Is Trump coming to his senses about America's role in the world? We can at least hope so.

I have a lot of respect for Charles Krauthammer. I really hope this article is right. I really hope that whatever naive, archaic isolationist noises President Trump may have made in the past or may make in the future, they are only noises.

I really hope the sudden and bizarre reversal of direction by the Trump administration required for the attack on Syria to take place signals a new awareness on the president's part that in the modern world "America First-" which was never really an option even in the past- is simply not a realistic foreign policy. The foreign policy Mr. Trump has consistently advocated since the day he declared his candidacy is the very foreign policy that gave us World War II. Any actual deviation from that course can only be good.

I really hope that the attack on Syria and whatever signal the symbolic gesture the American "armada" headed for the Korean peninsula sends to Kim Jong-Un means that the administration now intends to take America's role in the world seriously after all, that Mr. Trump is through humiliating our allies with false accusations about their being "deadbeats" who owe us money while playing patty-fingers with our enemies, and that the man plans to reverse rather than intensify his predecessor's ineffectual, hand-wringing wimpishness in dealing with the world.

I really hope that alt-right crazy and Special Assistant to the President Steve Bannon's star really is in decline and that while the crazy rhetoric may continue to flow for the benefit of his fans Donald Trump really is growing in office and coming to get a clue about how the world actually works.

I really hope that he can prove me wrong about him and demonstrate that he is more than a little man with a mediocre intellect and a big ego who is in way. way over his head and is psychologically unable to admit that fact even to himself. While I'm at it, I hope that he totally reverses course from his previous pattern and becomes a thoughtful, cagey, sagacious statesman who will make us forget Lincoln and Jefferson.

I'm not counting on any of this, mind you. Nor do I really believe a bit of it. Everything about the man tells me that this whole week has been just another instance of Mr. Trump's impulsiveness and erratic personality. But I really do hope that the president's sudden reversal of everything he's said about foreign policy in general and Syria and Assad, in particular, is something more than an impulsive, emotional spasm, and an indication that the man is actually learning and growing, and may some day actually be up to the job.

I'm very far from believing it. But one can hope.