Trump’s return and the ‘madman’ theory of diplomacy

By RIAAN DE VILLIERS

I need hardly remind readers that the Sentient Naartjie is back in our faces – and indeed those of most people forming part of the comprehensible world.

This time around, we can’t just watch from the sidelines. While we’re still struggling to comprehend this, Trump — as a treasured cousin of mine once put it in respect of an unrelated matter – is ‘chopping in our bush’.

Specifically, by halting US aid to sub-Saharan Africa – including the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) – he has ripped a big hole in South Africa’s response to HIV.

According to health minister Aaron Motsoaledi, PEPFAR contributed 17 percent (or more than R7,5 billion) to programmes for the 7.8 million South Africans living with HIV/AIDS. He has also pointed out that more than 15,000 health care personnel, including nurses, pharmacists and directors, were remunerated through PEPFAR.

South Africa may well be excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which allows goods from some sub-Saharan countries to be sold duty-free in the US. This, according to trade experts, would ‘deal a huge blow to South African firms ranging from car manufacturers to fruit exporters’.

In the latest (scarcely credible) development, Trump has booted the South African Ambassador – a bemused Ebrahim Rasool — out of the US on 24 hours’ notice. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this was because he [Rasool] was a ‘race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @Potus (Trump)’.

Describing this as ‘regrettable’, our President reportedly stated: ‘South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America’, and called on all parties to ‘maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter’.

Weirdly, the statement has since disappeared from the Presidency website. Maybe, even the Pres decided it was too lame to leave in the public domain.

///////////////////

Of course, this is nothing compared to what Trump has been doing – or threatened to do — to Canada, Gaza, Greenland and Ukraine. As regards Ukraine – as everybody knows, and remains difficult to describe – he has turned on Zelenskyy and cosied up to Putin, thereby casually trashing the entire post World War Two global order, centred on the US as the last guarantor of peace and democracy.

Believe it nor not, this is Donald Trump’s official 2025 portrait, released on the White House website. Via Wikimedia Commons.

But he might just have been irritated by Russia’s latest drone strikes. To wit, he has authorised renewed airstrikes against Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, aimed at ‘punishing’ them for attacks on Red Sea shipping. Astoundingly, he has posted the following on his own social media platform, Truth Social:

‘To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!

‘To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!’

While aimed at Iran, some analysts have pointed out that the air strikes may be an implicit signal to Russia that for all his nice talk Trump also has an itchy trigger finger. It almost seems as if he is trying – whether by accident or design – to keep everybody off balance.

///////////////

On Saturday, I attended a reunion of the Matric Class of 1965 at Jan van Riebeeck High School, held at St Michael’s sports field in Tamboerskloof – the scene of grim and savage events at that time. This time, sitting in an airy new clubhouse, we ate lamb on a spit, following by malva pudding and custard. My resistance to both is zero.

And so it came that, late on Saturday night — kept awake by glutton’s remorse and savage acid reflux — I watched a long documentary on the Vietnam War on my cel phone. It recalled the point where Richard Nixon told the sinister Henry Kissinger to convey to North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh that he [Nixon] was dangerously unstable, and that they had better negotiate before he dropped a nuke.

This has, since then, become known as the ‘mad dog’ theory or ‘madman theory’ in international relations. I went on to the internet to refresh my memory.

The first tranche of stuff was dished up by AI. Wha-a-a-at, you may say. But I’ve basically surrendered. In today’s world, where we no longer know what’s fake news and what isn’t – and where, frankly, it no longer seems to matter — we may as well go with the stuff google dishes up first — from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Anyway, according to AI, ‘the ‘mad dog theory’ or ‘madman theory’ n international relations suggests that a leader perceived as irrational or unpredictable can gain an advantage in negotiations or deter potential adversaries by appearing willing to take extreme actions, even if they are unlikely’. [Aha – AI forgot to add, ‘to do so …’ ]

It goes on to say: ‘The idea is that by projecting an image of being unpredictable and willing to escalate, a leader can force their opponents to yield to their demands or avoid actions that could trigger a catastrophic response.’ Not a bad effort, actually …

Next, good old Wikipedia has a commendably solid entry, starting with: ‘The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with the foreign policy of US president Richard Nixon and his administration, who tried to make the leaders of hostile communist bloc countries think Nixon was irrational and volatile so that they would avoid provoking the US in fear of an unpredictable response.

‘The premise of madman theory is that it makes seemingly incredible threats seem credible. For instance, in an era of mutually assured destruction, threats by a rational leader to escalate a dispute may seem suicidal and thus easily dismissable by adversaries. However, a leader’s suicidal threats may seem credible if the leader is believed to be irrational.’

