President Trump has chosen to take sides in the sectarian proxy wars between Sunni states and Iran that are killing hundreds of thousands, uprooting millions and are exporting terror overseas. A leading Middle East analyst takes a critical look at the emerging US policy in the region / By David Gardner

Whichever of Donald Trump’s courtiers came up with the idea of a whistle-stop tour of the three Abrahamic religions for his first foreign trip – Saudi Arabia, where Islam was born, Israel-Palestine, the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, and Rome, where Catholicism, the largest Christian faith, is headquartered in the Holy See and headed by probably the most charismatic figure on the world stage – the President must have thought it a neat wheeze. True, this most erratic of US leaders has had a stormy relationship with all three faiths. 

His election campaign last year dripped with Islamophobia. “Islam hates us,” he said. Twice since taking office only the American courts have thwarted attempts to ban Muslims from entering the country. His scatter-gun xenophobia, crystallised in his plan to build a wall along the southern border to keep out Mexicans – and to make Mexico pay for it – drew a sharp rebuke from Pope Francis, who called it “not Christian”. 

Trump has promised to be the “most pro-Israel president ever”. Yet he employs as chief strategist Steve Bannon, a white supremacist who made space for dog-whistle anti-Semitism as the editor of the “alt-Right” Breitbart News. Still, even with his notoriously short attention span, Trump will doubtless have grasped the potential to package his trip as some sort of peace mission, at a moment when swathes of the Middle East are being torn to ribbons and the survival of Christianity in the lands of its birth and earliest adherents could be in question (as the latest jihadi massacre of Copts in Egypt last week chillingly reminds us).