It has been a good week, in terms of foreign affairs, for President Donald Trump, who — perhaps surprisingly — has notched two successes in that arena.

The first, of course, was the imperative and — it seems — successful strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. As laid out in this space last week, America, and America alone, possesses the weaponry necessary to deliver what we hope was the decisive blow against Iran’s dream of becoming a nuclear power.

Trump’s detractors and the appeasement crowd — among whom dwell some of the loudest and most obnoxious of the Trumpeters — trotted out an array of objections; that the strike was carried out solely at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that America’s joining the war was a reckless and unnecessary exercise in adventurism, and, of course, that it was “illegal.”

Dealing with each in order: Did Netanyahu ask for America’s help? I have no doubt he did, and why wouldn’t he? As mentioned, the United States is the only military with the ordinance capable of penetrating to the depths needed to lay waste to Iran’s buried nuclear sites. Israel was acting on intelligence (and Israeli intelligence has proven quite capable of late) that indicated Tehran was a hair’s breadth away from joining the nuclear club, and had no choice. The task was more complicated than the last time the Israeli’s aborted a malevolent neighbor’s nuclear program — the 1981 bombing of Osirak which completely obliterated Iraq’s nuclear operations. Iran’s facilities were farther away, more numerous, more spread out and better fortified. Yes, they asked for America’s help.

And we provided it, not out of a sense of bravado or adventurism, but out of a sense for our own national interest. It does not take the foreign relations savvy of a Henry Kissinger to realize a regime which all but prints “DEATH TO AMERICA!” on its money and has cultivated a nearly 5-decade habit of exporting violence should not have an atomic bomb.

As to the claim the strikes were somehow “illegal,” professor and author John Yoo, who probably knows and understands more about American executive power and its constitutional limits than anyone alive, quite adequately made the legal case a few days ago in National Review. To summarize, Article II of the Constitution allows the president to take military action short of a congressional declaration war, which, as Yoo points out, even the founding presidents did: “George Washington conducted the Indian Wars without a declaration; Thomas Jefferson fought the Barbary pirates on his own authority; Abraham Lincoln raised an army and navy and launched them against the South without calling Congress into session.”

Now, congressional approval of these sorts of operations may be an exercise in constitutional hygiene, but they are not necessary when the strategic situation dictates expediency, and besides, Congress has only itself to blame for the steady hemorrhaging of its authority to the executive. Perhaps Congress can take some time now to figure out a way to not only reclaim some of its authority in such matters, but to do so in a manner expeditious enough to matter when thorny international situations develop faster than Congress’ glacial pace allows for.

Of course, no military operation is without risk, and few are as cut-and-dried as one would like. That the world is safer now than it was a fortnight ago is without question; but other questions remain, such as “how much safer?”, “is the job finished?” and “how much safer would we be if we had struck again?” It will be some time before we know with anything approaching certainty just how successful the B-2s were in achieving their goal, and a key job of the administration now will be to ensure America’s intelligence apparatus is up to the job.

Trump’s second success was a bit less ostentatious, but no less important. When he attended the NATO summit in The Hague this week, he appeared to leave the more bellicose personality at home, and came away with a unanimous commitment by the members of the Western alliance to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP. So, President Trump managed in two weeks to fulfill two of the United States’ longest-running and most pressing foreign policy objectives — deny Iran a nuclear weapon, and convince Europe and Canada to assume a greater share of the mutual defense burden.

This may, one hopes, reflect a change of heart for the president in terms of foreign policy, away from the neo-isolationism favored by the nascent appeasement wing of the Republican Party, and long harbored by the pacifist left, and toward a more realistic one which approaches the world as it is, rather than how we wish it were. In any case, these two events convey an important message to the world: The U.S. is not only able, but again willing, to employ its military muscle in exercise of its interests; and that the West collectively is again willing to take their defense seriously. Ears in Moscow and Beijing are perking up and taking note.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.