I READ recently that tuning into the news these days is like stepping into a rolling panic attack. The writer has a point. Our world, it seems, is awash with dystopian visions of anarchy and disorder.

There was no better example this past week than the grainy CCTV image of a woman wearing a white T-shirt with the letters “LOL” written on the front who Malaysian police say is a suspect in the killing of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam.

Surreal as the image of the girl in the T-shirt is, it was only part of an equally nightmarish story in which there are few laughs – and another bizarre twist in the saga of the North Korea's ruling family. Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son and a black sheep of the family, was killed by female assassins most likely on the orders of youngest son and paranoid dictator Kim Jong-un.

In North Korea itself of course few ordinary citizens will know little if anything about this. There, the Kim clan can do no wrong. This is a place where the country’s leaders are practically deified. Indeed, according to official accounts, Kim Jong-il, the now-deceased father of current leader Kim Jong-un, is said to have been born beneath a double rainbow, and his earthly arrival caused a new star to appear in the cosmos.

In a country where there is a government ban on sarcasm and mandatory haircut styles, it’s hard to top such stories, but last week’s assassination, might just have pulled it off.

Only yesterday, Malaysian police confirmed they had arrested a North Korean man in connection with the murder, the fourth suspect to be arrested in the investigations surrounding the killing in Kuala Lumpur last week.

If up until now most ordinary North Koreans will have been blissfully unaware of such murky goings-on, then they won’t be for much longer. According to the South Korean online news outlet The ChosunIlbo, psychological operatives from the South Korean military will use their tried and trusted method of relaying such news to North Koreans. Some time soon this will involve lining up ultra-powerful loudspeakers along the strictly demarcated border with the North and blasting news of the assassination into the country.

By all accounts, this is not a new technique. For years, South Koreans have sporadically cranked up these speakers to transmit inconvenient facts to their northern counterparts. Crude it might be, but effective it certainly is.

In some ways it’s not that much different from the way US President Donald Trump uses Twitter or his average press conference.

If one man hogs our dystopian headlines right now, it’s the recently elected 45th President of the United States. If he sneezes it makes a story, but most worryingly he’s doing much more than that.

Trump’s election is only the latest but perhaps most dramatic manifestation of a moment of staggering global transformation and volatility. There are few places these days where people don’t find themselves talking about Trump.

As Andrew Sullivan writing in the New York Magazine rightly points out, Trump’s presidency seems to be affecting everyone. If you happen to be American and not a Trump supporter that effect is even more keenly felt.

"This is a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near panic these past few months," Sullivan wrote last week. "It is not so much this president’s agenda. That always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge," Sullivan wrote, expressing the views of many disillusioned Americans and others.

"There is no anchor any more. At the core of the administration of the most powerful country on earth, there is, instead, madness,” he concluded.

That "madness" was manifest last week in Trump’s first solo press conference. Trump’s entire 77 minutes on the podium were a sustained attack on the media and an aggressive defence of his chaotic administration’s actions.

As ever there was no shortage of remarks by Trump that were immediately disproved, and at times his responses went beyond the pale. Among his startling and wholly inaccurate observations was that his electoral college victory this past November was the biggest since Ronald Reagan’s. This is untrue. Trump said he was fine with WikiLeaks because it never leaked classified information. This is false.

During the session he also shouted down an Orthodox Jewish reporter who asked him about rising anti-Semitism. It was, said Trump, “a very insulting question".

Then there was Trump’s insistence that the alternative to getting along with Russia could be “nuclear holocaust".

One that “would be like no other … they’re a very powerful nuclear country and so are we,” he said by way of bizarre explanation.

Berating journalists and boasting without any basis that, “there has never been a presidency that’s done so much in such a short period of time", Trump’s performance was anything but presidential. Instead here was a man “confidently unhinged”, as one reporter subsequently put it.

The naive hope that Trump’s election victory would herald some degree of moderation has been dispelled by his conduct during these early days in office. Right now he stands at the epicentre of a troubled world stirring up only more divisiveness, fear and uncertainty. All politicians tell lies, but Trump’s lies are different.

“They are direct refutations of reality, and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum, says Andrew Sullivan.

