Trump’s high-risk ‘madman strategy’ could be the ticket to winning 2020 election
We’ve just seen the most remarkable moment of the Trump presidency yet. Within 24 hours, the president both signed an order slapping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium and accepted an invitation to meet Kim Jong-un. This is history in the making.
If Trump delivers to his voters, he’ll not only win a second term but go down as a transformative president.
There’s actually more historical continuity to Trump than meets the eye. He’s not the first president to put tariffs on steel, nor to be invited to meet a North Korean leader (he’s the first sitting president to say “yes”).
And if you’re looking for a precedent in Trump’s bellicose foreign policy style, try Richard Nixon, who championed the “madman theory”.
Trump made a reference to it at a dinner last week, when he joked: “I won’t rule out direct talks with Kim Jong-un. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.”
If you were alarmed by Trump’s tweets that said “trade wars are good” or that his nuclear button is “much bigger” than North Korea’s, then you were supposed to be.
One half of the madman strategy is theatrical escalation to encourage submission. The other half is unexpected engagement.
After spending his entire career bashing Red China, Nixon suddenly announced he would visit it in 1972. The result was a new, creative relationship between Beijing and Washington that is only being challenged today.
Likewise, Trump’s long-term goal when it comes to steel probably isn’t to surround the US with a tariff wall, but to change the trade and industrial policies of other countries by leveraging access to America’s
‘As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine’
marketplace. Trump is using the tariff threat to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (a cause of so much poverty in the rust belt), just as he has used his war of words with North Korea to effect a diplomatic coup.
Don’t take my word for it. South Korea’s national security adviser stood outside the White House and said that the invitation to meet Kim was thanks to Trump’s leadership and application of pressure.
Will Trump go? I’d be willing to bet so, yes, because that’s Trump’s style.
This businessman has spent his whole life mocking his competitors in public only to do deals with them in private, where they often acknowledge that he is – in the words of Mitt Romney – “enlightening, and interesting, and engaging”.
Of course, the problem with any high-risk strategy is that it can backfire spectacularly.
Several members of the diplomatic community say North Korea isn’t putting anything new on the table, that Trump isn’t experienced enough to handle such a delicate situation and that a photo-op will be a propaganda coup for Kim.
Nixon’s critics also charged that his visit to China did a lot to strengthen Mao Tse-tung at the cost of weakening his Taiwanese opposition. If Trump fails, it’ll be an indictment of his whole leadership style, proof that he’s a wrecker rather than a builder.
But if he succeeds, it’ll vindicate those who voted for him because they wanted him to be a disrupter – a creative novelty.
Imagine a world in which a Republican president helps workingclass Americans keep their factories open and a Republican president brings stability to the Korean peninsular.
Jobs and peace are supposed to be Democrat issues, and just as Trump won in 2016 by advancing into constituencies that once voted for Barack Obama, so his own long march to re-election begins by doing things that Democrats failed to do because they lacked his willingness to go all the way.