WASHINGTON—Donald Trump’s press secretary stood at the White House podium and delivered a message to the world: Trump’s executive order was “not a travel ban” and “not extreme.”

Sean Spicer’s words last week were duly reported. Then Trump went on Twitter and touted his “travel ban.” His phrase for it: “extreme vetting.”

It was yet another mixed message from an administration that has made a dizzying early specialty of them. On matters semantic and significant, the president and his team have left America’s allies and adversaries suffering through the world’s highest-stakes involuntary guessing game, struggling to decipher just what it is this government actually means.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has dispatched at least three ministers to Washington this week. They will work to build relationships with the young administration. They will also seek clarity.

The pressing question is not only whether anyone who is not Trump can accurately speak for Trump. It is which Trump words are the magic Trump words.

“That’s a question that is already being asked inside the bureaucracy: when the president tweets something, how literally should we take that? And I think the answer is, we don’t know yet,” said Philip J. Crowley, an assistant secretary of state under Barack Obama. “And I suspect inside the White House, they don’t know yet either.”

The confusion may not exclusively be evidence of inexperience and inevitable first-month disorganization, although that seems part of it. Trump has argued, in his campaign book and in interviews, that a president should use “the element of surprise” to keep opponents “off balance” — creating his own version of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of diplomacy.

“In the foreign policy world, predictability is a very significant currency. And yet we have in the president someone who prides himself on being unpredictable, even impulsive,” Crowley said. “Whether this is a permanent feature of the Trump administration, or just a phase as the president learns the nature of the job, that’s a question I’m not sure we have an answer for yet.”

Trump’s volatility has miffed not only America’s enemies but its friends.

Trump began a mini-feud with Australia last week over an Obama pact to accept 1,250 refugees detained in camps off the country’s coast. But the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. embassy in Australia, announced that Trump would honour the arrangement.

Australian news outlets publicized the news. A few hours later, Trump wrote on Twitter, “Why? I will study this dumb deal!

The embassy was left to tell Australians, “I refer you to the White House.” Australia’s prime minister had no clearer explanation.

“Well, that is his tweet. I’m telling you what has been said to us, and said by his spokesman, and said by the embassy,” Malcolm Turnbull said.

The administration offered up another policy muddle on a matter of considerably more strategic importance.

Asked two weeks ago about disputed territory in the South China Sea, Spicer said the U.S. would “make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country” — words that represented a severe escalation of the U.S. approach to China’s claims to the land.

Then Secretary of Defence James Mattis tamped down the rhetoric. Speaking in Japan, he rejected “dramatic military moves” and said the U.S. would “exhaust all efforts, diplomatic efforts, to try and resolve this properly.”

China greeted Mattis’s words with applause. But his Asia trip, informally dubbed a “reassurance tour,” was of limited comfort to American allies.

“When Mattis was going off to South Korea and Japan, how reassuring is that? I just can’t imagine anyone is buying what he’s selling, because he’s just not an insider in this administration,” said Steve Saiderman, an international relations professor at Carleton University. In general, he said, “If there’s such a fundamental break between what the bureaucrats are saying and what the president is saying, nobody can be certain about anything.”

In some cases, the bewilderment appears to be a result of a divide between Trump and the traditional politicians, generals and diplomats working for him. His top allies sometimes appear to be attempting to conduct traditional Republican foreign policy without him.

The disconnect was perhaps starkest on the matter of Russia’s latest military action in eastern Ukraine. The White House issued a statement that offered no rebuke of Russia. Then his United Nations ambassador condemned the “aggressive actions of Russia” and said the U.S. laments the Ukrainian suffering caused by Russia. Then Trump gave an interview in which he said he respects Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan met Monday with Mattis. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is meeting Wednesday with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Finance Minister Bill Morneau is delivering a speech about the economic relationship at Georgetown University on Thursday.

It is a high-profile diplomacy blitz. Saiderman advocated a different strategy for Canada: conducting as much low-level diplomacy as possible, getting things done with professionals without attracting the attention of the mercurial president.

“It’s in the best interest of Canada,” he said, “not to remind him that Canada is a member of NAFTA or Canada is a member of NATO.”

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