A torrent of abrupt US policy reversals, resets and revisions since Donald Trump returned to the White House last month has left America’s friends and enemies struggling to keep up. Trump’s desire both to upend and dominate the established international order, and in particular his undermining of the postwar transatlantic alliance, is feeding talk of a watershed moment akin to 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled an end to the cold war.

His behaviour has strengthened a consensus, current among western politicians, diplomats and analysts, that the world is reaching a turning point, that the UN-led, rules-based, multilateralist system is crumbling, and that a new era of great power imperialism fuelled by authoritarianism, hyper-nationalism and left- and rightwing populism is unfolding.

Trump’s “America first” approach – self-interested, transactional, overtly commercial and untroubled by principled considerations of justice, international law and human rights – reflects and entrenches this changed world. When his ill-informed, consistently wrong-headed instincts collide with the harsh realities of specific international issues, problems predictably arise. Gaza is a case in point. Trump imperiously ordered the freeing of all Israeli hostages, and was ignored. Then he set an arbitrary deadline, which jeopardised the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire. He also proposed a US takeover of Gaza and the mass expulsion of Palestinians – an illegal, unworkable idea supported only by the Israeli far right. His noisy posturing makes things worse. All key issues remain unresolved.

The incoherence and disdain for facts that........

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