To his admirers, Donald Trump is playing 3- or 4-D chess with such aplomb that they can always identify a considered strategy behind his seemingly baffling foreign policy gambits. Usually, China is the bad guy that the US President is seeking to harm or isolate.

Hence, the theory goes that Trump has been pressurising Ukraine for over a year to settle with Russia and give up a large chunk of its cherished sovereign territory in order to drag President Vladimir Putin into America’s friendly orbit – thereby isolating China. Checkmate.

Or, in the case of Iran, that Trump decided to launch an all-out attack on the Islamic Republic, partly because the regime exports 90 per cent of its oil to China. Choking off this supply would damage the People’s Republic economically, giving the US another win.

There has been so much of this “winning” under Trump that Americans truly have grown “tired” of it, as indeed he promised they would for rather different reasons. There is no far-sighted master chess strategy at work.

The most consistent guide to Trump’s outlook on the world is that he loves dictators, has cosied up to Putin for years and has never been seriously hostile to China. He envies Xi Jinping, a........

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