Think about it. Heads of government do not normally reveal the texts of private communications from other heads of state. Yet that is what Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway did Sunday, on the first weekend of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the international press would have no difficulty finding appalled foreign leaders to comment.

You could think of this as a hostile act of a statesman appalled that the American head of government does not know that the government of Norway does not decide who gets the Nobel Peace Prize. It is probably better to think of it as an intervention, by a sympathetic observer who has noticed that Donald Trump backs down from untenable positions in response to ructions in political and financial markets.