Madmen and Realists

US foreign policy under Trump and beyond

Although this post is on foreign policy it is by Sam not Lawrence! It originally appeared as a review of two books in the Times Literary Supplement: “US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory” by James D. Boys and “First Among Equals” by Emma Ashford.

If you’ve been away over August you can look at our recent posts here - including ones on why “suicidal empathy” is such a dangerous idea; the myth of the “Boriswave”; why Iran could be American’s Suez; and much more.

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The problem with writing about Donald Trump is that one can expend an enormous amount of energy trying to explain moves he doesn’t understand himself. He has a set of underlying, and mostly wrong, beliefs about the world – mainly consisting of the idea that the US is being taken advantage of by everyone else. Beyond that, he’s susceptible to influence from almost anyone willing to apply the requisite level of flattery, takes almost no time to understand the historical context required for good decisions, and actively punishes those who tell him truths he doesn’t want to hear.

This is a particular challenge for foreign policy analysts, who like to write about grand strategies and world orders. Saying “this guy is in obvious cognitive decline, ill-informed and doesn’t know what he’s doing” over and over is not very satisfying.

One option is to assume that Trump’s erratic behaviour is part of a cunning plan to discombobulate opponents and get his way: a tactic straight out of The Art of the Deal. This is effectively what James D. Boys argues in US Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory. The book’s opening chapters offer an engaging intellectual history of the theory’s development and use under previous presidents. Most people associate the idea with Richard Nixon, but Boys convincingly argues that Nixon was influenced by President Eisenhower’s veiled threats to use nuclear weapons to end the Korean War.

The use of unpredictability as a way to improve negotiating strategy was developed by Cold War theorists including Thomas Schelling, Daniel Ellsberg and, most important, Henry Kissinger, who ended up working with Nixon. Whereas the eminently reasonable Eisenhower had used his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as his “bad cop” to create some uncertainty about how far the US would go, Nixon and Kissinger swapped roles. White House tapes captured them discussing Kissinger going around the world, encouraging co-operation from other states by telling them he couldn’t control his boss.

Boys sees Trump as consciously taking up this tradition in actions that have transformed US foreign policy, from the imposition of tariffs to threatening Greenland and yelling at Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. There is no doubt that Trump has, at various times, thought this was what he was doing. He clearly believes that being as bombastic as possible is the best way to negotiate, and often says that’s his plan, in the style of a reality TV contestant being interviewed about their tactics by the producers.

There was an early example during his first presidential campaign when he refused to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons against Islamic State: “I’m never going to rule anything out … I wouldn’t want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think that maybe we would use them”. During the 2024 campaign, he told the Wall Street Journal that he wouldn’t need to use force against China because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy”. (That these things are contradictory seems to have escaped him.) His aides regularly invoke Madman Theory as a justification for his behaviour.

The author expresses irritation with commentators who use discussion of Madman Theory as a hook to call Trump mad, noting that the whole point of the approach is to appear as if you’re a lunatic while actually being strategic. But the problem is not that Trump is mad, but that he’s utterly predictable. His ramblings on his Truth Social platform may be incoherent, but the broad framework in which he operates is consistent: he is a bully. Where he thinks he can take advantage of the US’s immense military and economic strength to undermine, belittle and force fealty, he does. When he faces any kind of serious consequences for his actions, he backs down. Constantly asserting how tough you are, to the extent of namechecking Madman Theory, is not what someone who was actually trying to be strategically unpredictable would do. Nixon never once acknowledged the idea in public (though ultimately his use of it failed to end the Vietnam War, because no one really believed that he was mad).

While other states find Trump hard to deal with, they have figured out that the best way to deal with him is through a combination of flattery, pretend compliance and waiting him out. As he neither cares about outcomes nor can pay attention to anything for more than a few weeks, he can be effectively managed this way. To justify his focus on Madman Theory, Boys goes out of his way to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, at great cost to his broader argument. In the discussion of tariffs, he accepts that the president’s decision to impose them on Canada was “in part, to stem the flow of fentanyl across the northern border” – even though this is an obvious nonsense. Less than 1 per cent of illicit fentanyl arriving in the US comes via Canada.

