Madman on the loose?

Let’s start with a weekend story at the BBC by Allan Little, whose thesis is presented in its title: “How Trump is using the ‘Madman Theory’ to try to change the world (and it’s working).” Donald Trump, according to Little, has more or less consciously used his propensity to act in a random and unexpected fashion as leverage against allies and rivals. In his words, Trump “has made his own unpredictability a key strategic and political asset.”

There’s no doubt about the basic idea, that a reputation for instability can be a useful thing. Little mentions Richard Nixon, but there are many examples; when John Hewson began working at Treasury he was allegedly told by his boss, Phillip Lynch, “You’ve got to realise, John, that we’ve got this madman upstairs” – a reference to prime minister Malcolm Fraser.*

If the leader really is mad, some (although not all) of the advantage disappears. For maximum effect, it has to be possible to turn the effect on and off at will, or at least calibrate it to some extent, which a genuinely insane leader is presumably unable to do. If a leader is totally unpredictable, then nothing you do can reliably affect their actions; all you can do is try to stay away.

As it happens, I don’t think Trump is mad in any ordinary sense of the word. He is clearly intellectually limited and lazy, although he has a degree of natural cunning and rhetorical skill: what could fairly be called charisma. He operates mostly on impulse, and his instincts are mostly bad ones. He is generally out for himself, seeking power, wealth and adulation (not necessarily in that order).

To the extent that he has further ambitions – an extent that isn’t very great; these are broad tendencies rather than worked-out plans – they are to turn the United States domestically into an authoritarian state and internationally into an ally of Russia. Both, in my view, constitute dire threats to civilised values and possibly to civilisation itself. His tendency to be distracted from them, to veer off at a tangent in pursuit of self-interest or of some new momentary impulse, is therefore more a good than a bad thing.

As Little remarks, the fact that Trump’s unpredictability is instinctive rather than calculated could diminish its usefulness. It may be, as he says, that “rather than being a sleight of hand designed to fool adversaries, it is in fact based on well established and clearly documented character traits, with the effect that his behaviour becomes easier to predict.” But he equivocates on this, suggesting that there is also an element of calculation at work.

European leaders (and some others) have responded to Trump by agreeing to increase their defence spending, a logical move on two grounds: firstly for their own safety (and that of Ukraine) as the US appears less and less as a reliable ally, and secondly as a sort of bribe to Trump, since such increases are what he claims to want (and remembering that money for defence usually means money to American defence contractors).

But Trump is torn on the question, or at least would be if he entertained more than one thought simultaneously. On the one hand he’s happy with a result that seems to demonstrate his power and validate his previous complaints about European “freeloaders”. On the other hand, greater strategic independence for Europe cuts against his other interests, and certainly is not what his ally Vladimir Putin has been aiming at.

In any case, as the world goes mad, Trump starts to seem more sane in comparison. His remark last month that Israel and Iran “have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing,” which helped to secure (so far, at least) the ceasefire between them, was an eminently sensible assessment of the conflict. And his eager pursuit of commercial and real estate deals in the region for himself and his family, while sordid, seems likely to do less actual harm than the less corrupt but more ideological goals of previous policymakers.

And since foreign and domestic policy should never be taken in isolation, because one always illuminates the other, it’s also worth noting that Trump of late has been sounding more sensible on the domestic front as well. But that will lead us on to tomorrow’s topic.

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* Quoted by Brian Buckley in his biography of Lynch, Lynched, p. 102.