Trump’s happy to play the ‘madman’ to restore global order. But will it work?

Can a powerful leader who is a bit crazy – or is at least perceived to be crazy – make the world a safer place?

Richard Nixon, the 37th United States president, thought so, according to his chief-of-staff Bob Haldeman. “I call it the madman theory, Bob,” the incoming president said in 1968, according to Haldeman’s memoirs, published a decade later. Outlining his strategy to convince communist North Vietnam to surrender to the US and its South Vietnam allies, Haldeman claims Nixon said he wanted the North Vietnamese to believe he was willing to “do anything to stop the war” – including using nuclear weapons.

Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit:

It’s unclear whether Nixon ever said these words to Haldeman (he forcefully denied doing so). Regardless, he was not the first nor the last person to advance such an argument. Philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli argued in 1517 that, in certain circumstances, “it is a very wise thing to simulate madness”.

Nuclear theorist Thomas Schelling wrote in 1966 that a “paradox of deterrence is that it does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, cool-headed, and in control of oneself”. Convincing your adversaries that you may act in an irrational way can keep them unbalanced and force them to make concessions they would not otherwise make, so the madman theory goes.

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the theory is set to be tested like never before. Trump has repeatedly and explicitly said he wants to use the perception he is unpredictable, and even crazy, to boost American power.

During his first term in office, he reportedly told US trade officials to portray him as unhinged to gain an upper hand in negotiations over a US-South Korea free-trade deal. Asked during his 2024 campaign how he would respond to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, Trump responded, “I won’t have to, because [Chinese President Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I’m f---ing crazy.”

Donald Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. Credit: AP

Now Trump has returned to the White House feeling emboldened and surrounded by loyalists, encouraging him to double down on his destabilising approach to global affairs. The implications for the world, including Australia, will be profound. We are tied to the US as an alliance partner and are banking on America to use its military power to preserve peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific.

While he is undoubtedly prone to hollow threats, the evidence shows Trump’s madman style can pay dividends under the right circumstances.

In 2019, Trump threatened to impose a 5 per cent tariff on Mexican imports unless the country cracked down on the huge numbers of migrants attempting to cross the US southern border. The threat alarmed many of Trump’s traditional allies, who thought he was behaving with wild irrationality. “I support nearly every one of President Trump’s immigration policies, but this is not one of them,” Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said.

I was this masthead’s North America correspondent at the time and described the threat as “magical thinking dressed up as policymaking”.

However, the ultimatum worked. The Mexican government scrambled to deploy 6000 National Guard troops to its border with Guatemala and froze the bank accounts of suspected human traffickers. Apprehensions at the US-Mexico border plummeted from 133,000 in May – the month before Trump’s tariff threat – to 33,000 in November, in part because of more aggressive immigration enforcement by Mexican authorities (the Trump administration’s own tough border policies helped as well). Trump never imposed the threatened tariffs, meaning US consumers didn’t have to pay any more for Mexican imports.

Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in 2019.Credit: AP

The same phenomenon could be seen in the breakthrough agreement this month to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of Israeli hostages. Then-president Joe Biden announced the core elements of the agreement last May but was unable to convince the Netanyahu government and Hamas to strike a deal. That changed only as Trump’s return to power drew close. Echoing his 2017 vow to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea, Trump injected a sense of urgency into the negotiations by warning that “all hell will break out” unless Hamas agreed to release the hostages before his inauguration.

He dispatched his special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, to Israel; he forcefully told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was time to cut a deal. Citing Arab officials, The Times of Israel summed up the developments with the scathing headline: “Trump envoy swayed Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year”.

Trump is already trying to repeat this success with Ukraine, which is bogged down in a three-year war of attrition against Russia’s invading forces. While Biden provided generous support to Ukraine, he took a slow and often painfully cautious approach to the war that critics say allowed Ukraine to avoid defeat but failed to give it a realistic shot at victory.

Trump, by contrast, cares little about Ukrainian independence but wants to establish a legacy as a peacemaker by ending the conflict. In a social media post over the weekend, Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to “settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE.”

Trump threatened a new round of tariffs and sanctions on Russian goods, but there is no sign this will change Putin’s calculus, given Russia exports barely any goods to the US. As for Taiwan, Xi will be carefully assessing whether Trump is truly committed to preserving the self-governing island’s sovereignty, or if he could trade away US support for a grand bargain trade deal.

This reflects political scientist Roseanne McManus’s important argument, in the Foreign Affairs journal this month, that “conveying exactly the right level of madness is very difficult” for world leaders. “Trump will have to demonstrate that his madness has limits,” McManus warns. “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.”

Trump has shown that his volatile approach to geopolitics can, for all its self-interested ugliness, produce important tactical victories. But if powerful leaders such as Xi and Putin ultimately see his threats as mere bluster, they will not be convinced to change their behaviour. He’d be wise to remember that, while Nixon may have coined the madman theory, he failed to persuade the North Vietnamese of his insanity. The US surrendered in Vietnam, not its communist opponents.

Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.