Iran nuclear deal, China trade negotiations and peace dialogue with North Korea – can Trump deliver on this agenda?
A revolving door of officials coming and going, and most key US negotiators being just weeks in office will limit the US president’s ambitions
The Trump White House is nothing if not hyperactive. The challenge is to gauge what substance – if any – sits behind this hyperactivity.
After three days last week feting French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, and three hours frostily lunching Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, he has less than two weeks to decide on whether to put a bomb under the three-year-old Iran nuclear disarmament deal, or whether to kick the can down the road.
He now has his whole top trade team on a plane to Beijing, to arm-wrestle on tariffs and trade balances and decide whether to plunge the region into a trade war.
He has to open the new American embassy in Jerusalem, and to share celebrations on the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel, on May 14.
And then there is the small matter of preparing for a potentially epoch-making discussion with “rocket man” Kim Jung-un in North Korea.
I can see why he is perhaps relieved not to be invited to the fast-approaching May 19 US-UK “entente cordiale” – the Prince Harry-Meghan Markle wedding. It seems the UK can wait until July.