GOP frontrunner Donald Trump reminds me of Lucy, the character in Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip “Peanuts.” In one strip, Lucy is trying to alarm a happy Snoopy, loudly yelling “Floods, fires and famine! Death, doom and destruction!”

Despite rumors of wars and earthquakes and floods, it’s not all doom and gloom. Love still exists and dominates our behavior. Hyperbolizing our fears is Trump’s chosen campaign trademark—and one that packs the potential for causing great harm to this country.

The Paris attacks and mass shootings in the U.S, especially in San Bernardino, have stirred 9/11 memories in our collective national consciousness, fears which Trump has been almost gleeful to exploit, predicting many more World Trade Tower collapses. His supporters seem to love it when he talks apocalypse.

Now Trump has given American voters a chance to see what he’d be like in foreign affairs. This week, he exported to the rest of the world his domestic politics of fear, division, and polarization. People are scared. Trump wants no show of American courage, but rather desires us to be even more frightened.
To that end, Trump proposed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He announced it by referring to himself in the third person, enlisting his middle initial: “Donald J. Trump calls for…” as if it were a royal decree. I didn’t know God had a middle initial.

It’s not the domestic reaction, but it is the turmoil Trump has caused among our allies, the cheer he gave our enemies, and the havoc he wreaked on U.S. security and foreign policy that should concern all of us.

You would thinks, as many Americans sure believe, that in such a chaotic, unpredictable and dangerous world, that we would be keen on keeping the friends we have. But Trump managed to alienate two of our strongest allies, the United Kingdom and Israel with one campaign trail statement.

Trump already had lit a bonfire in London by falsely declaring that there were Muslim sections of London where the police were afraid to go. That prompted London’s Metropolitan Police Force to issue a rare statement: “We would not normally dignify such comments, [however] it’s important to state to Londoners that Mr Trump could not be more wrong,”

The British themselves took immediate, strong, offense to Trump’s ‘ban all Muslims’ decree. Over 300,000 people signed a petition citing Trump’s “unacceptable behavior” and asking Parliament to ban Trump from entry into Great Britain. Parliament must consider such petitions for debate if they gather 100,000 signatures, which it did in a few hours.

Britain has banned others under a law to prevent entry for those individuals who foster hatred that could provoke domestic violence. Through his spokesman, Prime Minister David Cameron said that Trump’s ban was: “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.”

It’s safe to say that there would be no Cameron-Trump partnership like the Churchill-FDR one.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said that Israel “rejects the recent comments made by @realDonaldTrump about Muslims. Israel respects all religions.” There is something unnerving when foreign leaders must respond to Trump’s Twitter handle for his foreign policy pronouncements.

Trump’s ‘ban’ on Muslims, coupled with a proposed upcoming trip to Israel, plus a Trump provocation that he was ‘strongly considering” a visit to the Temple Mount, caused a Knesset member to warn that Trump was publicity-seeking at “the holiest place in the world for Muslims.” The New York Daily News quoted Abu Arrar, a member of an ‘Arab-dominated’ Israeli political party in Israel as saying, “Such a visit will set the whole region on fire. I am warning.”

The Pentagon warned that Trump’s Muslim ban undermined our national security. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and only the most miniscule number pose any sort of threat to the West. Seventeen men carried out 9/11; ten were involved in the Paris attacks; two home-grown terrorists undertook the San Bernardino shootings. ISIS has an estimated 20 to 30,000 militia. But Donald Trump’s statements has the potential of offending those 1.3 billion Muslims whom we count on as allies in the fight against terrorists of all stripes.

A typical Muslim response was sadness. Ruwayda Mustafah‏, a British citizen and a Kurd — the Muslims who have been most successful in fighting ISIS — poignantly tweeted, “There’s something inherently sad about having to humanise ourselves to be accepted,” about Trump’s Muslim ban.

The real-life harm Trump’s ‘total ban’ decree caused is serious enough that he undoubtedly was privately told by overseas diplomats that he should not even think of visiting. Trump cancelled his trip to Israel, tweeting that he would “reschedule after he was President.”

This week demonstrates the too real possibility that Trump could actually hurt the U.S. campaign to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. For now, Donald J. Trump’s tongue is likely to become more harmful to American security interests and helpful to the campaign ISIS and others are waging on the Internet.