Return of the Madman Theory
Whoa!
Return of the Madman Theory
Trump’s foreign policy is so erratic and unpredictable, it might just make the world more stable—for a very short time.
By Fred Kaplan
President Donald Trump’s most nerve-racking trait—his unhinged impulsiveness, driven more by random stimuli and shifts in mood than by careful study or long-held principles—might be having an oddly stabilizing influence in the world’s crisis-strewn regions, at least for a little while.
Consider what Richard Nixon called “the Madman Theory.” In the early years of his presidency, he told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to warn the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy. Nixon is obsessed with Communism, Kissinger was supposed to say. He can’t be restrained when he’s angry, and for God’s sake, he has his hand on the nuclear button. In two days’ time, Nixon predicted, Ho Chi Minh will be “begging for peace.”
The ploy didn’t work, in part because the North Vietnamese didn’t believe it. Whatever the many other eccentricities that Nixon had displayed in a quarter-century of public life, he wasn’t a madman, at least not in that way.
Trump, on the other hand, really does seem to be, if not quite insane, at least erratic, unpredictable, prone to outbursts of violence detached from coherent policy (e.g., firing 59 cruise missiles at Syria, to little effect, followed by nothing) and drastic reversals of opinion (e.g., recent statements on NATO, China, Russia, Janet Yellen, and the Ex-Im Bank, to name a few).
I am not suggesting that Trump has intentionally adopted Nixon’s madman strategy (or any strategy at all). I am proposing, however, that his behavior might be having the effect that Nixon desired.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/04/trump_is_inadvertently_putting_nixon_s_madman_theory_to_the_test.html
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