Will Trump's non-linear and unsettling diplomacy work?

Washington

"PRESENT at the Creation: My Years in the State Department" is the title of the memoir of Dean Acheson, the legendary American diplomat who joined the US Department of State in 1941 and later served as secretary of state under president Harry Truman, at a time when the international system, marked by the disappearance of world powers and empires, the rise of two global superpowers and the development of nuclear weapons, was undergoing a historic transformation.

"The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the 19th century was gone," Mr Acheson wrote. He recognised that the old methods of foreign policy would no longer apply, and helped shape the outlines of US post-World War II strategy and establish a new international order and its multilateral institutions and military alliances, including the United Nations, the World Bank and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), that still remain in place.