Trump: A Strategy of Madness

Author: Akram Atta Allah

During US negotiations with the Vietnamese revolutionaries, when they were intransigent and the Vietcong fighters held the advantage on the battlefield, US President Richard Nixon told his national security adviser Henry Kissinger: “You must tell the North Vietnamese negotiators that Nixon is mad.” Thus, in a moment of crisis a US president preferred to present himself as insane to his stubborn adversary.
Donald Trump, however, belongs to a new school of politics — the “school of madness” — which forces both foes and friends to make concessions out of fear of the president’s temper and eruptions. He precisely fits the clinical-psychology definition of “people whose behavior is difficult to predict.” That is Trump: a man who never stops surprising, who constantly changes positions with high caprice, and whose closest aides cannot even guess what he will do or say next.
Throughout human history there have been many unstable leaders, but history has rarely been painted with such blood because the sane and respectable rulers usually refrained from competition out of shame. The unstable, by contrast, have enough self-confidence to compete; they are driven by a taste for controlling others or by a belief in their own greatness and their ability to change history. The latest is Benjamin Netanyahu, who says, “God sent me on a spiritual mission” — and, like so many before him, most likely believes what he says.
With a politics of madness, Trump managed in eight months to extort the world: he extracted money from the Gulf, left Europe trembling and cutting into its own flesh to raise NATO budgets, and put it on permanent alert since his first remarks about Ukraine. He acted outside diplomatic norms with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, humiliating him in the White House and commenting on the suit he was wearing. No one expected him to sink to that level, yet he appears comfortable with that image because it has proven effective in securing achievements.
He strikes at Iran’s project — the crown jewel being its nuclear reactors — and the next day thanks Tehran for having the capability, courage and intelligence to stop the shooting. He pushes for a ceasefire in Gaza, then encourages and supports Netanyahu’s violations of it. He harshly criticizes Vladimir Putin to the point of threats, then meets him and doles out generous praise. He speaks much about stopping wars yet supports the worst and most brutal of them in Gaza. He consults with Netanyahu about striking Doha, then phones its emir to denounce it. Strangely, he sees no contradiction in any of this.
His behavior and thinking are hard to predict. This policy was inherited by Donald from Trump the real-estate dealer who lurks for prey, using enough ambiguity and tricks to capture it. It does not matter what labels are applied to him — deceitful, swindler, liar — those seem like trivial details compared with the success of the deal.
It is no exaggeration to say this is one of the worst developments in political practice. We have seen many madmen and sick rulers before, but not to the extent that morals collapse into utter degradation.
One of the ironies is that New York City — which lived through one of its most terrifying moments when al‑Qaeda’s planes struck the World Trade Center towers a quarter of a century ago — now welcomes a scion of al‑Qaeda and the one who pledged allegiance to al‑Zawahiri, Abu Muhammad al‑Julani, while the White House prevents the arrival of the Palestinian president who sympathized with New York at that time and the partner of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate — indeed, the man of the idea of peace in the region. This is Trump, beyond all expectations…!
Another irony of this Trumpian global moment is that, once, when values and morals were on the brink of collapse and the world breathed a sigh of relief following an election, it all returned again to begin a new chapter of political absurdity: a man at the head of the world’s greatest power runs the world with such lightness, and his criminal partner wanted by the International Criminal Court nominates him for the Nobel Peace Prize… Can you imagine a greater irony than this?
This is the world, and this is politics standing naked without even a fig leaf — a world of the powerful, of interests and of Machiavellianism embodied without cover. Trump is so scandalous that, brazenly, arrogantly and frankly, he threatens and asks — asks for money, then money again, from friends and foes alike. The world, for him, is no more than an investment case or, as Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich described Gaza, “a real-estate treasure” — words that flatter the interests of a president who understands no other language. When he speaks of his achievements over the past eight months he claims: “eighteen trillion dollars.”
That is his greatest accomplishment — this is how he sees the world and how he runs policy.
Major capitals understand that humanity will live through a deranged phase for more than the next three years. They are trying to get through it with minimal losses and to avoid provoking the unpredictable man by acceding to his demands. But the politics of madness collides with Moscow and Beijing, where his tone suddenly becomes reasonable, as if he had never heard of Pyongyang. See?