Boys describes the deal done with Ukraine to secure access to rare earth minerals as payment for military support as if it were an actual achievement rather than an obvious ruse to keep Trump quiet. Likewise, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites last year is described as evidence of “Trump’s willingness to follow through on his threats”, despite his failure to actually destroy the nuclear sites, in the face of his claim to the contrary. Indeed, he ultimately forced Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to back off from further bombing runs.

On none of these matters have Trump’s tactics worked. The US trade deficit is unchanged. Greenland has not been sold. Ukraine has not been forced to agree a peace deal with Russia. Iran’s nuclear capability remains. The current conflict with Iran, which began after Boys’s book was completed, is the clearest evidence yet that other states have seen through Trump’s bluster and faux belligerence. Despite numerous threats of armageddon, the Iranians have not backed down, and they called Trump’s bluff because he appeared unwilling to accept the economic consequences of escalation. China has taken a similar approach to managing trade wars, forcing concessions on the export of chips while finding ways to circumvent tariffs.

Perhaps the only way one could argue that Trump has achieved a long-term American ambition is in forcing European countries to up their defence spending, albeit nowhere near as far or as fast as they have promised to do so. Boys claims this as an example of Madman Theory’s efficacy, with threats of abandonment encouraging compliance by other NATO members. But there is no unpredictability here. Trump has made it clear that he has no meaningful interest in European security. It’s not a bluff, just hostility. And the cost of such disdain for the interests of former allies is that they are starting to exclude the US.

Ukraine no longer depends on the Americans, which has removed any leverage Trump had to force a peace deal on Russian terms. Increasingly, “middle powers” are profitably co-operating on matters of defence and security. While the US remains the strongest nation in the world due to its military spending and the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, Trump has diminished its global standing for very little benefit. It is tempting to ascribe this to madness, but really it’s just incompetence from a president with limited capabilities.

For some, a reduction in the US’s footprint is a positive, even if it is through unconventional and often embarrassing means. Trump has found tentative backing in the past from “realists” who have spent years complaining about US imperial overreach and idealistic world-building missions. One of the most influential, Elbridge Colby, occupies a senior role in the renamed Department of War. Others, such as John Mearsheimer, have bemoaned Trump’s incoherence and inability to execute while praising his scepticism of liberal interventionism and willingness to criticize Nato’s expansion into eastern Europe.

Unfortunately for the realists, in his second term the president has found that he quite enjoys using the military, causing some dismay to those who thought he was an ally – not least to his vice president, J. D. Vance, and America Firsters in the media, such as Tucker Carlson. Those who weren’t already disillusioned have found the Iran conflict a chastening experience – it is hard to imagine a more obvious example of a pointless intervention, with unclear and unrealistic objectives that changed, and still change, day to day.

In First Among Equals, Emma Ashford does not try to defend Trump’s behaviour in office, instead setting out a realist programme more consistent with the objections to American adventurism that he expressed during the 2016 campaign. Ashford objects to the rhetoric of America First because it doesn’t sit well with potential allies: no one likes a bully. But her proposals, which she calls “realist internationalism”, are in that vein, seeking to scale back US military objectives and costs. As the US’s brief moment as the sole global hegemon comes to an end, Ashford wants “middle powers” to pick up the slack so that US taxpayers see more of their money spent on their domestic needs.

The so-called realists have been bolstered in recent decades by the failure of more ambitious American strategies. Russia, China and other autocracies have not been converted to liberal democracy via capitalism, as many hoped in the years following the Cold War. The post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are now acknowledged by almost everyone to have been disasters on a historic scale, undermining the US’s moral and military authority at enormous expense in terms of lives and cash. The US’s humanitarian interventions have a chequered record: they stopped Slobodan Milošević from massacring Kosovar Albanians, but failed in Somalia and Libya. The realists also argue that the conflict in Ukraine is a direct result of overreach in the 1990s and 2000s, as the US and western allies unnecessarily provoked Russia by interfering in its “sphere of interest” – though others would note that Vladimir Putin’s own imperial fantasies might have more to do with it.

In practical terms, Ashford calls for a phased withdrawal of the US military from Europe and the Middle East over ten years, arguing that the strategic basis for such a large presence there (the Cold War and oil) no longer holds. She contends that this will give the Europeans plenty of time to get their act together and pay for their own defence, especially as Russian forces have been so heavily depleted by the war in Ukraine. In the Middle East, she wants most bases closed, with just a small naval force left to safeguard shipping lanes. China is now the main strategic risk to the US and so, she says, more focus is needed there, but with the emphasis on containment and building up regional allies to take up more of the slack in the future.

