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Trump has spoken with far greater affection for Putin, Saudi princes and the right-wing nationalists now in power in Poland than for democratic pluralists such as Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron. At the G-20 summit, in fact, both Merkel and Macron sounded more like post-World War II American presidents than Trump did.

And the ambiguity about what Trump said during his two-hour meeting with Putin about Russian meddling in the 2016 election (the administration denied that Trump had accepted Putin's denials, as Russia claimed, but its own account of what Trump actually did tell him was hardly reassuring) only underscored the president's reluctance to confront the Russian leader on anything. Trump gave Putin exactly what he wanted was the headline on a commentary in the New York Times by Russian writer and dissident Masha Gessen. It was hard to deny its truth.

In his speech in Polandon Thursday, Trump did commit himself to the Western alliance, but in an otherwise gloomy, backward-looking and Manichaean address.

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive, Trump said. Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it? If we fail to defend what our ancestors" passed down to us, Trump warned, it will never, ever exist again.

To which one might respond: Yikes! Trump's words were remarkably similar to Bannon's pronouncements in a speech to a traditionalist Catholic group in Rome in 2014. Bannon spoke of a Judeo-Christian West that finds itself in a crisis and confronts a new barbarity" that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years."

This dire view should remind the democratic left and the democratic right that while they have disagreed on many aspects of American foreign policy over the last two decades, they share some deep allegiances. These include a largely positive assessment of what the modern world has achieved; a hopeful vision of what could lie before us; a commitment to democratic norms as the basis of our thinking about the kind of world we seek; and a belief that ethnic and religious pluralism are to be celebrated, not feared.

They also see alliances with fellow democracies as serving us better than pacts with autocratic regimes that cynically tout their devotion to traditional values as cover for old-fashioned repression and expansionism.

Democrats have many incentives for opposing Trump. But it's Republicans who have the power that comes from controlling Congress. Their willingness to stand up to a president of their own party could determine the future of democracy and pluralism. He is, alas, a man whose commitment to these values we have reason to doubt, and his European jaunt did nothing to calm those fears.

E.J. Dionne's email address isejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. (c) 2017, Washington Post Writers Group

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Allies for Democracy? - Commonweal