Washington

BY SOME measures, President Donald Trump has altered the perception of American foreign policy more in the past seven days than his predecessors did in the past seven decades.

A nation that built its brand around the world as open to the needy and ambitious is now viewed, after Mr Trump's immigration executive order, as closing its doors in a way it never did even after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. Twenty years of stop-and-go efforts to rebuild a relationship with Mexico - on trade, counter-terrorism and drug interdiction - crashed into an avoidable blowup with the Mexican president, who cancelled his visit to the US.