Realism is a useful lens insofar as it encourages policymakers to think about the world as it really is and to set viable objectives. Trump’s Iran fiasco is another reminder, if one were needed, of why it is a bad idea to use military force when there’s a lack of clarity of purpose in assessing likely outcomes. We might think that it would be good to help the Iranian people to remove a parasitical and brutal regime, but there is no practical way to do so via military means.

The problem with realism, though, especially in the rigid formulation set out by Ashford, is that it assumes that a narrow assessment of interests is always the right course, regardless of circumstances. Ukraine is an obvious example. Though the author is reluctant to say so explicitly, the logic of her position is not only that the US shouldn’t be supporting Ukraine now, but also that it shouldn’t have in the first place, given the lack of direct American interest in the outcome.

In a section entitled “No one loves a political realist”, Ashford notes that “realist arguments about the war in Ukraine – and about the limited interests that the United States has in that conflict – have not sat well with a commentariat populated by those who idolize the liberal ideas of the unipolar moment”. But she doesn’t explain why they are wrong. Without the support provided by the Biden administration in the first few years, Ukraine may well have collapsed, leading to an emboldened Russia. Avoiding that was unquestionably a good thing. To complain that it violated a neat approach to grand strategy is itself a failure of realistic thinking.

One doesn’t need to think that the US can or should respond to every humanitarian crisis or autocratic horror to think that it should help out when it reasonably can and when the objectives are clear and achievable. Seeing the world as it is can mean asserting caution in the face of moral outrage; it can also mean acknowledging that the idealistic solution is sometimes the right one too. Bill Clinton’s decision to intervene in Kosovo also violated a narrow understanding of US interests, but it worked and it saved countless lives. Realists would no doubt argue that the short-term success was not worth the effect it had in bolstering the misplaced belief that the US should intervene everywhere. But that’s just an argument for taking every situation on its merits and accepting that logical consistency isn’t always achievable in a messy and unfair world.

The same applies to the realist view of relations with allies, which is where there is the clearest overlap with Trump’s foreign policy. Ashford argues that the liberal interventionist obsession with permanent alliances, particularly Nato, leads to the US being landed with heavy costs and responsibility as others seek to freeload, while making it difficult to withdraw troops from regions that are no longer a strategic priority. The author approvingly quotes Glenn Snyder: “Alliances have no meaning apart from the adversary threat to which they are a response”. But while it is true enough that alliances and partnerships can outlive their purpose, calcify unhelpful beliefs and constitute a false economy – Netanyahu’s hold over multiple presidents is perhaps the most obvious example – Snyder’s line is manifestly untrue.

Alliances that go beyond the transactional, built on history and shared beliefs, have a value beyond the question of immediate threat. They create relationships that allow for a rapid response to new challenges that may not have been predicted. In the aftermath of 9/11, Nato’s alliances led to a genuine outpouring of support for the US (even if that support was misused by George W. Bush). Such alliances also help to build backing for broader non-military goals. One has to hope that, at some point, a president is going to acknowledge the costs of climate change and the level of international co-ordination required to manage them.

The diminution of alliances under Trump has led not to a stronger and more focused US, but to an increasingly isolated one that is spending no less on its military and simultaneously forfeiting any moral authority that remained after Afghanistan and Iraq. This is in the interests of neither the US nor the world. Again, genuine realism requires a bespoke approach to alliances that acknowledges a wider range of factors and is open to taking different approaches in different circumstances.

While Trump is president, there won’t be coherence in US foreign policy, beyond the occasional reassertion of his long-standing bugbears. The world will keep trying to work around him, probably successfully. The bigger question is what happens next. A Vance foreign policy would no doubt be more obnoxious than Ashford would like, though it would be more consistently “realist” in the sense of trying to reduce the US’s global commitments. But what about the other side? One hopes that a prospective Democrat president would try to find a role for the US that acknowledges the limitations of intervention and approaches global challenges with a greater level of humility, while understanding that there is a place for US leadership, and that the country’s extraordinary power can still be used for good in the right circumstances.