It was another date that would live in infamy. But whereas Franklin Roosevelt declared war in sombre tones to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump did it his way.

The US president wore a white “USA” cap, dark jacket and white shirt open at the collar. He stood at a blue lectern bearing the US presidential seal and a black microphone, with the Stars and Stripes behind him, presumably at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. He released a video on his own social media network, Truth Social, at 2.30am on Saturday – a time when most Americans are asleep but Trump is often found rage-tweeting into the night.

In the space of eight minutes, Trump proceeded to upend half a century of US foreign policy, renege on his campaign promise to avoid the risk of forever wars and leave the Fifa boss, Gianni Infantino, with some explaining to do about why he gave Trump a made-up peace prize.

Bush dragged the US into a tragic war in Iraq in 2003 that costs hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and was recently crowned by the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank as the worst foreign policy decision in history. The avaricious Trump seems determined to seize that title for himself with another act of Middle Eastern regime change.