European leaders are indignant and defiant over Trump's G-7 statement. But they're not surprised.

BERLIN — It was an image that, in its Rockwellian presentation and characters, seemed to capture an emerging era.

European leaders stood arrayed on one side of a narrow conference room table, leaning in. On the other side: President Trump, seated alone, his arms folded.

The photo, released Saturday on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Instagram account and later tweeted by Trump national security advisor John Bolton, fast became a Rorschach test for an increasingly troubled relationship.

Trump was clearly isolated. But was he making an overdue stand against an expiring global order? Or was he just the odd man out in the world’s most powerful club?

The enchantingly unreadable facial expressions make it impossible to know.

On the day after the Group of Seven summit blew up in spectacular fashion, with Trump using idle time on an airport runway to insult his host and repudiate an agreement he had made with allied leaders only hours earlier, emotions were far easier to divine.

Allies were indignant. They were defiant. Yet they were hardly shocked by the outcome of a critical global gathering that had gone worse than any that longtime foreign policy players had seen.

“It was not a surprise,” said Norbert Röttgen, chair of the foreign affairs committee in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. “The president acted and reacted in the childish way he could be expected to.”

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