A wish for 2018: Washington should get its act together

SUGGESTING that America's military allies and trade partners experienced an acute case of anxiety in 2017 would be stating the obvious.

If the election of Donald Trump in 2016 had sent shockwaves around the globe, his inauguration as President in 2017 marked the beginning of a continuing effort by political leaders in world capitals to try to figure out what their new counterpart in Washington was all about and to forecast the direction of his global strategy.

The good news was that the earlier and dire predictions that the new US president, who had campaigned promoting a nationalist and populist agenda, would launch a costly trade war against China and other countries and would withdraw the United States from its security alliances across the Atlantic and the Pacific, not to mention the apocalyptic scenarios envisioning the collapse of the world's financial markets and a global economic recession, did not materialise.