It's a Mad Mad Mad Madman's World
I see we're gonna be testing the madman theory in 2025.
Last Friday op-ed writer extraordinaire Niall Ferguson gave a fascinating interview to The Times’ Damian Whitworth. Ferguson provided a veritable gold mine of actions and statements that could merit deconstruction.1 The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has only so many hours in the day, however, so let’s focus on Ferguson’s belief that Donald Trump has made and will make America safer than if Kamala Harris had been elected president:
He agrees with Trump’s assertion that if he had been president instead of Joe Biden, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine. In his first term, potential foes were wary of challenging Trump because he was presented as wild and unpredictable. “Trump had a deterrent effect that Biden wholly lacked,” he says.
Peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and perhaps even a ceasefire may happen quite soon after Trump’s inauguration, Ferguson claims. “And then the ceasefire, if there is one, will be very fragile and there will be repeated violations of it,” he says. “It’s going to be hard to get even to a Korean-style armistice while Putin is still in power in Moscow.”
Ferguson’s Ukraine claim would appear to contradict his Trump-as-deterrent-effect claim — but again, we need to focus! Ferguson’s hypothesis is that U.S. great power rivals are/were wary of challenging the United States because of Trump’s unpredictability. Is he right?
The Stanford historian is proffering a standard articulation of the “madman theory,” made famous by Richard Nixon. According to the State Department’s Office of the Historian:
The so-called “madman theory” was first suggested in Haldeman’s memoirs, published in 1978. Haldeman recalled: “the Communists feared Nixon above all other politicians in U.S. public life. And Nixon intended to manipulate that fear to bring an end to the War. The Communists regarded him as an uncompromising enemy whose hatred for their philosophy had been spelled out over and over again in two decades of public life. Nixon saw his advantage in that fact. ‘They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon,’ he said.”….
“The threat was the key, and Nixon coined a phrase for his theory,” Haldeman continued. Nixon reportedly told Haldeman in the summer of 1968: “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Nixon denied coining this term in subsequent interviews,2 but you get the point. The updated version of this argument is that Trump is such a wild and crazy and unpredictable guy that the rest of the world will be wary of crossing him.
Trump’s press conference today would certainly be of a piece with him trying to act like a madman:
What to make of Trump doubling and tripling down on U.S. territorial expansion and a refusal to rule out the use of force in some of these instances? It certainly falsifies — yet again — the notion that Donald Trump is a paragon of foreign policy restraint.3 But it also ties into that gosh-darn madman theory! One could posit that Trump, by talking so loudly and belligerently about territorial expansion, is signaling to U.S. rivals that he could do anything, up to and including coercing and/or invading treaty allies!!
So will Trump’s madman gambit work? I was skeptical that Trump’s unpredictability would gain much of anything during his first term, and I am even more skeptical about his second term. I could elaborate why I am so skeptical in this space.… or I could gift-link to my spectacularly well-timed essay, “Does the Madman Theory Actually Work?” that was just published in the latest issue of Foreign Policy!4 In it I proffer four reasons why one should be skeptical that Trump’s madman approach will work on the likes of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea:
“Trump’s first-term efforts at coercive bargaining went largely for naught.”
“Trump’s madman schtick worked better with U.S. allies than adversaries.”
“Most foreign leaders are now intimately familiar with Trump’s playbook.”
Successful coercive bargaining requires the ability to credibly commit to any deal, and… um… er… “to put it more plainly: What is the likelihood that any foreign-policy leader will believe Trump when he gives his word about anything?”
You’ll have to read the whole thing to see my whole argument. But here are the last few paragraphs of the essay:
Trump’s attempt to reprise his madman approach to international relations is unlikely to work during his second term, but he will likely try it anyway. Trump is a man of few moves, and this is one of them. His political allies noted during his first term that Trump is rarely playing three-dimensional chess: “More often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”
What is worrisome is that this time around, he might think he can pull it off even when the rest of the world does not. Trump’s improbable journey from convicted felon to second-term president could convince him to take even more risks. As one Trump advisor told Politico in November, “Look, he survived two assassination attempts, he’s been indicted how many times—he really is at this moment feeling kind of invincible and sort of emboldened in a way that he never has before.”
The problem is, if Trump is unable to convince anyone else that he really is a madman, then the only way he can prove it is to follow through on his most outlandish threats. Maybe that would work, but it could also lead to a conflict spiraling out of control. Which sounds, to be perfectly honest, like a pretty crazy idea.
I suppose we will have the next four years to see whether my doubt or Ferguson’s confidence about Trump’s ability to deter others will prove to be correct. His argument has one signal advantage, however. If he’s right, he will get to gloat for long, long time. If I am right, the gloating will be difficult to savor.
The other things included Ferguson “attending a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where the president-elect gave a speech and had an almost ‘beatific air’ as he basked in his election triumph. When YMCA, Trump’s campaign theme tune, blasted out, Ferguson took to his feet to join in the dancing.” Ferguson later told Whitworth that he was just “joking around.”
The very next sentences after that quote: “Nixon himself recalled events differently, however. The former President, during an interview with historian Joan Hoff in 1984, denied using the term ‘madman theory’ and claimed that he rarely discussed substantive foreign policy matters with Haldeman.”
I do like Jonathan Chait’s characterization of it as “performative imperialism,” but as he acknowledges, “Trump could very well blunder from performative imperialism into a live shooting war.”
Props to FP editor Ravi Agrawal for asking me to write this a few months back. That was some good anticipation!
What about the possibility that Trump isn't "performatively" mad; he really is batshit crazy.
I think attempts to explain Trump's actions generally fail out of the gate because they're not starting from the most grounded and well-established base - he's not "calculating" anything, he's an aging man suffering from a serious personality disorder. Time spent studying characteristics of such unfortunate folks will lead to a more clear understanding of the problems he makes for both himself and the rest of us. All you have to do is simply watch a couple of his press conferences in their entirety, as well read some of his posts in their entirety to understand this is a guy who has very real and serious issues. He's not performing, he's expressing what he's become over the years since his relationship began with his Dad. Perhaps it's somewhat flown under the radar because so many folks have some idea of what depression and psychosis look like, but are completely unfamiliar with personality disorders.