On his fourth day in office, President Donald Trump issued a presidential permit allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the Canada-United States border.
Protesters to the decision gathered in front of the White House in Washington D.C.
The Keystone right-of-way through Nebraska has yet to have state approval and will be strongly opposed, so the completion of the pipeline is ultimately out of Trump's control and still uncertain.
Donald Trump's new presidency has taken the United States into "completely uncharted waters," says David Cay Johnston author of The Making of Donald Trump.
"He is emotionally unstable and won't change," Johnston said on the Al Jazeera television program Up Front, broadcast in conjunction with Trump's inauguration as the 45th U.S. president on Jan. 20.
"I don't think that this is going to turn out well for the country, but I hope that this turns into lemonade for America and not lemons," Johnston said.
In Europe the chief fear is not that Trump might disengage from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which he has dissed, but that his authoritarian frame of mind might drift into fascism.
The fear of fascism is also present in America, where the president's power to override the constitutional protection of habeas corpus, imprison terrorists and hold them incommunicado is said to be a threat to dissidents to the Trump regime including the journalists who disagree with him.
The worldwide women's march on Jan. 22 drew twice the crowd to Washington as did the inauguration, with no rioters and tear gas, no thugs burning limos, breaking windows and looting.
The stage is set for uncertainty and change in American politics and foreign policy, as former prime minister Stephen Harper said in India before Trump was sworn into office.
Trump is an isolationist. On his watch, Trump promises, America won't be the policeman of the world pouring blood and treasure into endless little wars of peace.
The United States was formally isolationist from 1921 to 1941.
After the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover kept America out of the League of Nations and avoided treaties and alliances with other countries.
They preserved freedom of action in foreign affairs, and hid behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans rather that going to war, until Pearl Harbor ended isolationism.
Trump faces a much different world than Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.
American economic and military interests face several possible Pearl Harbors.
America is engaged in a deepening Cold War, an accelerating arms race and an expanding war on terror.
President Trump can't tweet these threats away, build a wall around America to keep them out, strike business deals to neutralize them, or charm his enemies the way that he says he has charmed Vladimir Putin.
Alberta and Mountain View County will be drawn into the Trump uncertainty and not just on Keystone XL.
Trump's intention to remake the North American Free Trade Agreement could inflict collateral damage on our resource industries, especially agriculture and forestry.
He will make decisions that affect the global prices of crude oil and gas.
Whatever harm he does will affect the credibility of those members of our political right, who have proclaimed him as a breath of fresh air.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
