The United States' foreign friends and partners had hoped that as the new US President, Donald Trump might temper the aggressive rhetoric he employed when campaigning, and that somehow, as one commentator put it, "the trailer would turn out to be worse than the movie".

Many must have been disappointed therefore by an inaugural speech variously described as divisive, isolationist and pessimistic in headlines at home and across the world.

Setting aside the tradition of inaugural presidential appeals to hope and unity, Donald Trump presented a dystopian vision of the US in which, amid widespread poverty and crime, there are "rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation."