The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World

Dedication

To Gloria, Tristan, Caden, and Sinclair

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Introduction: The Madman Theory

1: The End of American Exceptionalism

2: Commander in Chief

3: Strong Man Good: Russia

4: L’État, C’est Moi: Ukraine

5: Strong Man Bad: China

6: Fire and Fury: North Korea, Part One

7: Falling in Love: North Korea, Part Two

8: Retreat, Reverse, Repeat: Syria

9: Shifting Red Lines: Iran

Epilogue: Trump World

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The Madman Theory

There was a frightening and telling moment in the depths of the Vietnam War when the reeling President Richard Nixon delivered an astonishing order to his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Nixon told Kissinger to convey to his North Vietnamese counterparts that he, the president, will stop at nothing if the stalling negotiations between the two sides failed to make progress toward the honorable withdrawal Nixon was seeking. And by stop at nothing, Nixon meant—bluntly—to attack North Vietnam with nuclear weapons.

You can say, ‘I cannot control him.’ Put it that way, Nixon said.

Yeah. And imply that you might use nuclear weapons, Kissinger replied.

Yes, sir, the president answered, specifying even the words Kissinger should use: He will. I just want you to know he is not going to cave.¹

As matter-of-factly maniacal as this sounds, according to Nixon historian Tim Naftali, President Nixon believed he was acting very reasonably on the wisdom of one of his predecessors, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Nixon’s idea wasn’t actually his, Naftali explained. It was based on an idea of how the Korean War ended, that Eisenhower hinting that he might use nuclear weapons [against North Korea] encouraged the Chinese to settle.

The trouble is, he added, that there is not much evidence that any such threat from Eisenhower actually helped end the Korean War. Regardless, in 1971, at the height of another war that had already killed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, the sitting US president deliberately communicated to his adversary that he was just mad enough to launch nuclear weapons.

Nixon and Kissinger decide we have to scare the hell out of the Vietnamese, said Naftali. Nixon believes the North remembers what Eisenhower had done and so he and Kissinger think of this idiotic scare tactic.²

In the end, Kissinger did send President Nixon’s desired warning to the North Vietnamese, but Hanoi did not back down. According to Naftali, seeing their scare tactic wasn’t working, Nixon and Kissinger then backed off themselves, and the threat of looming nuclear conflict disappeared.

The theory behind it, however, did not disappear. In fact, in the months and years that followed, Nixon took ownership of what he himself described as the Madman Theory. As Naftali has noted, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, later summarized the theory in his memoir as a threat of egregious military action by an unpredictable U.S. President.³

*  *  *

Nearly fifty years later, a new US president introduced and executed a madman theory of his own. Donald Trump hinted he just might be crazy enough to start a nuclear war, with his infamous fire and fury threat against North Korea and public battle with the North Korean leader over whose nuclear button is bigger. He repeatedly bragged in public of his ability to kill millions of people in Afghanistan. Those were serious moments, when some of his own most senior advisors worried that he might take the country to war, wittingly or unwittingly, despite the fact that he has no real appetite for military conflict; quite the opposite, those same advisors say.

However, Trump’s madman is more prolific—the product of his uniquely capricious and unpredictable decision making across the entire spectrum of US foreign policy. This is sometimes by accident and sometimes deliberate. And unlike Nixon, he has unleashed his madman not only on our adversaries but also on our allies and often, according to several senior advisors interviewed for this book, on his own government.

The general concept was discussed, not as a strategy we deliberately adopted, but rather as something we pointed out as a matter of fact, said Mick Mulroy, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East under former defense secretary James Mattis.

The thing is, it wasn’t a ploy, he explained. I think both allies and enemies realize that his decision process was unpredictable even to those advising him up to and including the secretary of defense and national security advisor.⁴

The portrayal of Trump as unpredictable—the madman—is something that permeated official US interactions with the leaders of countries across the globe—from Syria to North Korea to Canada and Mexico to NATO allies.

Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump’s special representative for North Korea policy and was thus often the main contact between the Trump administration and both North and South Korean officials, said that in some of the most tense times on the Korean Peninsula, he would tell his counterparts—frankly—that he did not really know what the president would do next.

We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable, he told me. And I would communicate that.

Trump’s madman unnerved even the most senior US officials. Yun recalled that during the worsening standoff with North Korea in 2017, the Pentagon hesitated to give the president a broad range of military options, concerned that he might indeed order a major military attack on the North. You had to be careful what options you gave him, he said. We were being very cautious, because any options you put out there, he could use them.

That frustrated the White House. The White House viewed it as ‘Goddamnit! The president is looking for all options!’ Yun recalled.⁵ But the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary James Mattis at least, didn’t budge.

