* Trump & the ‘Madman Theory’ of International Relations

* Democratic Republic of the Congo Under Attack

* Remaking the World Order: US at Crossroads

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Trump as ‘Madman’: Pros & Cons

There is worldwide speculation whether US President Donald Trump is a lunatic. He does want US adversaries to think so.

Asked in October last year how he would respond if mainland China blockaded Taiwan, Trump told The Wall Street Journal’s editors: “I wouldn’t have to, because Chinese leader Xi Jinping respects me and he knows I’m fu…ing crazy.”

Assessing Trump’s early-January comments about acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, CNN-host and commentator Fareed Zakaria  noted: “Some say we are simply back to the ‘madman theory’ of foreign policy, which posits that it’s good for the US president to sometimes appear unpredictable, even irrational, because it throws adversaries off guard.”

If that is Trump’s strategy, is it paying off? As with everything else about Trump 2.0, the new administration’s foreign policy track record is evolving swiftly.

  • Before swearing in, Trump helped secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
  • He has since issued an ultimatum to Russia to settle its war in Ukraine or face heightened financial and economic sanctions.

[Vladimir knew very well that this was an idle threat – a pro forma show of force meant for Trump’s domestic audience, and Trump’s soft corner for Russia remains intact!].

  • After Colombia rejected migrant-repatriation flights, Trump’s public tariff threats seemed to force Colombia’s president to back down.  

Regardless, there are serious questions about volatility as a strategy.

For instance, Zakaria noted that “Trump tried this gambit in his first term, most obviously with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

He began by threatening him with nuclear war…and then abruptly switched to ‘romancing him’ with ‘love letters’. None of it worked.

North Korea continued to build its nuclear arsenal, conduct missile tests (after a brief pause) and threaten its southern neighbour South Korea.

The scholar Daniel W. Drezner notes that much research has concluded that the original subject of the madman theory, President Richard M. Nixon produced no positive results for his efforts to seem crazy and unhinged.”

The “madman theory” indeed has been tried, Penn State political scientist Roseanne Mcmanus writes in a new Foreign Affairs essay.

Nixon instructed aides to depict him as capricious and cruel.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev deliberately cultivated an image of insanity, at least initially, some U.S. officials believed,” McManus writes.

Nodding to arguments supporting the madman theory, McManus writes that during the Cold War, the nuclear-armed US and Soviet Union were locked in mutually assured destruction (also: MAD) if either attacked with nuclear weapons.

Everyone knew that, so any nuclear threat by a US or Soviet leader was less likely to be taken seriously.

Why would either country strike first, if that would ensure its own destruction?

No sane leader would.

If a leader were crazy, on the other hand, that might change things – and threats would become more believable and intimidating.

McManus sees limits to the madman strategy.

Nixon did not secure his goals in Vietnam, and Khrushchev backed down in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In those cases, seeming unpredictable did not induce capitulation.

Noting other problems with the theory, McManus writes that seeming crazy can incentivize a nuclear-armed opponent to strike first, before the supposed madman does the same.

A madman’s promise of peace, meanwhile, are less credible, and deals with him are viewed as unstable.

“Unfortunately,” McManus writes, “conveying exactly the right level of madness is very difficult…

“Many madmen – including Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein – developed reputations that ultimately proved detrimental, because their opponents came to believe that they would not abide by peace commitments…

“On the other hand, leaders like Khrushchev and Nixon may not have gone far enough, given that their adversaries doubted their willingness to use nuclear weapons…

“Trump might be able to succeed if he can portray himself as unpredictable and unrestrained without seeming unhinged. But if Trump comes off as hopelessly irrational, he is unlikely to get what he seeks.”

DR Congo: Goma & the Global Order

“Something awful is happening” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Economist writes.

“A rebel group called M 23 seized control of Goma, the biggest city in the east of the country, on January 27th, killing several UN peacekeepers and prompting hundreds of thouisands of locals to flee. Hardly anyone outside central Africa knows who M@# are or what they are fighting for.”

As CNN’s Nimi Princewill, Joshua Replogle and Stephanie Halasz report, the militants are widely believed to be backed by neighbouring Rwanda.

“The Congolese government accused Rwanda of equipping the M 23 with both weapons and troops,” they write.

“Rwanda does not deny the allegations. A spokesperson for the Rwandan government, Yolande Makolo, told CNN that her country ‘will do what’s necessary to defend our borders and protect Rwandans’.”

The Economist writes that the M 23 militants “claim to be protecting Congolese Tutsis from persecution, but the threat to them is exaggerated…

“M 23 is in fact a proxy for Rwanda, allowing it to grab a big chunk of Congolese territory while pretending not to.”

The Associated Press (AP) notes a history of local conflict and riches to be had: “Goma is a key location in the conflict-battered North Kivu province whose minerals are critical to much of the world’s technology…

“Rebel groups have long fought over control of eastern Congo’s mineral wealth, and the conflict has often pitted ethnic groups against one another with civilians forced to flee their homes and seek protection from armed groups.”

Last week, protests unfolded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital Kinshasa, with Western embassies – and that of Rwanda – attacked, CNN reports.

To explain the situation, The Economist draws an analogy to Russia and Ukraine.

