Donald Trump the ‘greatest source of instability’ in Asia, says Australia’s former PM Kevin Rudd

US President Donald Trump “is the greatest source of instability” in Asia, Australia’s former prime minister Kevin Rudd said in a panel discussion that mostly excoriated Trump’s administration for policy missteps that have damaged US relations with China and its allies in the region.

“The President of the United States is the greatest source of instability across the Asia Pacific region because no one knows which way he’s going to jump,” said Rudd, now president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, where the discussion took place.

Rudd singled out “the chaotic nature of the administration’s policy” on North Korea.

“We’ve now had two iterations of [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson being countermanded by the Commander in Chief Donald Trump on his diplomatic initiatives,” first via Twitter in October, after Tillerson held talks in Beijing about efforts to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.

In that tweet, Trump said Tillerson’s efforts to negotiate with China on the subject were “a waste of time”.

Meanwhile, United Nations chief Antonio Guterres on Thursday warned the world against “sleepwalking into war” over North Korea, as he called for diplomatic efforts to banish nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula.

Speaking on a visit to Japan, Guterres said: “The worst possible thing that could happen would be for us all to sleepwalk into a war that might have very dramatic circumstances.”