WASHINGTON—For once, the problem was not something he said but something he didn’t.Donald Trump’s first foreign trip as president gave him a chance to make headlines on something, anything, other than Russia. He succeeded for a few days. Then, with an act of conspicuous silence, he changed the subject back.In his Thursday speech to NATO, Trump declined to guarantee that his United States remains devoted to the bedrock principle of the bulwark against Russian aggression: a commitment to defend other members of the alliance if they came under attack.His refusal to endorse the all-for-one, one-for-all Article 5 of the NATO treaty, while hectoring members for spending too little on defence and too much on a new headquarters, alarmed and dismayed European leaders who had expected him to come to Brussels to reassure the alliance. And given that his omission doubtlessly thrilled Vladimir Putin, it reinvigorated bipartisan questions about where his loyalties lie.“That he couldn’t even say some very benign words that would’ve meant a lot to our allies was really striking,” said Loren Schulman, a former National Security Council official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “I think it’s a huge deal that he didn’t say it.” The NATO omission — it was at, of all places, the dedication of a memorial to the time NATO invoked Article 5 after Sept. 11 — was the biggest black mark on an eventful, five-country whirlwind tour. The trip was far from a shining success, but also no catastrophe.Here are six other lessons from Trump’s time in the Middle East and Europe:He’s not giving Israel free rein: Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat who advised six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, jokes that the version of Trump who spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before March of last year “could have been Hillary Clinton& ...
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