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US grand strategy and the Madman Theory: From Nixon to Trump would seem to be a timely topic for a new book. Perhaps too timely as events in the Iran war provide the most serious test of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy yet seen.
The author James D Boys fits Mr Trump into an American foreign policy tradition that stretches back to the earliest years of the atomic age.
Former president Richard Nixon and his then-national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, are identified as the key promoters of the theory as a tool of statecraft. But there is a cast of many figures responsible for forging the policy that stems from the theory, both in the 1960s and 1970s and during the period since 2016 when Mr Trump secured his first term in office.
As such, the book provides valuable guidance on "how we got here". It will be up to the readers to decide in the coming months if it also offers guidance on how the policy has evolved.
One episode that may be telling for today is the period leading up to the 1968 presidential election when Mr Nixon, the leading contender, feared that then-president Lyndon B Johnson would inject an "October Surprise" into the campaign by halting the bombing of Vietnam.
Mr Johnson and his predecessor, John F Kennedy, managed the Cold War and the Vietnam War ceasefire negotiations through a policy of brinkmanship. The idea was that the halt would force the communists into making concessions during their negotiations in Paris to secure an armistice.
It was a failed gambit. But after Mr Nixon won the election, Mr Kissinger played a key role in setting up a Madman Theory-based foreign policy.
It should be stressed that the ultimate tenet of the Madman Theory lies in thwarting any nuclear confrontation by the most extreme means – the not-unrelated concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction" being an essential element in resolving the clashing interests of two sides in a conflict.
Undoubtedly before the Iran war was launched, Tehran treated its negotiations with Washington as a serious challenge but not the ultimate risk that the country faced. It will be up to historians to decide if Iran’s negotiators were either not empowered or not capable of comprehending the scale of the challenge presented to them.
By adhering to the country’s inherent right to pursue its atomic programme, not to mention its absolute refusal to put its ballistic missile programme on the table, Tehran’s plenipotentiaries took a destiny-changing gamble over 900 kilogrammes of enriched uranium. It was an epic misjudgment of Mr Trump’s driving rational, which is this belief that extreme force can lead to a new era of peace.
Equally, once the war started it reached its critical point with surprising speed.
There has been plenty of talk about an escalation ladder, where both sides have a degree of leverage over one another's actions and reactions.
Tehran's decision to constrict movement through the Strait of Hormuz has opened up a form of mutually assured destruction to the conflict. The US and Israeli quest to degrade or perhaps even destroy the regime is up against Iran's opposing effort to disrupt or perhaps even destroy the global economy.
Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency chief, told reporters in Australia overnight that the crisis has removed twice the volume of supply of oil as the 1970s oil shock and half as much natural gas as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By affecting the supplies of petrochemicals, fertilisers, sulphur and helium, Iran has struck at the vital arteries of the global economy.
Critics fear that Mr Trump’s exploitation of a no-holds-barred and innovative approach to foreign policy – across international trade, Ukraine-Russia negotiations, Venezuela and the Gaza ceasefire – has left him cruising for a bruising after he launched the Iran war.
With the campaign ongoing, the jury will be out on who is winning.
Iran must bear the consequence of its own approach to retaliation since the attacks began. There is no strategy for the regime that avoids the reckoning for the annihilistic way in which it has led the country for decades.
There is uncertainty on the American side, too. Coercive diplomacy requires a way out of the attrition that currently works in Iran’s favour given the imbalance between the two sides.
The remnants of the Iranian regime would dearly like to restore some form of deterrence with the US and Israel, but there is little doubt that it is Mr Trump who is setting the direction of the conflict at this stage.
This brings us back to the book, in which the author draws one distinction between Mr Trump and Mr Nixon. The Nixon policy was often based on bluff and relied on being taken seriously so that the moment of truth was not called. Mr Trump, on the other hand, often shows a willingness to follow through on his threats, as Boys writes.
When push comes to shove, the author adds, the current President's "purposeful strategic ambiguity" ensures that no side can be sure of how he will follow through.
