The madman theory is simple: make your enemies believe you are unhinged enough to do the unthinkable, and they will back down before you have to. Richard Nixon first put it into words on a beach walk in 1968, telling his future chief of staff that he wanted the North Vietnamese to think he was obsessed and unstoppable, so scared of what he might do that they'd sue for peace on their own.
Trump has long admired Nixon (the two were pen pals in the 1980s) and his handling of the Iran war looks like a direct page from that playbook. In the days before the ceasefire, Trump threatened to "end Iran's civilization," "send it back to the stone age," and destroy its bridges and power plants. Then, once Tehran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he stepped back and declared a win.
You might be interested:
Trump: "Until ceasefire, we are blasting them back to the Stone Ages".
Trump steps back from threat to "destroy a whole civilisation".
The problem is that Nixon's record with the madman theory was mixed at best. It helped produce a period of détente with Moscow. But in Vietnam it culminated in the ferocious Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi, and a peace deal whose terms, critics noted, were barely different from what was on offer before the bombs fell. Some of Nixon's own aides questioned whether the madman act had crossed into something real.
Trump's ceasefire looks similarly costly. Iran gets to charge $2m per ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that was open before the US and Israel launched strikes in February. Tehran has extracted a profit from a chokepoint it was already sitting on. As exits go, analysts say, this one has a price.
The madman theory may have bought Trump an exit ramp. Whether it amounts to a win is another question, and one Nixon, who left office in disgrace, might have found uncomfortably familiar. In any case: Do you think Trump is using this strategy on Iran?