The Madman Strikes Back
Nixon’s theory on the power of unpredictability didn’t account for an actual madman adversary.
When U.S. President Donald Trump was elected to his second term, many foreign-policy watchers asserted that he would be likely to employ the madman theory as a tool of coercive bargaining. A term originally coined by President Richard Nixon, proponents of the madman theory argue that a leader who behaves as if he might do something crazy has a better chance of deterring and coercing actors into making concessions that they otherwise would not make. In other words, countries might be willing to acquiesce more to a leader insane enough to use nuclear weapons than a leader too rational to try such a bluff.
This article appears in “The Trump Way,” FP’s collection of essential articles on the U.S. president’s decision-making. Explore the full collection.
Trump was a firm adherent of the madman theory during his first term in office. He also pushed this argument during the 2024 campaign, telling the Wall Street Journal that he would never need to use force against China because Chinese President Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.” During the transition, historian Niall Ferguson argued that the United States’ rivals would be wary of challenging Trump because he presented himself as wild and unpredictable.
Last year, in these very pages, I assessed the madman theory and found it wanting—both in general and for Trump in particular. Indeed, for international relations scholars, the madman theory is akin to madman characters in horror films: Just when you think they have finally been killed, they rise from the grave and insert themselves into the narrative again. Despite a welter of academic articles concluding that the theory does not have much juice, the possibility that Trump is employing it—and that it’s such a crazy idea that it just might work—keeps being resurrected by the media.
For example, when the United States and Iran agreed to a cease-fire in April, just before a Trump-imposed deadline issued with the threat of bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” the New York Times’ David Sanger initially described it as “a down-to-the-wire tactical victory,” writing that “Mr. Trump’s tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels certainly helped him find an offramp he had been seeking for weeks. That success alone may fuel his belief that the tactics he learned in the New York real estate world — ignore old conventions, make maximalist demands — work in geopolitics as well.”
Of course, Sanger wrote those words believing that the cease-fire would open up shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. That turned out to be false—much like the evidence that the madman theory actually works. Indeed, after examining Trump’s second term to date, it is difficult not to conclude that his madman gambits have largely failed. Worse, his efforts to play the madman might have conjured up the one thing guaranteed to blow the theory out of the water: an actual madman for an adversary.
The problems with the madman theory are by now well known. Conceptually, acting crazy might increase the credibility of provocative threats, but it also reduces the credibility that the madman will follow through on any agreement to reduce tensions. Furthermore, saying out loud that one is acting like a madman automatically undercuts the strategy—and Trump likes to say things like this out loud.
This leads to the Trump-specific reasons that his attempts to play the madman were unlikely to work: His first-term attempts to do so largely failed, and his short attention span renders him less able to act as though he will follow through on extreme threats.
How has this dynamic played out over the past sixteen months? Trump’s second-term foreign policy has certainly been a little bit mad, what with the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development; his imposition of sweeping tariffs; his desire to annex Greenland and Canada; and his myriad uses of force in the Middle East, Latin America, and U.S. cities. Observers are keenly aware that in his second term, U.S. foreign policy is the extension of Trump’s singular preferences—unlike his first term, when he often seemed at odds with his own foreign-policy cabinet.
Still, the yield on Trump’s myriad madman gambits has been meager. Sure, some of Trump’s bluster has paid off. His threats against Panama have shifted that country’s behavior on Chinese control of port facilities, for example. And Trump’s maximalist rhetoric has contributed to symbolic concessions from countries such as Colombia. The tariffs have yielded a few economic security agreements of contested utility. Trump’s threats against Venezuela did not cause President Nicolás Maduro to back down—but Operation Southern Spear did effectively dispatch Maduro and enabled a more pliant leader to take his place.
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Mostly, however, it has been Trump who has backed down or changed course. The president put a pause on the tariffs he announced in April 2025 less than a week after they were threatened—in no small part due to financial market gyrations. Trump also backed down on the trade war with China, going so far as to offer the People’s Republic access to top-of-the-line Nvidia chips. Despite a lot of rhetoric about taking Greenland, Trump reversed course after markets got jittery again.
The pattern became easy to detect: Trump was willing to play the madman to the hilt when confronting smaller and weaker actors. At the same time, he was quick to suddenly revert to a more sane bargaining posture when confronting a more powerful actor. This was particularly true whenever markets responded negatively to his foreign and trade policies. It also explains his recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which produced no substantive agreements and exposed Trump’s willingness to make concessions on Taiwan.
Indeed, the pattern became so clear so quickly that just a few months into his second term, a Financial Times columnist quickly dubbed it the TACO principle: “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The European Council on Foreign Relations’ Jeremy Shapiro concluded that “Trump uses threats and force much like a playground bully: while large and outwardly powerful, he actually fears the use of force in any situation even vaguely resembling a fair fight.”
The very fact that Trump developed such a predictable and weak bargaining reputation complicated his efforts to play the madman. Trump has faced difficulties parlaying the madman gambit into real concessions because of his failure to follow through on his more outrageous threats. Such a reputation makes the strategy harder to execute—because the crazy threats seem less credible.
As the Venezuela incursion and Iran war demonstrate, however, Trump does not always chicken out. Indeed, one could argue that the tactical success of Operation Southern Spear, the high-risk Maduro operation, bolstered Trump’s threat credibility—a point that Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized in the press conference immediately after the operation: “When he [Trump] tells you that he’s going to do something, when he tells you he’s going to address a problem, he means it.”
It is not a coincidence that Trump’s interest in Greenland was rekindled immediately after the Venezuela operation—as was his escalation of threats against Iran. And other actors took Trump’s threats more seriously after the Maduro operation. Denmark implemented active defensive measures in Greenland. Multiple observers suggested that Trump might even resort to using nuclear weapons against Iran.
It’s worth noting that neither Denmark nor Iran acquiesced to Trump’s threats—which would be the sign of a successful application of the madman theory. Indeed, Iran’s response to Operation Epic Fury reveals a big flaw with the madman theory: It does not work against another state willing to act like a madman.
Consider that in response to the joint U.S.-Israeli attack, Iran escalated the war across multiple dimensions. Iranian rockets and drones struck targets in the Persian Gulf states. Many of those attacks targeted civilian infrastructure. And it was Iran that decided to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, thereby inflicting global economic pain and dampening sympathy for its plight across the global south. Trump, who usually assumes that he possesses escalation dominance, has encountered an adversary willing to escalate even more. The theocratic regime’s relatively extreme political preferences and willingness to tolerate economic pain make Iran a particularly difficult target for the madman gambit.
Iran’s responses have exposed other issues with Trump’s application of the madman theory as well. Negotiations with Tehran have been difficult for a number of reasons—but perhaps the biggest reason is that Iran’s leaders do not trust the Trump administration after twice being bombed in the middle of negotiations. Acting like a madman can make coercion more plausible, but it also raises the costs of conflict resolution.
At the start of Trump’s second term, I cautioned that “if Trump is unable to convince anyone else that he really is a madman, then the only way he can prove it is to follow through on his most outlandish threats. Maybe that would work, but it could also lead to a conflict spiraling out of control.” As the Iran conflict persists for longer than first suggested, the inescapable conclusion to draw is that, like Nixon before him, Trump is learning that the madman theory sounds better in theory than in practice.
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Daniel W. Drezner is an academic dean and a distinguished professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. He is the author of the newsletter Drezner’s World. X: @dandrezner
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