Donald Trump embraces the risky 'Madman Theory' on foreign policy

Donald Trump appears to have embraced, with gusto, Richard Nixon's "Madman Theory" of foreign policy.

He thinks he can use his reputation for unpredictability and lack of respect for long-standing international norms to unnerve and then intimidate America's adversaries into making concessions that they would not otherwise make.

The Chinese government's decision Monday to return the naval drone that it had seized in the South China Sea, despite howls of protest about Trump's braggadocio, just might be the first vindication of this approach.

A generation ago, Nixon wanted to convince the Soviets and their North Vietnamese clients that he was a hot-head willing to use nuclear weapons.

The goal then was to scare the communists into negotiating. In some ways, this was the nub of the secret plan he talked so much about during the 1968 campaign - just as Trump insisted that he had a secret plan to get rid of ISIS during the 2016 race.

"I call it the Madman Theory," the then-president explained to H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, as they walked along a foggy beach one day.

"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 about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's 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."

- Elites in Washington and across the world think Trump is crazy, but the president-elect has demonstrated repeatedly that he can be crazy like a fox. He knew exactly what he was doing when he called for a Muslim ban, for instance, or picked fights with people on Twitter to distract the press from much bigger problems. We've already learned that Trump's phone call with the leader of Taiwan was not some spontaneous faux pas but a carefully planned recalibration of U.S. policy.

For Trump's stratagem to work, foreign leaders must continue to believe that he's erratic and prone to irrational overreaction. "We must as a nation be more unpredictable," Trump often said on the campaign trail. "We have to be unpredictable!"

- This is a dangerous gambit in the current geopolitical risk environment. Nixon played the game in a bipolar world, with two superpowers and nothing like the Islamic State to worry about. The world that Trump must lead is multi polar. Asymmetric warfare is now a top-tier concern.

- Several events Monday - including the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara, the truck attack at a Christmas market in Berlin, the mosque shooting in Zurich, the on-again, off-again evacuation in Aleppo and the riots in Venezuela -- offered timely reminders of the degree to which our interconnected world is a tinderbox, perennially on the verge of bursting into flames. In Europe, they're already calling it Black Monday.

- What alarms so many foreign policy graybeards is that Trump is a flame thrower, not a firefighter, by his very nature. Since Teddy Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, every American president has prided himself on at least trying to defuse global tensions, not heighten them. As Billy Joel sang, we didn't start the fire. We didn't light it, but we try to fight it. . .

- The international order, which the U.S. sits atop, depends to some degree on stability, certainty and predictability. Allies need to know they can count on us, and America's enemies need to know that the security guarantee for countries from Estonia to South Korea is real.

- Trump seems either unable or unwilling to pivot into using diplomatic speak. That should not come as a big surprise, and it's not necessarily always a bad thing. A big part of his appeal during the campaign was his refusal to be "politically correct." Why would he change now?

- Trump's decision to adopt the "Madman Theory" highlights his long-time fixation with Nixon and underscores his pre-existing Nixonian tendencies.

- Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser and secretary of state, has spoken to Trump several times before and since the election. They've had long meetings to talk about the world.

Even as a nonagenarian, the German-born Kissinger has an uncanny ability to cast a spell on powerful Republican men - just as he did with Nelson Rockefeller a half century ago, then Nixon and finally Gerald Ford. Monday HAK sat with Pence, who studiously took notes and then tweeted a picture from their meeting.

Pence, 57, may not be old enough to remember when Kissinger, 93, was one of the biggest bogeymen there was on the right. Reagan's 1976 primary challenge against Ford was fuelled by conservative antipathy toward Kissinger, who was perceived as having Rasputin-like influence over the accidental president. Ford literally stopped using the word "détente" because Reagan was hammering him for being too soft on Russia during that campaign. How times change. . .

- If personnel is indeed policy, Trump's National Security Council will be heavily Nixonian. Kathleen "KT" McFarland started her career as a low-level staffer in the Situation Room of Nixon's White House and rose under the tutelage of Kissinger. She will now return as Michael Flynn's deputy.

Nixon hired Monica Crowley as a research assistant when she was 22. She wrote a tell-all after he died, revealing their private conversations. Now she'll be the senior director of strategic communications for the NSC.

Since Trump plans to eschew the presidential daily briefing, and empower NSC staff to make decisions without his sign-off, both jobs might be even more powerful than they normally would be. (McFarland and Crowley both came to Trump's attention as Fox News talking heads, which could increase the face time that the women get with him...)

- In a very meaningful way, the president-elect looks up to Nixon far more than he does Ronald Reagan, whose foreign policy he roundly criticized. The New York developer literally paid to take out full-page ads in The Washington Post in 1987 to trash Reagan's foreign policy for lacking backbone. At the exact same time, he was palling around with and trying to ingratiate himself with both Nixon and Kissinger.

In fact, Trump admires Nixon so much that he's planning to hang in the Oval Office a letter that the former president sent him in 1987 (the same year he was slamming Reagan). Pat Nixon had seen Donald on "The Donahue Show," he wrote, "and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!"