Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of international relations is so vivid and famous as to obscure its ultimate failure. As early as 1968, the soon-to-be US president hoped to extract concessions from North Vietnam by hinting that he “might do anything” with America’s nuclear arsenal. So shaken was the enemy by this threat that it fought on for five more years and took another 20,000 or so US lives along the way. Madman? Quite.
And so this column does not argue that erring on the side of aggression is the right thing in foreign policy. Those who would take liberties with the US are not always and everywhere deterred by the presence of a volatile hothead in the White House. The question, rather, is what American voters think. To judge by the 56 per cent who see President Joe Biden as “not tough enough” with Russia, the door seems open to a brusquer kind of US leader.
The Ukraine crisis is not the end of Donald Trump. Liberals are right to bring up his past flirtations with the Kremlin, but they overrate the harm it will do to his electoral viability. For one thing, few western leaders this century have a proud record on Russia. Biden belonged to a White House that “reset” relations with Moscow after its invasion of Georgia in 2008. His former boss, Barack Obama, laughed away the notion of the Kremlin as America’s principal threat. The best that can be said about that administration’s Russia policy is that it has aged better than Angela Merkel’s. Trump is damaged by his record, yes, but not uniquely or even especially so.