BUILDING walls, waterboarding and “black sites”. Welcome to President Donald Trump’s security and foreign policy world barely a week after his inauguration.

Over the years as a foreign correspondent, I’ve seen walls go up and walls come down in the name of reshaping geopolitical landscapes. I was in Berlin in 1989 during the euphoria when East met West, as the coming down of the wall changed the lives of Germans forever, and for the better.

More recently, I watched, too, in Gaza and the West Bank as Israel’s network of barriers, fences and walls made the lives of Palestinians a misery. It has tightened the noose around them, preventing most from connecting with relatives a few miles away let alone the wider world. Advocates of Israel’s wall argue that it has improved security and made its people safer, but what of the wider cost?

As one elderly Palestinian man who lived in the shadow of Israel’s wall once summed it up to me: “If you want security for your house you build the wall in your own garden, not in your neighbour’s.”

Closer to home, Mr Trump might do well to heed the words of his country’s great poet Robert Frost, who once wrote that:

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in our out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.”

The problem with walls is that they don’t work. Rarely has their construction achieved the intended effect. Walling in any people of the world is far removed from being a solution. Instead, it only diverts citizens and politicians from complex core problems.

Creating barriers does nothing to address racial or religious prejudice, economic inequality, migration, displacement, global conflict and environmental decline.

Experience has taught us – though not Mr Trump, sadly – that all or some of these issues surpass the borders and capacities of any given single country. For these reasons, his signing of an executive order for an “impassable physical barrier” between the United States and Mexico and his attack on American “sanctuary cities,” that protect undocumented immigrants within their boundaries will solve little.

Indeed, far from putting “America first”, they will most likely do nothing more than squander resources and result in lost political and diplomatic goodwill and opportunities for the US, both home and away.

Likewise, Mr Trump’s proposed refugee ban which, if not derailed by potential legal challenges, would upend decades of US policy on asylum seekers. Frankly, it will only further complicate the already daunting task the US and others face fighting against jihadist extremists in the Middle East and North Africa,

Not that any of this really matters to Mr Trump, of course. All he is really interested in is playing to his base and being seen to fulfill campaign pledges. Unity and its creation do not figure in the Trump psyche. The dark portrait of a crumbling America he depicted in his inauguration speech was yet another reminder of this. So far, the only unity Mr Trump has succeeded in creating is that of the disparate key institutions railing against him, be they rights activists or the CIA.

Just as walls don’t work in terms of solving geopolitical problems, similarly torture is not the answer to his intelligence community’s fight against Islamist-inspired extremists.

According to Mr Trump, because these extremists are “chopping off the heads of our people and other people,” the time has come to fight “fire with fire”. Or, to put it another way, resort to similar barbarity in response. As any beginner’s guide to terrorism points out, the very nature of the threat feeds off such a big-stick approach. America’s latest president is not known to be much of a reader. If he were, a cursory glance at his country’s military history would have taught him that a certain predecessor, George Washington, knew a long time ago that torture rarely delivers the desired strategic results.

As a general during the Revolutionary War, Washington vowed, unlike the British who tortured their captives, that America as a new nation would distinguish itself by its humanity toward enemy combatants.

It was a moral as well as a practical decision, resulting in better morale among American soldiers and fomenting desertion among British and Hessian troops from Germany hired by the British to help in the fight.

Today Mr Trump talks of us not “playing on an even field” when dealing with the likes of Islamic State (IS) Group terrorists. He’s right in that we’re not playing on a level field. This should not mean that, in combatting terrorism, it’s appropriate or wise to move over to what former vice-president Dick Cheney called “the dark side,” of brutal detention and interrogation techniques such as waterboarding.

We all know from the last few years where this takes us and the spiral of eye-for-an-eye atrocities that it inevitably invokes.

Having witnessed up close the kind of hideous acts extremists like IS are capable of, I flag up this warning not just from a moral position but a tactical one, too. Seriously useful intelligence has rarely been gleaned from the deployment of such techniques.

Overwhelming evidence shows that torture not only produces false intelligence; it also increases the risk that captured soldiers will themselves be tortured and undermines discipline and moral authority on the battlefield.

Indeed, the in-depth report published in 2014 by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush era drew just such conclusions.

Admittedly, this is a massive document, so is unlikely to have caught the eye of a president who, by all accounts, can barely bring himself to read a few pages of daily intelligence briefings.

We are barely a week into Mr Trump’s presidency and already the signs are of a leader who seems hell-bent on dismantling some of the platforms of democracy in the name of putting “America first”.

In going down that political path the Trump “vision” is not driven by optimism, despite his own claims to the contrary.

Instead, as the walls, waterboarding, black sites and “sanctuary cities” all point to, this is an Orwellian dystopia of a presidency, predicated on anger, fear, and resentment.

Faced with this, it would be easy for those Americans and others who oppose the Trump presidency to despair.

But they should take heart. All the early signs, unedifying and disquieting as they are, point to political conduct that will make it ever harder for him to continue as he appears to want to.

What drives Mr Trump as an individual and has taken him to the US presidency will also be his undoing. It might even happen sooner than many people think.