I’VE always maintained that the foreign policy arena is the place where Donald Trump is most likely to come seriously unstuck. Last weekend, as his immigration ban was making international headlines, another story was breaking that the Trump administration hoped would not come to light in the way it did.

In a botched US Special Forces raid against a suspected al-Qaeda base in Yemen, one American Navy SEAL was killed along with perhaps as many as 30 other people, including 10 women and children. It was, by all accounts, a military operation in which just about everything that could go wrong did.

Presented with the first of what will be many life-or-death decisions, Mr Trump and his closest advisers approved the mission over dinner just days after the presidential inauguration. Among those who gave it the green light was Mr Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special adviser and former Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon, as well as Defence Secretary General Jim Mattis. Already the blame game has started and some US newspapers, the New York Times in particular, have carried quotes from unnamed military sources that appear to shift blame for the mission to Mr Trump and his inner team.

If the accusations prove accurate it would be an extraordinary turn of events whereby Mr Trump approved his first covert counter-terrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup.

That the mission had been prepared under the Obama administration but had not been approved only adds to the considerable conjecture over what some US political observers are calling Mr Trump’s Benghazi. This, of course, is a reference to the 2012 attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city in which four Americans were killed.

That incident was to plague then secretary of state Hillary Clinton for what some described as “reckless” handling of classified information about the incident in her private email server. If, indeed, Mr Trump’s team went ahead without due attention to the dangers and logistics of the mission, it would only add to the belief that this is a commander-in-chief who doesn’t seem to understand the political nature of war or the strategic consequences of politics.

Though barely two weeks into office, Mr Trump is engaging in reckless foreign policy moves that do nothing but provoke or make even worse an already bad situation. Precisely at the moment when a number of looming international crises require deft and clever handling, Mr Trump blunders in making enemies and antagonising allies. Last weekend, having signed an executive order giving the Joint Chiefs of Staff 30 days to devise a plan for destroying the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, Mr Trump then signed another order barring entry to the US for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, or Somalia.

Clearly such an order threatens not only American values but also US security interests. Why? Well, perhaps it has escaped the Trump team’s notice but American armed forces are conducting military operations of one kind of another in all of those seven countries except Iran. Recently, while in Iraq, I saw US troops fighting alongside local soldiers in the battle against IS around the Iraqi city of Mosul. What kind of message does Mr Trump’s order send out to those Iraqis? Help us fight IS but under no circumstances will you be allowed to set foot on American soil because you might yourselves be terrorists.

In the Trump psyche the world is in chaos because America has lost the influence and leverage it once had. Mr Trump’s conclusion is that past US leaders have been bad negotiators who have been too “politically correct” to do what is really needed when it comes to foreign policy. In putting “America first,” he will secure the best deals, he insists. It does not seem to have crossed his mind that his kind of deal making is to diplomacy and geopolitics what KerPlunk is to chess. In Iraq, people tolerate the US military presence in their country because they, too, recognise the need to rid themselves of the terrorist threat that is IS.

Can Iraqis really be expected to continue this tolerance unreservedly, having been told by the US President that they would not be tolerated in America?

Mr Trump even seems determined to rile long standing allies like Australia, haranguing its Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on the phone over a refugee resettlement deal before hanging up on him. To be fair, Mr Trump, according to an aide, was a bit tired at the end of a long day.

Tired or not, again he seemed oblivious to the fact that Australia, is one of the “Five Eyes” (FVEY) alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US that have long been bound by the multilateral UK-USA Agreement for joint cooperation in signals, military and human intelligence.

Not content with having a go at allies, the Trump administration seems hell-bent too on picking new fights. Already he has almost tweeted the US into a war with Iran, putting the country “on notice,” after Tehran test fired a medium-range Khorramshahr missile last weekend.

The fact that the Iranians announced late last year that they were going to conduct such a test mattered nothing to Mr Trump. That the missile launch did not violate the hard-won nuclear deal with Iran had no bearing on his brash, belligerent response.

“Should have been thankful for the terrible deal the US made with them!” he tweeted. “Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the US came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion.”

This is the talk of a real-estate tycoon, not a US president and world leader with a grasp of realpolitik. Sensing these shortcomings, many countries will push Mr Trump to test him out. Already there are signs of that in eastern Ukraine where Russian president Vladimir Putin is gauging Trump’s mettle with volleys of artillery and rockets that have pounded Ukrainian forces in recent days and reignited that frozen conflict.

But, hey, perhaps that crisis is not really such a cause for concern given the two leaders’ apparent political cosiness. Mr Trump’s early foreign policy errors have come from a highly dangerous mixture of hubris and distrust. Around him he has a tight circle of acolytes and the wrong people inside it. The world they will have to address is one where anarchy often prevails, power blocs shift, borders are porous and conflicts are often labyrinthine in their complexity.

The foreign policy arena is one where often there are no winners or losers. It’s a place where sometimes it’s not even clear what “winning” means.

If there are victories they are frequently pyrrhic; otherwise they most often result from diplomacy, not threats. Mr Trump needs to realise this. It’s time for the President and his team to do a foreign policy reality check before things get really out of hand.