On Friday this week Kevin Rudd wrote an analysis of China's potential response to the incoming Trump administration, noting that what Beijing feared most was uncertainty.
The following day the president-elect's transition team issued a jaunty statement confirming that Donald Trump had arbitrarily upended 35 years of careful American diplomacy by speaking on the phone with the President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, conceivably putting the United States on a path that ends in direct confrontation with China over one of the most explosive geopolitical flashpoints on earth.
It is difficult to exaggerate how significant - and how provocative - this action was. China considers Taiwan to be a rogue province and has declared that it would go as far as using military force to prevent Taiwanese independence. The US has for a generation danced a careful dance in support of Taiwan. It is the de facto guarantor of Taiwanese defence, but it does not recognise Taiwan as an independent state. No US leader has officially spoken with a Taiwanese president in decades.
Into this fraught diplomatic charade, Trump bounded this week. After the Financial Times newspaper discovered that Trump had made the call, the President-elect's transition team confirmed that he had spoken with Tsai and "noted the close economic, political, and security ties" between Taiwan and the US.
Ever since Trump's election victory diplomats and specialists around the world have struggled to understand the implications for global security, even as Trump himself muddied the waters further with his own round of phone calls, calls made free of the careful planning and support of State Department experts who normally help script such high-level exchanges.
As The New York Times reported on Friday, he has unnerved diplomats by voicing his admiration for the despotic leader of Kazakhstan and said that he hoped to visit Pakistan, a nation carefully avoided by Barack Obama for the past eight years. He held a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with his daughter sitting in and told British Prime Minister Theresa May to look him up should she ever find herself in the US.
The Philippines government said on Friday that Trump had invited the country's President, Rodrigo Duterte, to visit the White House next year during a call between the two men.
Duterte has threatened to scrap his country's alliance with the US as he ramps up his diplomacy with China and earlier this year called Obama "a son of a whore".
The White House has all but begged Trump to take advice from the State Department.
"President Obama benefited enormously from the advice and expertise that's been shared by those who serve at the State Department," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. "I'm confident that as President-elect Trump takes office, those same State Department employees will stand ready to offer him advice as he conducts the business of the United States overseas. Hopefully he'll take it."
But the call with Taiwan is a concern of a different order. A 2015 US Defence Department briefing notes that, "preparing for potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait remains the focus and primary driver of China's military investment." In December last year the US sold $US1.83 billion worth of arms to Taiwan, its first such sale in four years.
It's long been thought that if the world's existing superpower ever goes to war with the world's rising superpower, it is likely to be over this issue.
Even more unsettling, it is impossible for observers to gauge what Trump's intent is, if any.
Were they studying another leader analysts could look to his or her political record or guiding world view. Trump has neither. They could seek to locate his actions in the broader outlook of his political party. Trump is an outsider.
Is Trump blundering? Is he deliberately challenging China? Does he want to open a golf course somewhere? Nobody knows.
At least one leading analyst appears to be signalling to the Chinese that Trump simply does not know what he is doing and should not be taken seriously.
"It would be a mistake for Beijing and others to overinterpret the meaning of a phone call between president-elect Trump and the president of Taiwan," Dennis Wilder, a former top White House Asia adviser during the George W, Bush administration, told the Financial Times.
He said that Trump was "not steeped in the diplomatic history of US-China relations and probably has not been briefed by the Department of State on the US-China understandings on our unofficial ties to Taiwan.
"We are in uncharted territory with Trump foreign policy, and nations should give him some latitude as he forms his foreign policy team."
In other words, as Trump begins to make his own mark on the world order, the most positive interpretation of his actions to date is that he has no idea what he is doing, and is taking no advice as he does it.
