The Madman Theory Plays Itself Out
My thoughts on Trump's trade climbdown.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made no secret of its… let’s say “skepticism” of Trump’s "madman theory” approach to international relations. Here’s what I wrote in Foreign Affairs 48 hours after Trump won:
Donald Trump is now a known commodity on the global stage. As the Columbia professor Elizabeth Saunders recently observed, “In the 2016 election, Trump’s foreign policy was somewhat mysterious. . . . In 2024, however, Trump’s actions are far easier to predict. The candidate who wanted to be the ‘madman’ and loved the idea of keeping other countries guessing has become a politician with a pretty predictable agenda.” Leaders such as Xi, Putin, Kim, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and even French President Emmanuel Macron have seen Trump’s schtick before. Both great powers and smaller states know by now that the best way to deal with Trump is to shower him with pomp and circumstance, abstain from fact-checking him in public, make flashy but token concessions, and remain secure that by and large their core interests will be preserved. Trump’s negotiating style yielded minimal concrete gains in his first term; it will yield less than that in his second term.
In the last month I have explained multiple times that when it comes to trade, the Trump administration is the gang that can’t negotiate straight. What has become manifestly obvious over the past week, however, is that Trump’s practice of, “attack first and piss away all bargaining advantages later” does not apply only to trade.
Consider, for example, the New York Times’ explanation for why Trump backed down from U.S. military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen:
When he approved a campaign to reopen shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthi militant group into submission, President Trump wanted to see results within 30 days of the initial strikes two months ago.
By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials.
But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.
The Houthis shot down several American MQ-9 Reaper drones and continued to fire at naval ships in the Red Sea, including an American aircraft carrier. And the U.S. strikes burned through weapons and munitions at a rate of about $1 billion in the first month alone.
It did not help that two $67 million F/A-18 Super Hornets from America’s flagship aircraft carrier tasked with conducting strikes against the Houthis accidentally tumbled off the carrier into the sea.
By then, Mr. Trump had had enough.
Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, who was already in Omani-mediated nuclear talks with Iran, reported that Omani officials had suggested what could be a perfect offramp for Mr. Trump on the separate issue of the Houthis, according to American and Arab officials. The United States would halt the bombing campaign and the militia would no longer target American ships in the Red Sea, but without any agreement to stop disrupting shipping that the group deemed helpful to Israel.
Now if you read the whole thing, what is striking is not that Trump backed down but that he agreed to the airstrikes in the first place. The CENTCOM commander had “proposed an eight- to 10-month campaign in which Air Force and Navy warplanes would take out Houthi air defense systems” followed by targeted assassinations.1 This was not planned to be a quick campaign! Indeed, both Biden-era and Trump-era officials thought that the opportunity costs of that kind of sustained effort would be too great. But Trump agreed to it and then backed down once the costs got too high. He declared "victory” — as did the Houthis.
The same dynamic has played out in the trade arena as well….