////////////////////

According to Wikipedia, it all started with Machiavelli, who argued — in 1517 — that sometimes was a ‘very wise thing to simulate madness’ . However, in his book Nixon’s Vietnam War, the historian Jeffrey Kimball argues that Nixon arrived at the strategy independently, as a result of practical experience and observation of Eisenhower’s handling of the Korean War.

Nixon’s chief of staff, HR Haldeman, wrote that Nixon had confided to him: ‘I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where 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”. Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.’

According to Wiki, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sought to develop the image of a madman, which was accepted to some degree by US policy-makers. For example, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said Khrushchev ‘could be expected to commit irrational acts’ and was ‘essentially emotional’. In one famous incident, Khrushchev was said to have banged his shoe on a desk in the UN General Assembly. A photograph of the incident was later found to have been faked.

The fake photograph of Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, pounding his shoe on a desk in the UN General Assembly in October 1960, with the base photograph below. Image: AP Archives.

Not surprisingly, some analysts have characterised Trump’s conduct towards allies and hostile states as an example of ‘madman theory’. For instance, during free trade renegotiations between Korea and the US during Trump’s first presidency, he allegedly told US trade negotiators to warn South Korean diplomats that ‘if they don’t give the concessions now, this crazy guy will pull out of the deal’.

And during the 2024 US presidential election, Trump touted his version of the madman theory as a strategy he would utilise against China in respect of Taiwan, as well as Russia in respect of Ukraine.

Illustration accompanying Gideon Rachman’s February 2022 article in the Financial Times headlined ‘Putin, Ukraine and the madman theory of diplomacy’.

Journalists have speculated that Putin is also using the madman strategy. In 2015, Martin Hellman wrote that ‘nuclear weapons are the card that Putin has up his sleeve, and he’s using it to get the world to realize that Russia is a superpower, not just a regional power’. This use of the madman theory, Hellman argued, was something which the West had not ‘properly caught on to’.

In 2022, days before the Ukraine invasion, Gideon Rachman argued in the Financial Times that Putin’s ‘penchant for publishing long, nationalist essays regarding Ukrainian and Russian history, his plans for nuclear weapons exercises, and his image of ‘growing increasingly out of touch and paranoid’, also due to isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, could have been the use of madman strategy.

Putin, Rachman wrote, was ‘ruthless and amoral. But he is also shrewd and calculating. He takes risks, but he is not crazy.’ However, he also noted that ‘the line between acting like a madman and being a madman is disconcertingly thin’.

In the first days of the invasion, Paul Taylor of Politico also speculated that Putin was using the madman strategy, after his decision to place Russian deterrence nuclear forces on ‘special alert’. Taylor stated that Putin was exhibiting ‘pathological behaviour’ by ‘swinging wildly from seeming openness to negotiations to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on four fronts, while threatening the world with mass destruction’.

/////////////////////////

The political scientist Scott Sagan and historian Jeremi Suri have criticized the madman theory as ‘ineffective and dangerous, citing the belief that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev did not understand what Nixon was trying to communicate. (Seriously?)

International relations scholars, Wiki says, have been skeptical of the ‘madman theory’ as a strategy for success in ‘coercive bargaining’. One difficulty is making others believe that you are genuinely crazy.

///////////////////////

So where does this leave us, and other confused and dazed global citizens? Put bluntly, is the man crazy or isn’t he? The argument slips and slithers around in maddening fashion. Specifically, after Trump’s ‘crazy guy’ reference during the trade negotiations with South Korea, the IR scholar Roseanne W McManus argued that this made the purported ‘madman’ approach counterproductive, as Trump had undermined the belief that his ‘madness’ was genuine. In other words, by proposing that he should be portrayed as ‘crazy’, he actually showed that he wasn’t.

Harry Palmer, the unforgettable working-class anti-hero in Len Deighton’s early spy novels, once remarked that the only thing he learnt at Oxford University was how to put on his 17-inch stovepipe trousers without taking off his chukka boots.

In the same vein, one of the very few useful things I’ve learnt in my life is that it’s not always either/or – in other words, that more than one thing can be true at the same time. So this is my take: Trump may well dimly perceive that it might sometimes be useful to act like a nutter. At the same time, though, he may also be barking mad.

//////////////////////

FEATURED IMAGE: The first American exponents of the ‘madman’ theory … Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on the steps of the White House, 1973. Image: Library of Congress.