Trump’s capriciousness left the advisors responsible for virtually every corner of the globe guessing. I had many meetings where my counterparts would ask, ‘Can we really believe what you’re saying? On whose behalf are you speaking?’ said Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council and key witness during the impeachment investigation of the president in November 2019. This makes the US a capricious partner for anyone who is interacting with us as a collective.⁶

Trump’s unpredictability was not a national secret. US adversaries were keenly aware that his own advisors and the institutions and agencies they lead were often in the dark about the president’s intentions and therefore sought to take advantage, said Susan Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence, the United States’ second-highest-ranking intelligence official. Our partners, adversaries, and competitors know we don’t know the next play.⁷

With any other president or any other administration, such deliberate unpredictability might be seen as a flaw, identifying it as a criticism. But in the view of Trump and his most devout supporters, his madman is a keen negotiator’s strength to be lauded. For him, the unpredictability is a card that he liked having, said Yun.⁸

Depending on whom you ask, Trump the madman is either a danger or a secret weapon, brilliant or incompetent, a madman by choice to gain advantage in negotiations, or a madman by accident who overestimates his own abilities and undermines the interests and safety of the nation.

President Trump, in the view of some of his closest advisors, simply knows better.

Look, this foreign policy establishment in this town. They were so elitist, Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor, told me. It’s like they want to just pat the American citizen and the taxpayer on the head and say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.’ ‘We know better,’ they say. It’s like, ‘No, you don’t. You failed on every foreign policy major initiative, in the last thirty years. On China, on NAFTA, on Iraq, on Afghanistan.’⁹

And isn’t he right? Who can make a convincing argument that the foreign policy establishment, to the extent there is a contiguous group of decision-makers, has gotten the biggest foreign policy decisions entirely or even mostly right in the last several decades—whether on China, on Russia, on the Iraq War, or on a workable Middle East peace plan?

Steve Bannon, who served as the president’s chief strategist early in the administration, agreed that Trump is totally unpredictable. However, he explained his unpredictability not as a disturbing quality but one that is reflective of a businessman who has acted on his gut and instincts with success.

He suggested a telling analogy—Trump’s golf game: His swing is not taught to you by a professional. More importantly, he never hits practice balls. He’s not on the range pounding balls. He’s what’s called a field player. I would talk to him about getting ready for the debates. He would say, ‘I’m a game-day player.’ He’s not a guy doing reps. He does no practice. Game is practice.¹⁰

In the online groups where some of his most ardent supporters commiserate and organize, madman has become a badge of honor. From the very first days after his election to the present, his supporters on Reddit have celebrated Trump moments with joyful references to the madman Trump, ranging from his election victory, to his attacks on the press, to his promises to build the wall on the US-Mexico border.

HOLY F*CK, THE MADMAN DID IT. 304 ELECTORAL VOTES! wrote one Reddit user the night of the election.

MADMAN! He did it. CNN, The New York Times, Politico and Buzzfeed were not allowed to attend the Press Briefing, wrote another when Trump blocked several news outlets from a press gaggle.

THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN!!!!!! CONSTRUCTION OF THE WALL HAS BEGUN!!!!!! wrote another Reddit user as Trump claimed a win on his longtime campaign promise.

But the madman of his online base and his rallies is, one could say, trumped up. Trump is unpredictable in every way but his desire for a full-blown war, nuclear or otherwise.

He’s not a confrontational person, particularly on national security, Bannon told me. And the last thing he wants is the troops anywhere.¹¹

Of course, madman is not a badge of honor for most close observers of this president. I asked everyone I interviewed for this book if, based on their firsthand experience, they personally doubted his mental fitness. No one told me they believed the president was truly mad or senile, an attack the president’s allies have leveled without hesitation or evidence against some of his political opponents, most prominently against former vice president Joe Biden. They described Trump’s unpredictability, his favoring his gut over hard data, his deliberate and almost reflexive ignoring of advice and counsel as simply who he is and how he operates. For some, this may provide comfort. For others, it might heighten the alarm.

As with so much else about this president, he is what people want to believe about him.

*  *  *

An unpredictable, unstudied president creates other dangers, however. Under Trump, every decision big and small, every strategy, every military deployment, every commitment to every alliance and more has come to depend on the vagaries of a president who makes decisions on the fly, without a policy process, and without a strategy, or at least a strategy that he sticks to. Trump is the foreign policy and the foreign policy is Trump.

What we have seen in the past year is the hyperpersonalization of the presidency. And that’s something we haven’t had before in such an acute form, said Fiona Hill, the president’s most senior advisor for European and Russian affairs for more than two years. It’s similar to what happened in Russia at the peak of ‘Putinism,’ where everything of significance had to go through him, and—ironically—even Putin is pulling back now and delegating more authority to others in the system given the complexity of the issues Russia faces.¹²

The United States has had powerful presidents before, and presidents who hoard authority, but not one who has so diminished the vast government made up of dozens of agencies and tens of thousands of experts built over decades not only to inform the president but to keep the ship of state sailing safely.

