If, as seemed increasingly possible, Trump had been helped into the presidency by a Russian intelligence operation, then the ultimate guarantor of the whole world order had revealed a system-shaking vulnerability—as if the Red Cross could not manage a blood bank, as if the Federal Reserve had run out of dollars. Every international actor, benign or malign, had to take the new information into account. America’s friends might hope that the Trump presidency would prove short, its activities limited and ineffectual.
