Will Trump's 'madman' strategy pay off?

Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th US president this afternoon. In the run-up to his second term in office, he has wasted no time in "returning to centre stage in US foreign policy" and "reprising his hallmark blend of bombastic rhetoric and threats" to keep both allies and enemies guessing.

Trump has already engaged in "undiplomatic talk", threatening, for example, to reclaim the Panama Canal and annex not only Greenland but Canada. And world leaders have been "scrambling" to respond, said NPR.

Panama, Canada and Denmark (which oversees Greenland) have strongly reminded Trump of their sovereignty but the new US president's sabre-rattling is clearly stoking tensions on the global stage already.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the commentators say?

It's easy to dismiss such pronouncements as a "nothing-burger" asides and instead "wait for a more authoritative expression of the new administration's plans", said Ed Kilgore for Intelligencer. But that would be "a mistake". Trump has conveyed something important to the world: "a forceful reminder that he is an extremely unpredictable champion of America's interests, as he sees them", and that neither "precedent, taste, or conventional wisdom" will constrain him.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, "he sounded mad an awful lot of the time – in both senses of the word", said Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, in Foreign Policy. Time and time again, he made it clear he would be a different kind of president "because he was willing to be a little bit crazy, a little bit unpredictable".

Trump's delivery is often a marked departure from that of his predecessors but his sentiments echo that of President Nixon, "who also liked to get mad in both meanings of the word". It was Nixon who developed the "madman" theory of governance, wanting the North Vietnamese, for example, "to believe he was capable of doing anything to bring the Vietnam War to an end – up to and including the use of nuclear weapons".

"Trump's madman schtick" has so far worked best "with US allies", who have been "rattled by his threats to withdraw from long-standing alliances and trade treaties", and so have "made some public displays of fealty". But Trump has been "too busy trying to ingratiate himself with the autocratic rulers of China and Russia to act crazy in front of them". And, in any case, as he enters his second term, "most foreign leaders are now intimately familiar with Trump's playbook" – which makes him "more predictable to a host of foreign leaders who had to deal with him the first time around".

There is also little evidence that such an approach works historically, said Brad Glosserman in The Japan Times. For Nixon, "it didn't win the Vietnam war". And, though Vladimir Putin "flirts with the madman theory when he hints at his readiness to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict", that war is still going on.

What next?

Today, Trump will seek to "flex one of the most intense and sweeping demonstrations of presidential power on the first day of any administration" with a "blizzard of hardline executive actions" on energy production and immigration, and pardons for the January 6 rioters expected "by sundown", said CNN.

And this "inaugural show of force" will set the tone for Trump's second term – one which is "anchored on Trump's strongman persona and vision of an all-powerful presidency", a presidency which will be "aimed at unleashing intense disruption at home and abroad".