Return of the Madman Theory [View all]

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Trump’s foreign policy is so erratic and unpredictable, it might just make the world more stable—for a very short time.

President Donald Trump’s most nerve-racking trait—his unhinged impulsiveness, driven more by random stimuli and shifts in mood than by careful study or long-held principles—might be having an oddly stabilizing influence in the world’s crisis-strewn regions, at least for a little while.

Consider what Richard Nixon called “the Madman Theory.” In the early years of his presidency, he told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to warn the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy. Nixon is obsessed with Communism, Kissinger was supposed to say. He can’t be restrained when he’s angry, and for God’s sake, he has his hand on the nuclear button. In two days’ time, Nixon predicted, Ho Chi Minh will be “begging for peace.”

The ploy didn’t work, in part because the North Vietnamese didn’t believe it. Whatever the many other eccentricities that Nixon had displayed in a quarter-century of public life, he wasn’t a madman, at least not in that way....

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/04/trump_is_inadvertently_putting_nixon_s_madman_theory_to_the_test.html