Trump: Madman?
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via the White House
Just weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump has made good on his promise to the American people to root out bureaucratic malfeasance in Washington and upend the liberal international order. To great effect, the President has broken up federal departments like USAID, and imposed his presidential authority by issuing more executive orders at this point in his presidency than any other since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, nearly a century ago.
In response to his crusade against the federal bureaucracy, historian Niall Ferguson has claimed Trump’s actions can be viewed as “Nixon’s revenge”. The thirty-seventh president often found himself at odds with the bureaucratic apparatus left to him following the liberal Johnson Administration of the 1960s. Similarly, one can look to foreign policy as an example of where Trump is treading the same path blazed by Nixon half a century ago.
The “Madman Theory”, championed by Nixon’s national security adviser (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger, was his attempt to keep communist adversaries guessing during the Cold War. Among other things, such a tactic envisioned scaring the North Vietnamese into believing Nixon would use nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam War. He didn’t, and the communist nationalists eventually reunited the country in 1975.
Yet it is doubtful that Nixon, even at the height of wishing to appear a mad man, would have sought to defend as clear an adversary as Putin, while berating an ally as vulnerable as Zelenskyy.
Trump’s approach to foreign policy has developed a certain cache amongst his acolytes, and his advisers are quick to defend him. Foremost amongst the skills attributed to him in the peace-making process is his ability as a deal-maker. Therefore, any methods to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table are seen as justified - purely an extension of the art of the deal.
In foreign policy, rhetoric often doubles as policy, particularly with a Western hegemon like the US. Trump may be correct in certain circumstances that the US can negotiate better deals for its economy. However, rhetoric that fosters insecurity amongst its allies can only provide comfort to the Kremlin and Xi Jinping’s Politburo. And then there’s tariffs. Punitive in their makeup, the Trump White House has announced these with hardly any warning and with undisguised vitriol, eroding relations with allies still further.
Today, there is great contention amongst experts about whether President Trump’s “transactional” approach to foreign policy puts him in the realist school of thought on the subject, or whether it is merely ad hoc. As Robert Kaplan recently noted, Trump departs from the international realism espoused by Kissinger – one which recognised the benefits of alliances to buttress US power.
Others are more critical still. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has asserted that Trump “doesn’t really care about enhancing American security”, nor does he think in terms of policy. Instead, he accuses the President of only caring to enhance one thing: Donald Trump.
Similar concerns have been voiced by H.R. McMaster, Bolton’s predecessor in the first Trump term. In particular, McMaster has pointed to rhetoric around Russia and suggests Putin may be appealing to Trump’s sense of aggrievement in order to bend the President to his will.
Clearly, then, there is some debate even amongst Republicans as to whether Trump is cut from the same realist cloth as his GOP predecessors. If he is, and this really is part of some master plan, he appears to be playing Go while those around him are playing chess, such is the unpredictability and mystification surrounding his actions. If not, and the President is ceding US power as wilfully and openly as it appears, then Trump may have gone past Nixon and into the realm where theory meets reality.