The madman theory is a foreign policy strategy in which a leader deliberately projects irrationality, unpredictability, or willingness to use extreme force — including nuclear weapons — to compel adversaries to make concessions at the negotiating table. The theory holds that an opponent who believes they’re dealing with someone unhinged will back down rather than risk catastrophic escalation. It was coined by Richard Nixon in 1968 and has been revived, with mixed results, by every strongman politician who likes the sound of it since.
I first heard the phrase “madman theory” not in a politics seminar but in a pub argument in 2019, when someone tried to defend Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani as “strategic genius.” The logic, as presented over a pint, went roughly: he did the unpredictable thing, Iran didn’t retaliate, therefore the crazy works. I found it unconvincing then. Six years later, with a ceasefire in a 40-day war against Iran holding by a thread, the argument is back — louder, and, if anything, even less persuasive.
So let’s actually think through what the madman theory is, where it came from, and whether it works. Because the answers are not what most people on either side of this debate want to hear.
Where the Theory Actually Comes From
Nixon told his future White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman during the 1968 presidential campaign: “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” The Globe and Mail
Ho Chi Minh was not in Paris in two days begging for peace.
Nixon sent B-52 bombers with nuclear warheads toward the Soviet Union on October 27, 1969, in what became known as Operation Giant Lance — and then cancelled the exercises after finding they weren’t having the desired effect. Allrisenews Kissinger got nowhere. Haldeman recounted that “Henry found the North Vietnamese absolutely intractable.” Washington Monthly The war dragged on for years. Hundreds of thousands more people died. Nixon eventually got essentially the same deal that had been available to him on inauguration day.
This is the founding case study of the madman theory. It failed. Completely. And yet here we are, in 2026, treating it like a proven playbook.
The Theory Sounds Clever. That’s the Problem.
There’s a reason the madman theory keeps getting recycled. It flatters the person deploying it. It frames recklessness as calculation. It repackages the impulse to threaten and bluster as strategic sophistication. Politicians love it because it gives their worst instincts an academic-sounding name.
The basic logic runs like this: rational deterrence assumes your opponent believes you will follow through on your threats. But if your threats seem disproportionate or irrational, the opponent faces a harder calculation. They can’t confidently call your bluff. Uncertainty itself becomes leverage. So far, so coherent.
But here’s what the textbook version glosses over: the strategy only works if your opponent believes the irrationality is situational — a deliberate posture — rather than dispositional — meaning you actually don’t understand what you’re doing.
Political scientist Roseanne McManus’s research shows that if a leader is situationally acting like a madman, with extreme preferences deployed tactically, that might pressure an adversary to give in. But if the person seems dispositionally mad — genuinely unable to understand the consequences of their actions — the adversary is not going to give in, because there’s no credible deal to be had. Allrisenews
The distinction matters enormously and gets almost no coverage. A chess player who flips the board isn’t crazy — they’re sending a message. A player who knocks it over because they forgot which pieces were theirs is just incoherent. Opponents read the difference.
Nixon’s Ghost Haunts Trump’s Iran Strategy
Trump actively cultivates an image that may be called the “madman theory” of foreign policy. The US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 was one of the major examples of Trump acting this way during his first term — an unexpected killing of a senior state official that risked direct war and went against the opinions of many foreign policy experts. Trump saw it as an act of deterrence and strength, and felt vindicated once the Iranians did not respond in kind. Al Jazeera
That’s the version of the story Trump tells himself. And it’s not entirely wrong — Soleimani’s killing did not immediately trigger the wider war many feared. But “the apocalypse didn’t happen” is a pretty low bar for strategic success.
Fast forward to 2026. After US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, Trump was threatening an even bigger attack, backing up the threat with a large-scale movement of US military assets toward Iranian waters — claiming these threats were his way of convincing Iran to accept a deal that would effectively end its nuclear programme and limit its ballistic missile capacity. Al Jazeera
Trump vowed in an expletive-laden post to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if its leaders didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. International law experts noted such actions would technically amount to war crimes. RNZ
And then? Trump backed down, agreeing to a two-week ceasefire — which critics mockingly labelled another example of “TACO,” or “Trump always chickens out” — marking the biggest step toward de-escalating a 40-day war that had shaken the Middle East and disrupted global energy markets. Bangor Daily News
The madman chickened out. The madman theory doesn’t work especially well when the madman has a pattern of blinking.
The TACO Problem: Why Repeated Climbdowns Are Lethal to the Strategy
This is the part that most analysis skips. The madman theory depends entirely on credibility. If your adversary believes you will follow through, they cave. If they’ve watched you fold before, they wait you out.
At times, analysts said, Trump’s approach appeared an intentional strategy while at others it seemed haphazard, with his aides kept in the dark and the administration walking back positions following pressure from financial markets or his MAGA political base. U.S. News & World Report
That is not a description of a coherent deterrence strategy. That’s a description of improvisation.
The TACO pattern dates to around a year ago, when faced with some $6.5 trillion of US stock market losses in the space of four days, Trump dialled back the hefty tariffs he had announced at his “Liberation Day” event, and then reversed a separate batch of punitive levies against China. Bangor Daily News
So: tariffs — backed down. Iran ceasefire threats — backed down. Every time domestic economic pain hit fast enough, the retreat followed. Your adversaries are watching. They’re learning the price at which you fold.
Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, considered hawkish on foreign policy, put it plainly: “The problem with the Madman Theory of geopolitics is you’re not only going to scare your enemy, but you’re scaring your allies and you’re scaring your people.” Bangor Daily News
That’s a rare moment of honesty from a corner of the foreign policy world that usually cheerleads this stuff.
What Happens When the Other Side Has Nothing to Lose?
Here’s the structural flaw that no proponent of the madman theory wants to discuss: the strategy assumes your opponent has something to protect. A state, an economy, a leadership class that wants to survive. Uncertainty is coercive precisely because they’re afraid of losing things.
The Islamic Republic — or at least elements within it — now sees its own survival as being at stake. In those circumstances, the “madman” approach faces a fundamental problem: the other side may have nothing to lose. Al Jazeera
When an adversary reaches that conclusion, no amount of unpredictability changes the calculation. They’re not going to back down because you’re irrational — they’re going to escalate precisely because the alternative is annihilation.
Iran’s strategy appears to be shifting the conflict into a test of endurance, betting it can absorb pressure longer than Trump can sustain domestic tolerance for uncertainty — particularly with political constraints looming in the November midterms. Newsweek
That’s not an irrational opponent panicking in the face of a madman. That’s a rational actor who has figured out the domestic clock constraining the madman. Iran doesn’t need to defeat Trump militarily. It just needs to wait for gasoline prices to spike and approval ratings to drop. History, including this particular war, suggests that’s a sound bet.
The Real Verdict: Strategy or Compulsion?
After nearly 4,000 people killed and 40,000 injured without any strategic objective attained, Trump employed his crazy reputation to forge a two-week ceasefire. What Trump has shown is a willingness — or worse, a compulsion — to not just say crazier and crazier things, but do crazier and crazier things. Washington Monthly
This is the distinction that actually matters, and it echoes McManus’s academic framework: Is the madness a tool, or is it the condition?
Nixon knew the difference. He was deploying an act. He had war aims, however brutal, and he thought unpredictability served them. You can disagree with everything Nixon did and still recognise that there was a coherent, if catastrophically wrong, logic operating underneath the theatrics.
With Trump, the evidence increasingly suggests the theatrics are the policy. The flip-flopping on Strait of Hormuz threats, the Easter morning all-caps Truth Social posts demanding Iran open shipping lanes, the pivots that follow gasoline price spikes — none of that reads like a calculated performance. It reads like a leader who genuinely cannot hold a consistent strategic position for more than two weeks.
As one critic put it, the most one could credit Trump with is that maybe his rhetoric persuades his base that he was employing the Madman Theory all along, thereby reducing his political costs for backing down. For everyone else, the United States has failed to achieve most of its stated war aims. Lawyers, Guns & Money
That’s not deterrence. That’s spin.
The Doctrine That Flatters Power and Protects Nobody
| What Madman Theory Promises | What the Evidence Shows |
|---|---|
| Adversaries back down under irrational pressure | Adversaries learn the retreat pattern |
| Unpredictability is coercive leverage | Unpredictability erodes ally trust |
| Extreme threats force concessions | Dispositional irrationality removes credibility |
| Nixon used it successfully | Nixon’s original application failed in Vietnam |
| Trump vindicated by Soleimani non-response | Iran waited out the Iran war pressure |
What Most Articles Miss About This
Almost everything written on the madman theory right now treats it as a Trump story. It isn’t. It’s a recurring temptation in the structure of power itself.
The theory gets revived whenever a leader wants to sound strategic while behaving erratically. It’s a doctrine perfectly calibrated to flatter the powerful and give their supporters something to say at dinner parties. He’s not crazy, he’s playing 4D chess. That formulation has been applied to Nixon, to Trump’s first term, to Erdogan, to Netanyahu’s escalation calculus — and it almost always falls apart under scrutiny.
The deeper problem is that the madman theory treats reputation for irrationality as a resource you can spend without cost. You can’t. Every time you back down — TACO — you deplete it. Every time your allies see you scare them as much as your enemies, they quietly start looking for alternatives. The Global South has been watching. China has been watching. The deterrence you think you’re building is actually a withdrawal you haven’t noticed yet.
And the nuclear dimension deserves one more sentence: the most prominent invocation of madman theory was noted geopolitical practitioners Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger killing large numbers of people and expending enormous resources to get essentially the same deal that was available to them on Nixon’s first inauguration day. Lawyers, Guns & Money That is the track record. That is the history. Before invoking it approvingly, you should at least know what it actually delivered.
What You Should Actually Take From This
The madman theory is not useless as a concept. Genuine unpredictability does impose costs on adversaries, and there are moments in diplomatic history where brinkmanship has worked. But the conditions are narrow: the irrationality must be situational and credible, the adversary must have things to protect, your domestic political clock must be longer than theirs, and — crucially — you must actually have a coherent endgame in mind.
Strip away those conditions and what remains isn’t strategy. It’s noise that costs lives, alienates allies, disrupts global energy markets, and eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Back in that pub in 2019, I should have asked the person defending Soleimani’s killing one simple question: what’s the plan for when they stop being scared?
That question is still unanswered. And as the two-week Iran ceasefire ticks down, the clock on finding an answer is getting very short.