The reality is that a president makes a tiny percentage of the decisions that drive that ship, in particular, around the world. Susan Gordon sought to make the point by asking me a question: Of all the decisions that get made in national security, what percentage do you think the president makes?

I took a shot in the dark: Thirty-five percent. I wasn’t even close.

Point 001 percent, she corrected me. "He’s one guy. Only a small number of decisions come to the president’s attention. When you have a gap, how do those other 99.999 percent of those decisions get made? And how do you make sure that they are being linked to good effect? That’s what worries me.

The president’s conversations are not the only decision conversations that need to happen, she said. And if the gap widens so much the system isn’t confident of what the president’s decisions are, then [the system] becomes either invalid or ineffective.¹³

Invalid or ineffective or perhaps both. Trump’s version of the madman has upended the very way the United States—perhaps the most powerful nation in history—makes and carries out decisions and actions of enormous consequence around the world.

As a result of this hyperpersonalization there is no effective delegation of authority, no other deciders in the system, even at the cabinet level, said Hill. Our biggest liability domestically and internationally is not knowing if anyone else in the government can make a lasting, independent decision about anything important.¹⁴

*  *  *

The Madman Theory is a book about what happens when a sitting president decides that every president before him, Republican or Democrat, has been wrong about the world and the United States’ place in it. Through the accounts of some of his most senior advisors, I’ll explore Trump’s deeply disruptive ideas, where and how he put them into action, and how those ideas have changed the country and the world during his four years leading a superpower. What is the United States without allies? What are international relations when every relationship is transactional? What is US foreign policy when policy making is downgraded and dismissed—in effect, when the man himself is the policy?

From his very first days in office, President Trump put his madman theory into action—whether by accident or with intent—with adversaries and allies alike and sometimes with both at the same time. In 2019, as the president and his team were considering military options in response to escalating acts by Iran in the Persian Gulf, senior Pentagon officials made clear to US partners that they could not predict how and where Trump would respond, or if he would respond at all.

We told allies that we did not know what the president would be willing to do against Iran, Mick Mulroy recalled. It was possible he could make a decision that would lead to an escalation of the conflict, and that escalation could lead to war, so they needed to relay that to Iran so they realized not even his staff knew what would happen if they attacked another oil facility, for instance.¹⁵

President Trump’s early threats against North Korea contained incendiary lines seemingly drawn straight from the madman playbook. In August 2017, he ad-libbed the most infamous of them, saying outside a meeting at his New Jersey golf club intended to be focused on the opioid crisis, North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.¹⁶ The next month, he took personal aim at the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself, he told the UN General Assembly in a fiery speech.¹⁷ To this day, Trump and his allies are convinced it was those very threats and that very unpredictability that later helped bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table. Trump’s madman theory, in their view, worked.

China has been one of his most consistent targets. Two years after using his UN General Assembly speech to threaten North Korea, President Trump harangued Beijing as Chinese diplomats looked on: Not only has China declined to adopt promised reforms, it has embraced an economic model dependent on massive market barriers, heavy state subsidies, currency manipulation, product dumping, forced technology transfers and the theft of intellectual property and also trade secrets on a grand scale.¹⁸

In unleashing his trade war, Trump spoke openly about not just altering Chinese behavior but forcing China to abandon its economic model. His threat was, in effect: give in, or we will force the entire international supply chain out of China. And his advisors have continued to speak proudly of how they believe that is happening regardless of what Beijing does. That such a change is an existential economic threat to China is, in the view of Trump loyalists, all the better. All’s fair in a trade war.

Trump, however, has taken the madman theory in directions even Nixon never ventured into. Whereas Nixon reserved his most ominous madman threat for a country the United States was then at war with, Trump has often applied the theory to the United States’ closest allies. He has threatened to withdraw from the United States’ decades-long participation in NATO, describing the organization as obsolete and refusing to confirm that he would come to the defense of the United States’ treaty allies. He threatened and delivered economic pain on the United States’ neighbors, Canada and Mexico. His target was the North American Free Trade Agreement. He tweeted early on in the negotiations, We are in the NAFTA (worst trade deal ever made) renegotiation process with Mexico & Canada. Both being very difficult, may have to terminate? The next year, he threatened to withdraw once again, saying, I’ll be terminating it within a relatively short period of time. We get rid of NAFTA. It’s been a disaster for the United States.¹⁹

There are no apologies for the friendly fire. In fact, Trump and his allies—as with North Korea and fire and fury—say the threats worked.

