What do we make of the Oval Office meltdown that led to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky being politically ambushed and then rushed out of the White House? How do we best interpret Donald Trump's rude, bullying behaviour, reinforced by his trusty sidekick Vice President JD Vance?
The incident, which was televised and quickly went viral on social media, raises serious questions about where America is right now and where it is going. The bar of common decency has been lowered to a new low. Is this kind of raw, shock-and-awe treatment the new normal for US diplomatic relations going forward?
Henry Kissinger famously put to use Richard Nixon's mercurial nature to browbeat diplomatic subjects into submission, in what became known as the madman theory.
Kissinger counselled his diplomatic partners not to provoke the unpredictable wrath of his easily angered boss. The idea was to present President Nixon as being so irrational and so volatile, that the safest course of action was to get in line with the US line. Otherwise, who knows what would happen?
Mr Trump, in keeping with his needy tendency to steal the show in any encounter, and his brusque penchant to appear unremittingly tough in a showdown, is at once easy to trigger and hard to predict, a black box impervious to logical reasoning. He's a one-man, madman team in action.
Western leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer recently made pilgrimages to the White House, the ostensible centre of Western power, if not world power, to defend their respective national interests by showing they could "handle" the unpredictable Trump.
Mr Macron chose to be obsequious in manner, stroking the big man's big ego, playing his part as smooth as an actor would, in order to disarm Mr Trump's reactive tendency to swing back. Diplomatic historians will argue whether Mr Macron's visit was a success or failure, but he got a few words in edgewise, and even a factual correction, which Mr Trump promptly dismissed with a wave of the hand, but speaking up quietly might be construed as a small victory in itself.
UK Prime Minister Starmer's "audience" with Mr Trump also involved a great deal of planning in order that he not be made to look the fool in front of a president whose favourite catchphrase from his television days was, "You're fired!"
The Guardian reported a British official explaining the situation as such: "We're well prepared but also aware that absolutely anything could happen. Trump is so mercurial…So it's rather fraught."
Once such fraught moment was captured during the question-and-answer session, when Mr Trump interrupted Mr Starmer's response to a question about Canada, a sovereign state about which Mr Trump has repeatedly made the cringe-worthy suggestion that is in need of US annexation.
"That's enough!" Mr Trump said, shutting up the British Prime Minister mid-sentence and moving on to the next question.
If the stakes are high for putative allies from Europe, who share many common Western values with the US and are presumably good at "reading" Mr Trump, what can Asian leaders expect when they come face-to-face with a chauvinistic "America First" president?
The Oval Office debacle with Mr Zelensky, who held his own in a rather admirable fashion despite the pile-on by Mr Trump, Mr Vance and pro-Trump reporters, was a failure for US peace efforts and proof, if proof be needed, that Mr Trump is not the master diplomat and dealmaker he pretends to be.
With such an immodest man, it's all about him and the whims of the moment. This reactive egotism makes for great television, as Mr Trump himself pointed out immediately afterwards, but it also shows the leader of the free world, if such a thing can be said to exist, to be petty, thin-skinned and mean-spirited. If his massive ego is not sufficiently stroked, he's apt to act badly.
Most summits are heavy on protocol, pomp and circumstance, allowing for little spontaneity. Even direct diplomatic engagements on the side are bound by convention and mutually agreed upon ways of conducting discourse.
The rulebook has been tossed aside. Mr Trump's disrespectful and disruptive antics might make for good television, but it's also a new force to be reckoned with.
Under the spotlight of the world, the US leader acts like the don of a criminal enterprise, eager for fawning compliments from those who want to kiss the ring of power, and dismissing with prejudice, often in threatening tones, anyone who fails to please him for whatever reason.
With a possible Trump-Xi summit under discussion for later this year, China's diplomatic corps will have to work overtime to get this one right. Previous meetings between the two men are an unreliable guide, for Mr Trump is not the man he was during his first presidency. Now emboldened by a second win, and a lucky escape from assassination attempt, Mr Trump acts as if the world is putty in his hands to shape as he likes. He exudes the cocky confidence of a man who thinks he can do no wrong.
Mr Trump's antics were disruptive enough the first time around, but the collateral damage was minor in comparison to what a vengeful Trump, supported by a rabid, rapid-action team of righteous zealots, is capable of now.
The growling, groveling, unstatesman-like behaviour of Vice-President Vance makes Mr Trump's mild-mannered ex-VP Mike Pence look like a master statesman in comparison. Mr Trump's desire to leave an imprint on the world, his imprint, should have the world worried. He's not only shown himself capable of turning rhetoric of "American carnage" into reality by the wholesale gutting of functional US governance, but he's messing with a fragile planet at a time of great instability and peril.
Whether it be his ruthless betrayal of loyalists who once worked for him, or his sordid revolving door of unqualified personnel hires, or his willingness to exploit the downtrodden while cheering on the bullies, the Trump show makes for indecent diplomacy. He's discarding decades of courting allies and mutual confidence building, ditching carefully constructed relationships, scuttling peace treaties and revoking commitments. His apparent readiness to throw Nato and Europe under the bus in order to placate Mr Putin for reasons that are still not well understood, could seriously trigger a dark age of chaos.
If the White House has had an unusual number of Western leaders knocking on the door as of late it's not because Mr Trump is admired, but because his sanity is highly in question. In short, he is a man for whom the madman theory of diplomacy is most apt.
The day Mr Trump and Mr Vance ganged up like crude schoolyard bullies to demean, humiliate and extract concessions from a leader whose nation is crippled by a hostile invasion, will not be easily forgotten.
The Feb 28 diplomatic disaster should give pause to any leader contemplating a meet with the cantankerous US president. Already it's provoked outrage and shame for many American people, once upon a time cheerleaders for democracy, who are scratching their heads, as if to ask, what have we wrought? What is this mad fury that America has unleashed upon a sorely divided nation and unsuspecting world?
Philip J Cunningham is a media researcher covering Asian politics.