Tuesday night’s debate devoted little time to foreign policy, but a few key moments revealed—more dramatically than half an hour of dedicated discussion might have—just how much a renewed Donald Trump presidency could weaken the United States and make the world a more dangerous place.

Many noted, after the debate, how readily Vice President Kamala Harris lured the ex-president into traps. All she had to do was push one of his buttons—to remark that the crowds at his rallies are bored, or that he inherited all of his wealth (then blew it in successive bankruptcies), or that world leaders laugh at him—and he exploded in paroxysms of fury, ranting over grievances, rambling down ratholes of conspiracy theories, thrown off course from the issues at hand.

What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands.

“I like people who like me,” Trump has publicly said in several contexts, and the heads of every intelligence agency on Earth no doubt took careful note. “He respects me,” Trump once said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He famously sighed that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un sent each other “love letters,” and, even now, years after the bloom faded, still beams, “He likes me.” At the recent Republican convention, he boasted—boasted—that the head of the Taliban called him “Your Excellency,” and added, “I wonder if he calls the other guy”—meaning Biden—“ ‘Your Excellency.’ I doubt it!”

In Tuesday’s debate, Trump cited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a character witness, recalling the time when Orbán told him the world had fallen apart since he left office because all the leaders were “afraid” of him. It didn’t matter to Trump that Orbán is the least democratic leader in Europe, the one EU head of state who openly aligns with Putin (in Trump’s scorebook, that’s likely a point in Orbán’s favor). It would be funny, if it weren’t so alarming, that Trump took Orbán’s ego-stroking seriously.

The point is that in Trump’s mind, everything is about—and only about—Trump. When Harris doubts or ridicules his stature, his wealth, the size of his crowds, or whatever, he feels compelled to fight back and restore his eminent centrality at once. When the likes of Putin, Kim, Orbán, and the chief Islamist terrorist in Afghanistan bow down before him in even the most blatantly feigned respect, he basks in the glory—and (this is the dangerous part) reciprocates the gesture.

Trump told Orbán (according to Orbán) that the way he’d end the Russia-Ukraine war would be to cut off all military aid to Ukraine. He struck a deal with the Taliban, behind the Kabul government’s back, promising the complete unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He canceled joint military exercises with South Korea in order to please Kim (and Chinese leader Xi Jinping).

Even now, Trump doesn’t think he did anything wrong here.

After showing how deeply she could rattle him with the slightest personal insult, Harris turned the tables and spelled out how deeply others can win him over with the slightest compliment. “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” she said, “because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”

She claimed that if Trump wins in November, Putin would soon after be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, beginning with Poland—and then laid it on thick, with a local spice for viewers in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, where the debate was taking place:

Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator, who would eat you for lunch.

Harris said all this while looking straight at Trump. Many people who have dealt with Trump know this about his vulnerability to flattery, his envy of strongmen, his puzzlingly desperate need for approval and praise. Some of his aides have recounted this compulsion in books they’ve written after leaving office. But it’s quite possible that Harris is the first person ever to say these things straight to his face.

Whatever else people might think of Harris, one way or the other, they can no longer honestly believe that she’s too timid to go toe-to-toe with a bully.