“They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission," wrote Sullivan in his recent New York Magazine piece entitled The Madness of King Donald.

Few have broached the debate about Trump’s mental health, but increasingly politicians, writers and expert medical practitioners are facing up to some serious and uncomfortable questions.

This month, Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, went so far as to say he was considering proposing legislation that would require a White House psychiatrist.

On one level debate over Trump’s mental fitness is of course nothing new, and existed even before his election, last November. More worrying is the number of mental health experts who are joining the chorus of concern.

In December, a Huffington Post article featured a letter written by three prominent psychiatry professors that cited President Trump’s “grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality” as evidence of his mental instability.

In the most recent expression of worry, 35 mental health professionals in a letter to The New York Times warned that the “grave emotional instability” indicated in Trump's speech and actions made him “incapable of serving safely as president”.

Some have gone as far as to suggest that Trump has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

According to the magazine Psychology Today, people with this condition often show signs of grandiosity and lack of empathy for other people and a need for admiration. They believe themselves to be superior and struggle with criticism and defeat.

While concern is being expressed about Trump’s mental health, most professionals in the field have refrained from making public statements following a self-imposed principle known as the “Goldwater rule”, adopted by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1973.

It says that psychiatrists can discuss mental health issues with the news media, but that it is unethical for them to diagnose mental illnesses in people they have not examined and whose consent they have not received.

It was instated after a magazine asked thousands of experts in 1964 whether Republican nominee Barry Goldwater was psychologically fit to be president.

All these questions over Trump’s mental fitness for office aside, what is abundantly clear and evident is the chaos within his administration and the profound impact this is having on foreign policy issues. This is already having a disruptive impact on international geopolitical equilibrium.

Few would deny that the United States plays a necessary, if not always likeable, role in carrying a large portion of the burden of creating and maintaining order at the global level.

With his “America First” campaign, this is a role that Trump has often vociferously questioned, and continues to undermine. Not content with already being at "war" with its own intelligence community at home, the Trump administration is already bear baiting nations and leaders abroad.

Top of the list of any potential conflagration is a conflict with Iran. Tensions have already risen to worrying levels between Tehran, Israel, and America’s other regional allies. There are other potential flash points too, like the South China Sea and of course North Korea. Should Trump continue to govern as he campaigned, he risks unravelling the US-led alliances and institutions that have underpinned security and prosperity for the West since the Second World War.

For precisely that reason many western leaders will take some relief from yesterday’s speech by US vice-president Mike Pence, who told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference the US will be “unwavering” in its support for Nato.

That said, Pence also made the point that European countries were “failing to pay their fair share” on defence and that failure “erodes the foundation of our alliance,” remarks that will leave many uneasy.

Pence’s comments come too amid the huge controversy in the US over ties between the Trump administration and Russia, and concern in Europe over whether the new administration would attempt to restrain Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Such uncertainty only adds to an already fragile world that is seriously testing international diplomacy on so many levels.

That much was evident too last week during Trump’s press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At one point Trump might just as well have been singing the children’s song: “One potato, two potato,” as tried to explain his position on a one-state or two-state option regarding the Israel-Palestine issue.

Speaking in near riddles during another toe-curling press conference performance, Trump’s inability to convey any real understanding of the complex Israel-Palestine issue, let alone realise the vacuity of what he was proposing, beggared belief.

“I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like,” Trump said elliptically. “I can live with either one.”

Yes, maybe Trump can live with either solution, that, however, doesn’t mean to say the Israelis or Palestinians can do the same. If history has taught us anything with regards to this seemingly intractable Middle East problem it’s that much.

Casting a glance across the world news headlines this past week one is overwhelmingly struck by the levels of chaos, violence and uncertainty that prevail.

From terrorist bombings in Pakistan to poison pen wielding assassins in Malaysia, a US President whose competency is seriously in question to international diplomatic stand-offs, these are volatile and uncertain times.

Hardly surprising then that dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale dominate the best-seller lists.

It’s said that Yeats’s chilling poem The Second Coming was quoted more in 2016 than in any other year in three decades as commentators came to terms with the world around us. The coming few years its lines are likely to be invoked even more:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Welcome to the new world disorder.