In each case, Trump’s madman has been intended for audiences abroad and at home. He wants to convince Americans as much as foreigners that he’s tough. And that perceived toughness is, to him, an end itself, often in spite of damage his approach has done to alliances, or even to the stated goals of Trump’s own foreign policy.

The most fundamental question is: Has Trump made the United States greater or weaker? Safer or less safe? Fact is, the answer may not be as simple as his fans or his critics believe.

*  *  *

There is a deep irony to Trump’s madman persona and its ties—even if unintentional—to Nixon’s attempt to harness the same madman theory to his advantage. Nixon deliberately communicated to Vietnam that he was just crazy enough to start a nuclear war. President Trump, despite his glib references to nuclear conflict in his own threats to North Korea and Kim Jong Un, has grand ambitions beyond threatening countries into submission. He actually sees himself as a leader uniquely committed to reducing the danger of a nuclear conflict.

At the root of his interest, say some advisors, is family. He has made frequent references to his late uncle John Trump, who was a physicist at MIT, and the conversations they had about the power of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear is powerful, my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, Trump said in a campaign speech in July 2016.²⁰

Later, as president, he referenced his uncle again following his first summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, explaining his desire to address the nuclear threat: I had an uncle who was a great professor for, I believe, 40 years at MIT. And I used to discuss nuclear with him all the time. . . . You’re talking about a very complex subject.²¹

President Barack Obama warned Trump during the transition that North Korea’s nuclear program would be his greatest and most immediate national security threat—and Trump believed it. With Pyongyang, he then launched an unprecedented series of face-to-face summits to address the threat and perhaps move closer to achieving his goal of a planet safer from nuclear war. With Iran, he withdrew from a deal that had restricted Iran’s nuclear program, in part, because he wanted to negotiate an agreement to deny Iran from ever achieving a nuclear weapon.

When he went to Helsinki in July 2018 to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin, he had bold visions of finishing what Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had begun three decades earlier, when the two sides discussed the lofty but ultimately failed goal of banning all ballistic missiles. Instead, Helsinki took another, deeply damaging turn for Trump and the United States. Trump’s high hopes were shattered by another of his personal fixations: denying Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, which he still cannot help but perceive as undermining his election victory.

The madman again interfered, this time to Trump’s embarrassing detriment.

*  *  *

Even under the rules of his zero-sum approach to geopolitics, Trump’s madman theory requires a trade-off. A leader—even of the most powerful country in the world—cannot be both a reliable partner and an unpredictable madman.

The madman theory is basically shock-and-awe diplomacy, said Tim Naftali. Bullying may work if it’s a small item for another party but if it’s their very existence, you are asking people to violate an essential proposition.²²

As a result, some of Trump’s most aggressive stands have so far failed. With North Korea, Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign followed by his diplomatic charm offensive has not changed North Korea’s belief that only nuclear weapons will ensure its survival. His demands that Mexico pay for the wall never had a shot of overcoming two successive Mexican presidents’ refusals to be seen as the United States’ toady. And his one-sided Middle East peace plan could not convince Palestinian leaders to give up yet more of their territory in exchange for aid, even under waning support from their Arab partners.

In many respects, neither adversaries nor allies want to deal with the madman. Tim Naftali believes they want something very different. They want a cage, he said.²³

What does Trump’s madman theory mean for the United States? Has it made us safer or less safe? Has the president accomplished his own goals? And at the root of it all, is there a strategy? This book will try to answer those questions, by asking some of the people Trump himself chose and appointed to put his America First policy into action.

1

The End of American Exceptionalism

The Question

America First or Trump First?

Trump’s madman theory is one facet of a broader Trump revolution in US foreign policy that carries with it a redefinition of the United States’ role in the world. The circus of events may seem like chaos, but they fit a pattern: Over four years in office, he has deliberately dismantled the existing policy-planning and decision-making process. He has often made policy decisions on the fly and delivered them summarily and without consulting his seniormost officials and advisors. He has decided on and announced not one but two US withdrawals from Syria via tweets, each time surprising his staff and commanders on the ground. Whatever process followed rather than preceded the decision, with loyal aides having to then figure out how to deliver on Trump’s newly stated desires.

There is a worldview that forms the basis of his policy, and it is a consistent one: Trump believes that the United States is powerful but not exceptional. He believes that the United States is a winner, that it can and should beat its competitors, including both allies and adversaries. He believes in a game with no rules that pays little or no attention to human rights, international law, or multilateral treaties. He asks, Why should we play by the rules when other nations do not?

Intertwined with this cold, practical, even Machiavellian view of the world is a question about Trump’s own priorities. It’s a question his own seniormost advisors have asked themselves at times throughout his administration: What is the Trump policy: America First or Trump First?

Susan Gordon, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence, suggested a simple phrase to summarize Trump’s foreign policy: "‘Don’t be