in Trump's visit last week to Brussels, where he insisted that NATO's European members meet their 2014 pledge to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. (It hovers around 1.46 percent.)
But that demand isn't new--Ash Carter demanded as much as Barack Obama's defense secretary--and it isn't unreasonable. And even if Trump was less than explicit in avowing America's Article 5 mutual defense commitments under the NATO Charter, at least he's given up calling the alliance "obsolete."
Trump did better on the Middle Eastern leg of his trip (or, as he would put it, the Middle East--and Israel).
It is no small irony--and perhaps no mean feat--that the candidate who campaigned for office using scurrilously anti-Muslim rhetoric now has a better relationship with Muslim leaders than Obama ever did.
Partly that's a matter of personal styles. Like Trump, Gulf state regimes revel in gilt and traffic in geld. Like him, they view politics in transactional and amoral terms.
But Trump's main achievement was to restore normality to a U.S. Middle Eastern policy that had become abnormal under Obama. "Our friends will never question our support, and our enemies will never doubt our determination," he said in his remarkably good Riyadh speech on Islamic extremism. "We must seek partners, not perfection--and to make allies of all who share our goals."
That was a useful correction to the Obama years, when our Mideast diplomacy became an eight-year exercise in strategic ambivalence--almost friendly toward the regime in Tehran or the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo; often tense with the governments in Jerusalem or Riyadh.
By contrast, Trump seems to have grasped the plain-spoken wisdom of Lyndon Johnson's remark about J. Edgar Hoover--that it was better to have the FBI director "inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in." Applied in the Middle East, it means knowing that it's better to keep the Saudis as less-than-ideal allies than allow them to become not-such-benign freelancers.
Then there was Israel.
I wish Trump had made good on his pledge to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. A reality of 69 years would have been recognized. The world would have protested, and then shrugged. And the president would have kept one of his promises for a change.
I wish he had done more to press Mahmoud Abbas about the governance--and misgovernance--of the crumbling Palestinian Authority rather than pursuing another half-hearted attempt at a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
I also wish the administration had taken my advice from February and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, again to acknowledge reality while punishing the Assad regime.
But with this administration we've learned that high hopes must rest with slight harms. Status quo U.S. foreign policy entails many disappointments and squandered opportunities. But it also means fewer disasters. In this regard, at least, we seem to have a president whose temperament may be clownish but whose policies are conventional.
As I said, it could be worse. If our luck holds out, we might be able to make it through whatever is left of this administration with nothing worse than a crooked neck on account of a permanent cringe.
Editorial on 06/02/2017