-Analysis-
CAIRO — Donald Trump is back in the White House for four more years. His return has once again raised the question of whether the “madman theory” of diplomacy can function in contemporary foreign policy and statecraft.
The debate centers on the consequences of world rulers who intentionally pose, pretend or threaten to be veritably insane and irrational in governance and negotiating processes. In the West, the view is that Trump’s second term will fully test the success of this madman approach to achieving the American leader’s goals. And it is above all the Arab world where this theory will play out.
The Florentine diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) famously wrote that: “It is a very wise thing to simulate madness.” Machiavelli suggested that leaders can exploit the method of simulating madness or unexpected behavior to confuse opponents and achieve strategic gains.
Nixon in Vietnam
Fast forward to the 1960s during the movement in the U.S. opposed to the Vietnam war. The opposition gained momentum when defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, which revealed the deception and lies of successive administrations about the results of the war.
Ellsberg has often discussed in his writings the connection between the “madman theory” and American foreign policy of the President Richard Nixon administration: leaders who act unexpectedly or appear crazy have greater opportunities to pressure their opponents to make concessions, thus achieving gains, due to fear of their unexpected reactions.
In his book Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, Canadian journalist Michael Maclear cited one of Nixon‘s White House aides as saying that National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was putting the “theory” into practice during his negotiations with the Vietnamese in Paris. Whenever negotiations got tough, he would threaten that he couldn’t be sure what the “madman in the White House” would do, and that he could resume bombing Vietnam at any moment and level it to the ground.
Allied concessions
In his book, the Strategy of Conflict, economist and foreign policy professor Thomas Schilling said: “It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational.” If others believe a madman could do just about anything if he does not get his way, the threat of escalation becomes more credible — making it logical to concede more to de-escalate, he argued.
Still, Schilling ultimately didn’t believe that madman theory diplomacy achieves long-term gains. Ellsberg, the defense analyst, likewise was convinced that Nixon’s use of this tactic produced minimal results.
Most foreign leaders today are fully aware of the game Trump is playing
In an essay published last month in Foreign Policy, Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international policies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, reviewed recent research papers on the effectiveness of the “madman” theory in the case of Trump.
Reviewing and monitoring Trump’s deliberate associating his reputation with madness in his first term, Drezner draws attention to the deception of the White House press staff that the president was behaving like a madman, which led one of those journalists, CNN’s Jim Sciuto, to write a book about Trump’s foreign policy entitled The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.
But Drezner ultimately concludes that this strategy had little success during Trump’s first presidency, citing modest trade concessions won from South Korea and the brief halt to North Korea’s missile tests. Ultimately, he concludes, the madman approach appears to work better with the allies of the United States than with its adversaries, notably China and Russia.
Indeed, most foreign leaders today are fully aware of the game Trump is playing, and calculate it in to negotiations just as the Soviets did with Nixon.
Trump’s second term
Drezner does not believe that Trump’s attempt to repeat the madman approach to his foreign policy during his second term will succeed. Still, he doesn’t believe that the president will abandon it. Moreover, it may go even deeper after his path from a convicted criminal to a comeback candidate who survived two assassination attempts, which may instill in him the conviction that he is invincible.
He will have to demonstrate that his madness has limits
And Drezner warns that Trump is unable to convince anyone else that he is truly mad, even if he continues to follow through on his most outlandish threats. This plan may succeed, but it may also cause a conflict to spiral out of control.
Roseanne McMinus, meanwhile, said in an article in Foreign Affairs, that Trump’s first term suffered from the unpredictability of his reactions. In a second term, he will have to exhibit some level of reliability to get real results.
“Trump will have to demonstrate that his madness has limits. He will need to make it clear that his foreign policy is not totally devoid of reason and that he can be trusted to uphold a deal,” she writes. “Such an approach will not only increase the odds of compliance with Washington’s threats. It will also reduce the risk of inadvertent escalation, and thus reassure allies nervous about Trump’s policies.”
In the end, Trump could succeed in portraying himself as “unpredictable and unrestrained without seeming unhinged.”
How does he currently look in the Arab world? it is likely that the Middle East will be the prime testing ground for his real and imagined state of mental health.
