At the G7 Summit in Alberta, Canada in June, a visibly dismayed President Trump said that Russia’s expulsion from what used to be the G8 was wrong. The ejection occurred after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. President Trump argued that if Russia were still part of that club, the current war in Ukraine wouldn’t have started.

That assertion is quite dubious. President Trump makes those bold proclamations without ever bothering to explain why he thinks things might have been different. After all, Russia was a member of the club when it engaged in that illegal annexation. So how would remaining in it have changed Russia’s character? Furthermore, President Trump has repeatedly promised to leverage his great personal friendship with Vladimir Putin to bring an end to the war. He has had little to show for his efforts thus far. If anything, he appears to be taking the side of the Russian dictator as he pursues his goal of ending the conflict.

After I listened to President Trump’s public protest in June and his apparent suggestion that Russia should be invited back to a newly reconstituted G8, one question immediately came to my mind. It was this: What self-respecting European, Canadian or Japanese leader would be willing to sit in a club meeting with Vladimir Putin? I simply couldn’t see how that was possible after the atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol, and in many places across Ukraine, as well as the forced abductions of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children by Russian forces, together with Putin’s status as an indicted war criminal.

Following the much-ballyhooed Trump-Putin summit in Alaska last week, many pundits inexplicably declared that the high-level meeting had allowed Putin to reclaim his coveted seat at the global table. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, John Bolton, former White House national security adviser and later U.S. ambassador to the U.N., appeared to take the same view. He began his article with the following sentence: “Vladimir Putin led Russia out of international isolation on Friday, striding down a red carpet to greet an applauding Donald Trump.” Mr. Bolton and the commentators seem to have drawn the wrong conclusions from the summit. President Trump may be the most powerful person in the world, but he cannot dictate who other people and their nations should be friends with. His embrace of Putin cannot and should not be extrapolated as global recognition of the heretofore pariah.

I have seen this movie many times in my long career in the private sector. There are some employees who go to great lengths to get in the good books of some individual in senior management. Their whole existence and fortunes within the organization then become heavily reliant on that one influential person. When that patron leaves the company for whatever reason, the employee suddenly becomes so lost that quite often, the only choice left for them is to make an exit also.

That is exactly the position Putin finds himself in today. Apart from Trump, he has no friends in high places in Washington or any other Western capital. He is similarly unwelcome in many other influential capitals such as Tokyo and Seoul. Because his Washington patron is term-limited, unlike his dictator friends, Putin will certainly return to his full pariah status in a little over three years from now. I therefore don’t understand what all that hoopla after the Alaska summit was about.

Elsewhere in his opinion piece, Mr. Bolton wrote this: “Mr. Putin emerged from diplomatic purdah with flags unfurled, literally. How long before Europeans like France’s ever-opportunistic Emmanuel Macron phone Mr. Putin or visit him in Moscow?” I wonder what the French president thinks of Mr. Bolton’s view of him.

I was unhappy with President Macron’s unilateral approaches to Putin during the early months of the war because I felt he was showing undue deference to the Russian dictator. To his credit, President Macron realized his mistake and quickly reversed course. Since then, he has become one of the most hawkish leaders on the war, and has strongly and persistently urged Europe to end its unwise dependency on America for the continent’s defense. He deserves a lot more respect than Mr. Bolton appears to give him.

Mr. Bolton should perhaps direct his disdain toward the Western business leaders who seem to be champing at the bit to return to Russia to make money there. Milton Friedman said that the sole purpose of corporations is to make money and maximize profits for shareholders. But I suspect that even he would be quite careful about looking so eager to do business in such an odious environment. When the time comes, I hope Mr. Bolton will publicly call out those shameless business leaders as he has done, unfairly, with President Macron.

There is much unscrupulousness in politics everywhere. Europe is no exception. But on the war in Ukraine, there is no question that European heads of state and their senior government officials have shown a lot more self-respect than leaders elsewhere, including many of our own here in America.