The world laughed at Donald Trump this week. When the bombastic US president boasted at the UN of his achievements, he was greeted with a ripple of derision. But rather than sneering at Mr Trump, we should perhaps be studying him. He may be one of the first leaders to have grasped the essence of quantum politics.
That arresting phrase has been developed by another president, Armen Sarkissian of Armenia, to explain how politics now works. Mr Sarkissian has been studying this phenomenon in practice and in theory. Since being elected president in March, he has tried to calm political turmoil in Armenia. He is also one of the very few heads of state to be a theoretical physicist.
The 65-year-old was a winner of the Lenin prize for science back in Soviet times and a former colleague of the late Stephen Hawking at Cambridge university. For good measure, he was also one of the inventors of the Tetris computer game.