One perk of being the president of the United States is that you almost never need to be unpleasantly surprised. The largest and most powerful intelligence agencies in the world are at your command, and every day they synthesise everything they’ve found into a single brief, the Presidential Daily Briefing, centred on your priorities. Pretty much anything you want to know, you can know.

That makes it particularly strange that Donald Trump appears in recent weeks to be almost constantly wrongfooted by the reaction of other world leaders to his own high-profile announcements – even by some of his closest personal allies.

Last month, Trump announced what he described as a “monumental” deal that would see the “complete disarmament” of Hamas in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal of troops from the Gaza Strip – the first and long-awaited accomplishment of Trump’s much-vaunted Board of Peace.

Usually, this kind of deal would be announced at a major summit, with lots of pomp and ceremony – and Trump is very fond of pomp and ceremony – but in this case, there was none of that. In fact, Israel seemed to be absent from the announcement altogether. Trump had announced a supposedly historic peace........

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