The magazine sees Rwandan leader Paul Kagame using a pretence of local separatism to encroach on a neighbour.

That’s what Russia did in 2014, when it backed pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

“Following the Donbas model,” The Economist writes, “Rwanda has informally created something that looks a lot like a puppet state on Congolese soil. And it may not stop at Goma. Some Western diplomats worry that Mr Kagame ultimately aims to topple the Congolese government. This is not merely illegal and wrong. It is a worrying symptom of a decaying international order. The global taboo against taking other people’s territory is crumbling.”

The Costs of Trump’s Foreign Policy Disruption

The liberal rules-based international order the US built and sustained in the years after the Second World War is disintegrating at an accelerating pace.

After a period of comity following the end of the Cold War, great-power competition has returned with a vengeance, pitting the United States against two major revisionist powers, China and Russia, meanwhile smaller powers cozy up to one or multiple members of this unfriendly trio.

According to veteran US diplomat and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Thomas E. Graham, the first Trump illeberal,in its National Security Strategy, and the Biden administration only amplified that view on its own. In these administrations’ telling, America’s rivals are disputing the foundations of the liberal order, including the democratic values that inspire it and the U.S. power that undergirds it.

As the United States’ margin of superiority over other power thins, new, mostly illiberal centres of global power such as China, arguably India, and possibly Russia, gain authority and influence.

More generally, world power and dynamism are flowing away from the Euro-Atlantic community, the core of the liberal order.

Although the United States resists the idea, the world is moving toward illiberal, if not necessarily anti-liberal multipolarity.

And Trump’s second administration is accelerating the process.

The Trump factor

Donald Trump ran for the White House pledging to disrupt U.S. foreign policy. He has been true to his word during his first 100 days in office.

Among other things, he has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization [with incalculable risks both for the United States and the world at large], imposed a ninety-day pause on most U.S. foreign aid programmes, called for relocating Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan [what a scatterbrain idea], and suggested he would use force to claim Greenland and retake the Panama Canal.

Trump says this disruption will provide big benefits for the United States. Ivo Daalder (CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former US Ambassador to NATO) and James M. Lindsay (Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations) are very skeptical whether Trump’s moves will produce the bonanza he predicts.

In fact they argue that the price of Trump’s power politics will be quite heavy for the US and the world, and that it is China and Russia that stand to win in a ‘might-makes-right’ world (Foreign Affairs, Jan. 30).

They write that for decades, Trump has argued that the foreign policy that the United States has pursued since the end of World War II has saddled it with policing the globe, allowing its friends, partners, and allies to free ride on its security guarantees while stealing American jobs. He sees world politics as a cut-throat place where your friends can be as big a threat as your enemies.

Daalder and Lindsay argue convincingly:

“Trump’s skepticism about US support for Ukraine and Taiwan, his eagerness to impose tariffs, and his threats to retake the Panama Canal, absorb Canada, and acquire Greenland [ by force if necessary ] make it clear that he envisions a return to nineteenth-century power politics and spheres of interest [and influence]…

“In that era, the great powers of the day sought to divide the world into regions that each would dominate, regardless of the desires of those who lived there – a vision of the world that Trump explicitly echoes… 

“Trump sees few significant U.S. interests outside the Western Hemisphere, considers alliances to be a drain on the U.S. Treasury, and believes the United States should dominate its neighbourhood…

He subscribes to the worldview of the ancient Greek Thucydides as enunciated in The Peloponnesian War: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

As the world’s leading economic and military power, the United States can certainly coerce other countries, especially much weaker ones [ like Colombia and Panama ], to get what it wants.

But Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan provide powerful reminders that hard power does not always prevail.

Daalder and Lindsay write that, on the whole, acting the bully provides diminishing returns and will likely do more to harm U.S. interests than advance them. They will also resurrect the image of the Ugly American.

Moreover, Trump’s hubris [overconfident pride combined with arrogance] could very well lead to his downfall!

Until now, Washington’s network of alliances has granted the United States extraordinary influence in Europe and Asia,  imposing constraints on Moscow and Beijing at a scale neither power can replicate.

Ceding that advantage will come at great cost to the United States: not only will erstwhile U.S. allies no longer follow Washington’s lead, but many could also seek safety by aligning themselves more closely with Russia and China instead. 

Beijing and Moscow certainly have been working for years, and increasingly together in an informal alliance, to peel support away from Washington.

Lindsay is quite clear that those efforts will likely ramp up as Trump turns to threats to pressure friends and neighbours.

As a result, Washington will surely lose some ability to attract support.

China Ascendant

China is especially well positioned to contest U.S. influence across the globe, including in the United States’ own backyard – Latin America.

Trump does not offer other countries new opportunities; he demands concessions.

Beijing, by contrast, is eager to do business around the world with its Belt and Road Infrastructure Initiative.

It invests with few immediate conditions, and it speaks the language of win-win outcomes.

Chinese firms also often offer competitive products at better prices than U.S. companies do.

Unsurprisingly, China has already become the number one trading partner for many countries in the Global South.

And as Washington withdraws from international institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement, Beijing is swiftly moving to fill the vacuum.

The writer can be reached at: [email protected]