The Palestinians have seen the president in all his facets. “Trump was so agitated at the Bethlehem meeting, shouting, accusing Abbas of incitement, saying Abbas was not the nice man he’d believed — it was awful,” Muhammad Shtayyeh, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, told me. “But at their next meeting in September, things were fine. Then, all of a sudden, we get this unilateral Jerusalem measure that sabotages everything. So, for us, what sort of message is the president sending?”

One year into the Trump presidency, a lot of people around the world are asking that question. A nation of erratic disruption and “America First” belligerence has supplanted the underwriter of the post-1945 global order. The multilateral institutions of that order — from the United Nations to NATO — are mistrusted by the president. A void has opened up. Neither chaos nor China has quite filled it yet. In Gramsci’s words, written between the 20th century’s two global conflagrations, “The old is dying, and the new cannot be born.”

Trump’s universe is a place of dread, not deals. If there was no catastrophe in the first year, the possibility of one in the second was ratcheted up, from North Korea to Iran. In the National Security Strategy published in December, the subheading under “Diplomacy and Statecraft” is “Competitive Diplomacy” — not cooperation. Money is apparently no object to ensure “weapons systems that clearly overmatch” in “lethality.” Diplomacy, by contrast, requires “efficient use of limited resources.” The evisceration of the State Department and big increases in military budgets reflect Trump’s mind-set.

His nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea seems to involve a belief that nuclear war might just be feasible as a means, short of a blood bath, to bloody Kim Jong-un’s nose. That — and I’m being charitable — is hard to imagine. Limited nuclear war is a near oxymoron. It is not inconceivable, however, especially if Trump begins to feel cornered by the Russia investigation and in need of a foreign policy surprise. New lower-yield nuclear weapons, whose threshold for use might be lower, are contemplated in the Pentagon’s draft Nuclear Posture Review. The surprise could also come with Iran. The president’s foolish undermining of the Iran nuclear deal is perverse. If North Korea could have been stopped short of a bomb, as Iran has been, even Trump’s White House would be happy.

But Trump is deaf to reason. He talks of revived American greatness. Yet, as president, he has not set foot in California, where American technology and innovation create companies that capture the world’s imagination. All that interests him is that Californians tend to dislike him. Disrespect, whether domestic or foreign, is intolerable to him.