HE has become the volte-face President. A leader who within 100 days of taking office has abandoned his pledge to pursue non-interventionist policies and now readily wields the big baton of global policeman. Even before he was elected US President, regular readers of this column might recall my warning of where a Donald Trump foreign policy might lead. Little, however,could I have imagined that so soon after the creation of the Trump administration, the United States would be staring down the barrel of confrontation with North Korea.

The current stand-off with Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons programme is of course only one of many crises that Mr Trump’s foreign policy – or lack of it – has exacerbated. I really don’t buy the arguments of those who say, so far so good, when it comes to the Trump administration’s response to the various global crises that have tested it to date. Indeed I’m baffled as to the plaudits Mr Trump has won in some quarters over his decision to order a Cruise missile strike against Syria, following what appeared to have been another chemical weapons attack by the regime of Bashar al-Assad on his own people.

There is another danger here. Mr Trump is clearly a narcissist who craves praise, especially by the media. Those plaudits he received for launching that missile strike on Syria will most likely only encourage him to do the same again. Almost inevitably he will draw the conclusion that the political benefits of belligerence outweigh the risks to global stability.

Just what, precisely, was achieved by that US missile strike, apart from triggering a destabilising confrontation with Russia? Has it actually given those Syrian civilians caught in the crosshairs of the Damascus regime’s firepower any more of a guarantee that they will not again be targeted?

I would be among the first to accept that the al-Assad regime needs to know unequivocally that the deployment of such weapons is unacceptable. But without an accompanying diplomatic strategy as follow-up, the US missile strike is nothing more than military posturing.

Bombing a single airstrip does not a foreign policy make. This is the core weakness and potential danger of the Trump foreign policy approach. While his administration is manoeuvring to master the art of military posturing, it hasn’t necessarily determined how to get what it wants.

In the meantime along the way, foes and allies alike have found themselves shunted into a maelstrom of expanding strategic and geopolitical instability. No one, be they on Washington’s side or not, knows which way Mr Trump is going to jump. For allies, enemies and observers alike he is a wild card.

All the more worrying then to hear Britain’s own resident political narcissist, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, fall into line behind Mr Trump in saying it would be very difficult for the UK to refuse the US if it asked for support in another military strike on Syria. What Britain could conceivably gain from such a wanton endorsement of Washington’s erratic approach to the Middle East right now is anybody’s guess.

Mr Trump himself has said that America needs to be more “unpredictable”. But it is the predictability of what he is doing rather than the unpredictability that is currently giving real cause for concern.

Far from putting “America first” through an isolationist approach as his election campaign slogan promised, it is a military-first strategy that now lies at the heart of his foreign policy agenda . For the moment at least his administration appears to have reverted to a dangerous dependence on the military.

At home, Mr Trump has proposed cutting the State Department and foreign aid budgets by one-third to fund a $54 billion increase in the military budget.

Putting aside the missile strike on Syria and the scarystand-off with North Korea, his track record to date elsewhere in terms of military interventionism is also very discomfiting. Right now US military commanders have “total authorisation” from the President to pretty much do what they feel needs doing anywhere. Not only has Mr Trump loosened the Obama-era strictures on military operations, he has approved more aggressive and riskier counter-terrorism raids. Only recently he made clear that his commanders in the field now need no prior approval from Washington to deploy powerful weapons like the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (Moab) that was dropped on a base used by Islamic State (IS) extremists in Afghanistan. Against those same IS jihadists too he has also allowed US Central Command to delegate responsibility downward when it comes to calling in airstrikes.

There are those, of course, who will say that it’s high time the military were given such powers, and that unhindered they can get on more effectively with their job. The political risks associated with such an approach, however, are enormous, especially when no tangible sense of accompanying diplomacy is anywhere to be seen.

“The President has managed to accomplish at least one big thing in his first 100 days: the once unthinkable is now unremarkable,” wrote one American commentator recently in the highly respected magazine Foreign Policy. How true that observation is.

Therein, too, lies the real danger of a world becoming complacent about the direction of political travel the US President is taking right now. There is no doubt that his foreign policy process remains deeply dysfunctional. Discipline and cohesion are not his administration’s strongest suit.

As one American political scholar once pointed out, no presidential election campaign vision of what you’re going to do ever completely survives the encounter with a world that has a mind of its own. In terms of foreign policy strategy Mr Trump is learning that lesson the hard way right now. But in turning the generals loose he might simultaneously just be unleashing the dogs of war, be it over Syria, North Korea or Iran.

One hundred days into Donald Trump’s presidency he is doubtless hoping such a muscular military strategy will portray him as the tough guy he likes to think he is, while at the same time bringing about just political rewards. Those rewards though, remain far outweighed by the myriad risks involved.