Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of international relations is so vivid and famous as to obscure its ultimate failure. As early as 1968, the soon-to-be US president hoped to extract concessions from North Vietnam by hinting that he “might do anything” with America’s nuclear arsenal. So shaken was the enemy by this threat that it fought on for five more years and took another 20,000 or so US lives along the way. Madman? Quite.
And so this column does not argue that erring on the side of aggression is the right thing in foreign policy. Those who would take liberties with the US are not always and everywhere deterred by the presence of a volatile hothead in the White House. The question, rather, is what American voters think. To judge by the 56 per cent who see President Joe Biden as “not tough enough” with Russia, the door seems open to a brusquer kind of US leader.
The Ukraine crisis is not the end of Donald Trump. Liberals are right to bring up his past flirtations with the Kremlin, but they overrate the harm it will do to his electoral viability. For one thing, few western leaders this century have a proud record on Russia. Biden belonged to a White House that “reset” relations with Moscow after its invasion of Georgia in 2008. His former boss, Barack Obama, laughed away the notion of the Kremlin as America’s principal threat. The best that can be said about that administration’s Russia policy is that it has aged better than Angela Merkel’s. Trump is damaged by his record, yes, but not uniquely or even especially so.
The other problem with invoking his past is selective quotation. Yes, Trump flattered foreign strongmen. But he also threatened them. His world view has always been a dog’s breakfast of contradictions: praise for tyrants, but also a sense of macho competition with them; avoidance of foreign military burdens, but also a horror of anything that smells of weakness or retreat. His handling of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un alternated between fatherly affection and impatience to nuke him off the planet. In 2017, he enforced Obama’s red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria — unlike Obama.
Trump, in short, meets the definition of strategic “madness”. He believes a US leader must be pugnacious and even reckless to keep the global peace. It is a belief that lacks nuance. It is likely a rationalisation of what are just his own uncontrollable instincts. But it also has a surface plausibility now that it didn’t just a few months ago.
Were he taking Biden on in an election now, imagine the lines of attack at his disposal. Should a US president really wait for Russia to invade a country before imposing sanctions? Should he state up front (via tweet, no less) what he is not willing to do for Ukraine? What happened to strategic ambiguity? And why is Trump the only US leader elected this century on whose watch Vladimir Putin has not attacked a neighbour?
You need not be moved by these questions (or think Trump has the moral standing to pose them) to sense that swing voters might be. Since the end of the cold war, Americans have elected presidents who overcorrect the foreign policy of their predecessor. Biden broke with Trump’s unilateralist chauvinism, which broke with Obama’s “leading from behind”, which broke with George W Bush’s military over-reach. It is easy to imagine the popular view setting in by 2024 that Biden, for all his deft co-ordination with allies, is too conventional a leader for an era of brutes. The pendular logic of politics would then set the stage for Trump, or someone like him.
Seen from this angle, Biden’s supposed gaffe last weekend, in which he seemed to endorse regime change in Moscow, was nothing of the sort. It introduced an element of chaos into an administration that can be orthodox to a fault. There is such a thing as reckless caution. There is such a thing as inflammatory emollience.
This month, without so much as notifying Washington, the UAE received Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad on an official visit. Elsewhere in the region, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman said he did not care what Biden thinks. Small omens, yes, but throw in last year’s fiasco in Afghanistan and a deft Republican could spin a tale of the US as a pushover under present management.
Even the Ukraine crisis, if it drags on, will be reframed as less a case of Biden’s sure touch than of American helplessness and Russian impunity. What often does for a politician is not new facts but a new interpretation of existing facts. A country that tires of Biden the careful diplomat will pine for a leader who “might do anything”.
The Ukraine war is not the end of Donald Trump
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