Donald Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Richard Nixon, Watergate and leaving office in disgrace be damned.
But the president has taken his tribute act to new levels in threatening to erase Iran as a civilization, only to step back from the brink when the Tehran regime agreed – at a price – to reopen the economically vital strait of Hormuz.
The template is Nixon’s “madman theory” of diplomatic engagement – shorthand for prompting your adversaries to doubt your sanity and mental instability to the point where they are intimidated into otherwise unlikely concessions.
Nixon expounded on the idea to his future White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman in the incongruous setting of a walk on the beach beside the Pacific Ocean in 1968 before he was elected president, suggesting it might end the war in Vietnam.
“I call it ‘the madman theory’, Bob,” he told Haldeman, as recounted by Anthony Summers in The Arrogance of Power, published in 2000. “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 communists. 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 weeks begging for peace.”
It was a theme Nixon returned to several times in the years that followed, instructing aides to communicate to Soviet officials that their boss was “somewhat crazy” and “capable of the bloodiest brutality”. Some felt little exaggeration or invention was necessary.
In 1972, with war in Vietnam still raging despite Nixon’s affectations of madness, he told Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, that he wanted to use nuclear weapons against the communist north.
“I’m going to destroy the goddamn country, believe me?” he said. Later, he said to Kissinger: “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?”
“That, I think, would just be too much,” replied Kissinger only to be told that he was “so goddamned concerned with civilians”.
Evidence that Nixon’s insane posturing was a productive instrument of diplomacy is patchy at best.
His approach to Moscow produced a period of detente in US-Soviet relations that led to the signing of two arms-control treaties.
But applying the tactic to Vietnam culminated in a ferocious bombing onslaught against Hanoi and other targets in the Christmas period of 1972 to destroy vital infrastructure and bring the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table. The result was a peace treaty whose terms, critics argued, were roughly the same as those agreed to before the bombing.
Some suggested that Nixon’s dalliance with madness extended beyond the theoretical; Summers’s book records that the president’s psychiatrist of more than 40 years expressed concern that he “might not be the right man to have his finger on the nuclear trigger”.
All of which brings us to Trump and his agreement to a ceasefire with Iran immediately after threatening to “end its civilization”, “send it back to the stone age” and destroy its bridges and civilian power plants.
The reward for this climbdown is Tehran’s agreement to reopen the strait of Hormuz, the strategic energy chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes – and which was open until the US and Israel began unleashing military strikes on 28 February. The Iranian regime has also extracted a price of $2m for each ship that passes through the strait, meaning it will profit from it being open as never before.
As victories go, it look distinctly pyrrhic – shades of Nixon and North Vietnam in 1972.
Yet with Iran showing no signs of folding after nearly six weeks of bombardment, Trump – like Nixon before him – badly needs a prop to avoid looking weak, and apocalyptic threats might do the trick.
“Because he hasn’t been able to get any kind of clean victory out of this conflict so far, he’s probably looking for some sort of a master stroke in order to be able to walk away and declare victory without his critics being able to punch holes in his victory narrative,” said Ali Vaez, Iran programme director of the International Crisis Group.
Master strokes are not easy and are unlikely to be cost-free.
Being seen to intimidate Tehran to reopen the strait may also emancipate Trump from the dreaded “boots on the ground” option of a ground invasion – as does his claim on Tuesday morning that Iran had promised to “dig up and remove” nuclear material.
Any invasion aimed at seizing Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile would be “an extremely complicated, costly and time-consuming operation”, warned Vaez. “It’s not an in-and-out type of military intervention”
In that context, the resort to bloodcurdlingly bellicose threats in order to bulldoze the Iranian leadership into providing him an offramp is unsurprising – even if it comes at the cost of the US’s reputation as a standard-bearer of civilised values and a renewed chorus of doubts over Trump’s sanity and fitness for office.
Also unsurprising is Trump’s use of Nixon’s old playbook. The pair became pen pals in the 1980s when the then rising property tycoon wrote to the former president expressing his admiration and citing him as a personal inspiration.
Nixon, who died in 1994, reportedly wrote to Trump in 1990 to say that “the massive media attack on you puts me in your corner!”
One of Trump’s acolytes, Roger Stone, also once worked as a Nixon aide and has a tattoo of the former president on his back.
Yet in extricating himself from a looming quagmire with his feeling of virility intact, Trump might want to reflect on the damage to his credibility. How often can he fall back on such tactics to escape a self-inflicted predicament?
He also might want to ponder Nixon’s fate, whose very identity became bound up with playing the madman and ultimately exacted a high price.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
