The Beclowning of the Madman Theory

The tentative cease fire negotiated earlier this week is not --repeat, not -- an example of the Madman Theory at work.

Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash

It looks like President Trump’s threat to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s entire civilization will not, thankfully, be carried out in the short run.

A two-week cease-fire has been declared, although it looks awfully damn fragile as of this writing. There is considerable confusion over whether the cease-fire arrangement covers Israel’s incursion into Lebanon, and the Iranians are sounding like they might not be honoring the deal.

Of course, calling this a “deal” or an “arrangement” is an overly generous description — What actually happened sounds more like a series of coordinated social media posts. According to CNN’s Catherine Nichols, this particular cease-fire lacks the normal ingredients of such an arrangement — things like, you know, a formal, written document.

For right now, however, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume some cessation of hostilities for the next few weeks. This is a far cry from where a lot of commentators thought things would be 36 hours ago..

Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric had unnerved people who have long grown inured to his bluster. Garrett Graff characterized the chances that Donald Trump would use a nuclear weapon against Iran as “non-zero…. I’d personally put the chance that Donald Trump uses a nuclear weapon against Iran at some point in the three percent range — which is a stunningly high number, given the history of nuclear weapons and the presidency.”

For Nate Silver — and every other sane human on the planet — three percent is three percentage points too many when it comes to brinksmanship:

I don’t think Graff’s take was “alarmist”. There were really three scenarios: 1) Iran would back down; 2) Iran wouldn’t back down, but Trump would chicken out anyway; 3) Iran wouldn’t back down, and Trump would follow through on his threat.

I’m not sure whether we just experienced Scenario #1 or Scenario #2….

But this certainly isn’t some sort of 13-dimensional genius move. It reflects an unchecked Commander-in-Chief who was erratic on his best days, who is 79 years old, who was boxed into a corner, who has sycophantic advisors who are mostly too afraid to challenge him, and who once bragged that he could maintain approval from his base even if he murdered someone.

States with nuclear weapons have the ability to make a lot of bluffs. The expected value of a 3 percent chance of an infinitely bad outcome is still negative infinity. That’s why many countries, including, of course, Iran, have pursued the bomb.

And it probably does help Trump in some ways that he could be plausibly considered an irrational actor under “Madman Theory”, the term popularized by Richard Nixon. I doubt that a President Romney or President Haley or President Biden or President Harris or President Ocasio-Cortez would have used the same rhetoric, but if they had, it would have read differently.

There were, however, various ways this could have gone very badly, or still could go very badly the next time the “game” is played, and inevitably will go badly if we repeat the scenario often enough.

Silver posits that Trump pursued an extremely risky gambit and was able to employ it more effectively than other U.S. politicians. Others have postulated something similar: that the cease-fire is an example of the Madman Theory in action. The New York Times’ David Sanger, for example, wrote a news analysis suggesting that the intimidating rhetoric contained in Trump’s madman rhetoric generated a tactical win:

Mr. Trump’s tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels certainly helped him find an offramp he had been seeking for weeks. That success alone may fuel his belief that the tactics he learned in the New York real estate world — ignore old conventions, make maximalist demands — work in geopolitics as well.

Without question, it was a down-to-the-wire tactical victory, one that should, at least temporarily, get oil, fertilizer and helium flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz, and calm markets that feared a global energy shock would lead to a global recession.

But it resolved none of the fundamental issues that led to the war.

As someone who has written about Trump and the Madman Theory, at this point I have to ask a very basic question: what tactical victory?!

I’m serious: what tactical gain did the Trump administration secure by agreeing to the two-week cease-fire beyond the cease-fire itself? Sure, President Trump saved himself from committing war crimes, but that’s not exactly a tactical win. Iran’s military has been battered, but that has not stopped Iran’s regime from retaliating across the region and closing the Strait of Hormuz.

The most one could credit Trump with is that maybe his rhetoric persuades his base that he was employing the Madman Theory all along, thereby reducing his audience costs of backing down.

But for everyone else not named “Pete Hegseth” it remains the case that the United States has failed to achieve most of its stated war aims. Neither Israel nor the Gulf allies seem particularly pleased with the current status quo compared to the pre-war moment. The rest of the Arab world ain’t thrilled with the United States either.

Meanwhile, even a conventionally weakened Iran has managed to control the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint — a fact unaffected by the cease fire. Indeed, Politico’s Ben Lefebvre and Phelim Kine report that oil executives are keenly aware of just how the current status quo is worse than the pre-war situation:

Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration.

“Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before — and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?”

I have yet to read a credible analyst explain how the United States has won this clash with Iran. But I have seen a boatload of analyses that explain how the current U.S. situation is far worse than the pre-war status quo.

Jonathan Last concludes, “If the general contours of the ceasefire agreement hold, then America will have suffered a significant strategic defeat and Iran will have won a significant strategic victory.”

David Frum concurs, “Foreign leaders are surely willing to believe that Trump is ‘crazy’ in the sense that he is detached from reality. They have seen him miscalculate risk and bungle all kinds of projects, such as his trade wars with China and his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. But they also know that when push really comes to shove, Trump will flinch. TACO has become, like NATO, an acronym so familiar that it no longer needs spelling out….. Trump has taught the world that he has every quality of the madman except indifference to pain.”

Tom Wright warns:

The war has exposed the contradictions of the Trump administration’s geopolitical worldview. Under this president, the United States has rewarded Russia, ignored China, punished Europe, and abandoned its Asian allies and partners to an economic crisis that it helped set in motion….

The United States is nowhere to be found as Asian allies cope with the worst energy crisis in 50 years. There has been no G-20 emergency meeting. No visit by the Treasury secretary to the region. No acknowledgment of the problem. Just a lambasting of U.S. treaty allies for not joining in….

The Iran war has laid bare a new geopolitical reality. America’s adversaries are becoming more coordinated, sharing resources and capabilities in ways that amplify their power, while America’s global alliances, long its greatest asset, are neglected and fragmenting. The United States is, in effect, moving toward a world in which it faces more connected opponents with a less cohesive coalition of its own. This is a major shift with profound implications for U.S. national security—and it’s one that the Trump administration shows no sign of recognizing, let alone reversing.

Even Sanger, a few hours after he wrote the analysis excerpted above, wrote a follow-up piece suggesting that Trump’s post-cease-fire options were more constrained:

Just a few hours into the fragile cease-fire that President Trump announced on Tuesday, it was clear that while resuming combat operations may be a viable military option if negotiations go nowhere, it is not a particularly viable political choice for Mr. Trump. And, with talks scheduled to start in Islamabad on Friday, the Iranians know it.

If shipments actually resume through the Strait of Hormuz, the price of Brent crude oil, which has already dropped about 14 percent, hovering around $95 a barrel, could keep falling. Gas prices should follow, even if no one is expecting them to go back to where they were before the war broke out. Major stock indexes rose over 2 percent.

These are the measures of instant success that register with Mr. Trump. And he knows that even if the two-week cease-fire runs out on April 21 with no final agreement on the long list of issues that have divided Washington and Tehran for decades, the political risk of renewing hostilities is high — particularly with the midterm elections looming and an upcoming summit with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

Trump’s last-minute cease-fire acceptance is an example of the Madman Theory only insofar as the madman gambit has a lousy track record of securing greater concessions — and this cease-fire also failed to gain anything for the United States. Meanwhile, the strategic losses caused by this war will continue to mount.