By barraging social posts to urge Iran to make a deal and threatening to end the “whole civilisation”, is US President Donald Trump deploying what’s known as the “Madman Theory”? An international law expert said he believed that there was a deeper strategy at play.
Over the weekend, Trump posted an expletive-laden message for Iran, saying, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F***** Strait, you crazy b******s, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” was Trump’s ominous weekend warning.”
He vowed to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if the country’s leaders don’t reopen the . “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!,” he had added, setting the precise deadline for Iran to act.
Waikato University Professor Al Gillespie told RNZ such actions would technically amount to war crimes, but he believed there was a deeper strategy at play. He spoke about “Madman Theory.”
What is the ‘madman theory’?
The ‘madman theory’ is a foreign policy strategy in which a leader pretends to be irrational and unpredictable — to make adversaries believe they might take extreme, even catastrophic, actions.
The theory argues that being perceived as irrational gives a leader an advantage in international coercive bargaining
The phrase “Madman Theory” itself comes from a statement by Former US President , recorded in a memoire by his aide.
Nixon was famously described as pursuing a “madman theory” in his approach to wartime negotiations, creating the perception that he was capable of any destruction to cow adversaries, according to Reuters.
For Nixon, the historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson wrote, “the ploy pivoted on the idea that he did not consider himself to be mad. He considered himself crafty.”
As per Reuters, the theory hardly led to long-term success in the Vietnam War, but it has been trotted out to explain the current outlook of US President Donald Trump in his campaign against Iran.
Meanwhile, Cody Smith, a lecturer on negotiation and conflict resolution at Columbia University, explained to Reuters that if you’re acting like a madman, there’s no consistency there, and so you’re not going to accomplish the goal that you’re seeking to accomplish.
Is Trump successful in deploying ‘Madman Theory’?
Waikato University Professor Al Gillespie told RNZ recently he did not believe that the strategy would be successful, because the Iranian regime did not care about what the US did to its civilian population.
He said that the issue with Trump’s use of the strategy in the case of Iran is that it relies upon a rational opposition.
“In the case of eitheror autocratic regimes, they often don’t have that fear,” he said, adding, “And then there’s the concern that they don’t actually believe the person making the threat.”
“Iran feels emboldened by Mr Trump’s increasingly extreme rhetoric… I think they almost want it right now,” Gillespie was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, the MIT Centre for International Studies noted that “madman theory” approach has been tried — mostly unsuccessfully — by leaders as diverse as Nikita Krushchev and Moammar Gadhafi.
Besides, Cody Smith, a lecturer on negotiation and conflict resolution at Columbia University, believes that “In general, you want to have the other side to some degree think that you are sane.”
“You want them to think that you’re a rational actor because then they can influence you and you can influence them, and there’s a way to work together effectively. That is, I think quite critical and especially in a long-run negotiation. You have to build up trust,” he told Reuters.
