So it is rather startling to be told that a US presidency just months old not only has a plan to deal with this, but that it is already "working", as Kori Schake put it in Foreign Policy.

One could write this off as another instance of Trump supporters' belief in the self-fulfilling power of advance publicity - famously vindicated by his election as President, but which has since hit rather choppier waters with his "beautiful" health care plan, "brilliant" phone call to the Taiwanese president and the travel ban that was "working out very nicely".

But there is a far deeper problem here than an administration struggling to get out of second gear.

In his piece applauding the Taiwan phone call, Marc Thiessen - a loud supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and torture under the second Bush administration - used the phrase "Lilliputian diplomatic threads" to describe long-standing US policy settings towards Beijing and Taipei.

This idea of the US as an unjustly constrained "Gulliver" enjoyed a vogue in the earliest days of George W. Bush's presidency, leading to a disregard for environmental treaties and the United Nations in general as well as a rush to war in the Middle East which many US allies counselled against.

Those who want to roll out the "Mission Accomplished" banner for Trump should recall those days. They should also think carefully about four key questions before calling Trump's actions on the Middle East so far a "strategy".

1. The question of rights

"The White House is less conflicted than the Obama administration about authoritarian tendencies, civilian casualties, and domestic human rights records of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other countries," Schake tells us. "Stable states working with us to stamp out terrorism is this administration's priority for the Middle East." Even Syria's Assad regime is to be left in place in the name of stability.

The foreign minister of one of these "stable states" put it rather more succinctly: "He doesn't like Iran. He wants to do business, and he's not going to tell us how to do business inside of our country."

Making Arabia Stable Again doesn't have quite the ring of another famous Trump slogan, but it does capture the nostalgia many American policymakers feel for a time before the invasion of Iraq and the "Arab Spring".

"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region ... and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course," Condoleezza Rice told an audience in Cairo in 2005.

What the course was never became entirely clear, but it certainly didn't seem to work. Barack Obama too vacillated on this question, backing the calls of protesters for democracy in Egypt in 2011 before switching back to arming a military coup's leader in the name of national security.

What is now being proposed is a bit like Trump's narrative of firing up the coal industry and manufacturing again - returning to a past American posture without any indication that times and conditions have changed.

The administration recently swept aside human rights concerns to approve the sale of F-16s to Bahrain. But a real indication of how far it is willing to go to restore the status quo ante will come with this week's visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has thousands of civilians in jail for participating in pro-democracy protests.

As any Australian who watched the trial of Peter Greste knows, the rule of law in Egypt is a malignant farce. Much more importantly, there is no proof at all that subjecting more and more people to this kind of treatment does in fact create states that are stable. Rather, when people see no chance of working within constitutional and political norms for reform, increased extremism and violent breakdowns in state order become more and more likely.

The President, who is America First in all things, is unlikely to raise these sorts of issues with his guest. Yet failure to do so guarantees that the US will be faced with further problems down the track.

2. The question of borders

Donald Trump is of course famous for his commitment to borders and sovereignty, as manifested in his wall on the frontier with Mexico and his repeated attempts to institute a travel ban.

While Schake sees Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's meeting with a coalition to fight Islamic State as proof of his attention to the needs of Middle Eastern allies, I couldn't help wondering about the thoughts of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who joined Tillerson on stage for the event.

The first travel ban would have directly targeted Iraqis, regardless of their political affiliations. The second left them unscathed.

This bipolar approach cannot have gone unnoticed by other nations in the region, and in the absence of explicit detail about future strategy (which Trump is temperamentally disinclined to give) it will give them pause.

Moreover, if Trump genuinely does care about stable states, then the borderlessness of the Middle East today should appal him.

Turkey is conducting military operations in Syria, Egypt has bombarded Libya and both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have sent troops into Bahrain and conducted indiscriminate air strikes in Yemen. This is before we discuss the enormous refugee flows that these overlapping conflicts have created.

Is the Trump administration prepared to take a clear stand on the importance of borders in the Middle East? Or will it decry some incursions while overlooking others?

3. The question of Islamism

Perhaps the strongest endorsement Trump could give to Sisi at their meeting would be to follow his lead in outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood. This would be in keeping with his Breitbart-fuelled campaign rhetoric and would also mark the realisation of a dream long held by Christian hardliners in the Republican Party.

However as recent State Department advice has pointed out, a sweeping ban on the movement would in fact destabilise the Middle East, since branches of the Brotherhood have elected MPs sitting in the parliaments of Jordan, Tunisia and Yemen, to name just three.

Those movements on the spectrum of Islamism (or political Islam, as it is sometimes known) that make a commitment to be bound by the rules of democratic process must be encouraged rather than persecuted. They represent a genuine challenge to anti-democratic Islamists such as Islamic State, who recently devoted the cover of their magazine Dabiq to damning "The Murtadd (apostate) Brotherhood".

The alternative is that a class of political pariahs will be created across the region, undermining faith in politics and swelling the ranks of militancy. Indeed, one of the grandfathers of jihadism, the Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, recently expressed the hope that Trump would move ahead with a Brotherhood ban.

The US President shows little sign of caring for such distinctions. Trump has a penchant for use of the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism", though his new National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has reportedly urged him to drop that term from speeches.

The question is whether Trump will feel more inclined to the approach of his old national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who saw Turkey's Islamic Gulen Movement as a threat to US security and recommended the extradition of its "radical" leader Fethullah Gulen. He currently lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania and is the prime target of the Turkish president's ire.

It has since emerged that even while working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Flynn was being paid by Turkish businessmen to push their government's line. It is not impossible that Egyptian businessmen also have this sort of access to Trump Tower. Can the counsel of career diplomats and servicemen prevail in such circumstances?

4. The question of Iran

Schake tells us that one of the pillars of the new, "working" strategy from the Trump White House is "laying the foundation for an anti-Iran coalition once the IS problem has been solved". Yet in the same analysis we are told that "Russia is to be palliated, their interests supported".

In the words of "Scarborough Fair", we seem to have found an acre of land between the salt water and the sea strand.

Let's be quite clear: the objectives which Schake proclaims as Trump's priorities - defeating IS in Iraq and in Syria, while leaving Bashar al-Assad in charge in Damascus - are also the priorities of Iran, for which its soldiers are fighting and dying on the ground in both countries.

But beyond these immediate military objectives, there is a much longer-term alliance between Moscow and Tehran which makes it almost impossible to see how a Trump administration can oppose and antagonise the latter while "palliating" the former. The strongest manifestation of that alliance is the nuclear deal signed by Iran and six world powers, including Russia, which Trump has repeatedly described as "terrible".

It is notable that Trump no longer talks about ripping the deal up, but if he did return the US to its traditional position of outright hostility to the Islamic Republic he would for once in his life be on the same page as Arizona senator John McCain, who made "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" into a refrain on the campaign trail in 2007.

The problem is that Iran is not a mythological beast from graphic novels or Purim rituals that can be slain or exorcised but a nation of over 77 million people that sits on the crossroads between the Middle East and Central Asia. Any policy that seeks to unite the dictatorships of the Middle East against it won't contribute to stability - it will simply see destabilising forces flow in a different direction.

Under Barack Obama, who pursued the nuclear deal with Iran while arming the Sunni monarchies, it was often difficult to see the way forward. But should Trump opt for this new-old approach wedded to destruction and demonisation, it may well become impossible.

Maher Mughrabi is Foreign Editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.