Play dumb

Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” When you think of Trump, this proverb may seem like an exaggeration. But his apparent political innovations also add up to nothing. To see this, just read a curious document prepared in 1995 during Bill Clinton’s presidency by an advisory committee of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Command. The text, initially secret and declassified years ago, was titled “Primary Principles of the Post-Cold War” and was written to answer a question that remains highly relevant today: “How can we deter nations other than the former Soviet Union from using weapons of mass destruction?”

So, the United States wanted to take advantage of the collapse of its great enemy to impose imperial hegemony. And the report's authors believed the best way to achieve this was to promote the image of their country as a nation that could become irrational and vengeful when it decided its vital interests were being harmed. One of the prescribed means for this image-building operation was to threaten terrible but vague preemptive action or retaliation, with the aim of taking full advantage of the ambiguity surrounding what the United States might do against countries tempted to behave in ways it didn't want them to. Another was to make the negotiators, instead of presenting themselves as "overly rational and calm," "appear potentially out of control," in a drama that "could be beneficial in creating and reinforcing fears and doubts among those who had to make the decisions" in the nation to be deterred. The objective of these procedures was, of course, to frighten rival negotiators. As the report argued, “the essential feeling of fear is the driving force of deterrence.”

Trump's political innovations are old hat: Nixon's Mad Man strategy for Vietnam

Obviously, the authors of the document weren't inventing anything either. They were simply recycling the mad man strategy that Nixon had said should be followed in Vietnam. His advisors probably got the idea from some recent book. From Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962) by Herman Kahn, the Rand Corporation military analyst who inspired Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Or from The Political Uses of Madness by Daniel Ellsberg (1959), or The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling (1960). But the idea was already found in Machiavelli, who, in the Discorsi , had said that, sometimes, it was very wise to simulate madness. Machiavelli said "sometimes." And the case of Nixon and Vietnam exemplifies that it may not be so when others don't fall into the trap or aren't interested in falling into it. Because, as we saw at the NATO summit, playing dumb with someone who's playing dumb because it offers a pretext to do what you already wanted to do is also a strategy, and Trump's second term is becoming a window of opportunity for those who want to pursue it.