The transactional world Donald Trump seeks would harm not help America

It MAY BE a holdover from his failure as a casino mogul or a reflection of a might-is-right worldview. Or perhaps America’s president is simply feeling lucky. Whatever the reason, Donald Trump loves to describe geopolitics as a card game. Russian forces, he said of the war in Ukraine recently, have “taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards”. Soon afterwards Mr Trump suggested that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was refusing to accept the inevitable: “He has no cards.”