Donald Trump has already kept one campaign promise: he has made American diplomacy more difficult to read.
In the past few days he has called the Nato military alliance both “obsolete” and “very important”, defied presidential norms by commenting on the value of the dollar in relation to trade, and undermined Washington’s decades-old adherence to Beijing’s “One China” policy by inviting a representative from Taiwan to his inauguration.
Such contradictory and convention-defying positions, as well as his apparent policy differences with several of his incoming cabinet nominees, have at least fulfilled a campaign call for the US to “be more unpredictable” in its dealings with other nations.