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On some of the occasions when President Donald Trump seems crazy, he’s just acting that way to make foreign leaders think he’s crazy and therefore rush to placate him before he does something crazy. Or so the Wall Street Journal reports “senior officials” are saying. When an aide asked Trump why he wrote “Praise be to Allah” in a social-media post that threatened to destroy Iran, the Journal reports:

[Trump] said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table. … It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. … “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers.

[Trump] said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table. … It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. … “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers.

The idea comes straight out of Richard Nixon’s playbook. During his 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon explained it to his assistant, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman (who inscribed the words in his posthumously published diary):

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just let 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 [where negotiations were being held] in two days begging for peace.”

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just let 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 [where negotiations were being held] in two days begging for peace.”

There are three things worth noting about the Madman Theory and why it hasn’t worked yet for Trump.

First, it didn’t work for Nixon. After winning the election, he sent his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to convey the message to the North Vietnamese—who shrugged and proceeded with their plan to take over all of Vietnam, as they believed would have happened peacefully if the United States hadn’t refused to carry out the 1954 Geneva Agreement calling for Vietnam-wide elections (which they believed Ho’s Communist Party would have won).

Nixon tried out the Madman Theory again a few times during his presidency, putting U.S. nuclear forces on higher alert, which he meant as a signal to the Kremlin’s leaders, threatening that he might start a nuclear war if they didn’t pressure North Vietnam to make peace—again, to no effect. The Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, observed at the time: “Americans put forces on alert so often that it is hard to know what it means.”

Second, if you’re the president and you want to give the Madman Theory a try, you have to play the Madman role consistently. You can’t keep changing your mind about what you want to accomplish in a war; you can’t keep making threats, then retreating from them; above all, you can’t announce that you’re playing the Madman Theory game. If you do any of those things (and Trump has done them all), then the Iranians—the intended audience of his play-acting—won’t know what to do, even if they believe the act and want to go along.

Third, the whole idea is malarkey—a half-witted distortion of fairly conventional deterrence theory. Deterrence, especially nuclear deterrence, is a mix of threat, bluff, and maybe a hint of madness (is any president or prime minister really going to start a nuclear war in response to an adversary’s non-nuclear aggression?). But to the extent deterrence is credible, it’s because it’s backed up by certain qualities in a country’s arsenals—and, more important, its politico-military decision-makers.

Here is where I would offer an alternative to the Madman Theory. Let’s call it the Rational Leader Theory. This posits that the best way for a president to coerce or otherwise lure an adversary to the bargaining table is to do the following: have an idea of what you want to accomplish in the war; have an idea of what motivates the adversary (if just to conclude whether or not negotiations are worthwhile); align your words with your actions.

In other words, demonstrate that you know what you want, have what it takes to get there, say what you mean, and mean what you say.

This is a pretty straightforward list of qualities for leadership in any realm, but Trump has violated all of them. I have nothing but loathing for the Iranian regime, but its leaders have every reason to distrust anything Trump says, whether or not he’s wearing his Madman mask. Consider:

In his first term, Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal, a 159-page document signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and five other world leaders, even though international inspectors had verified Iranian compliance with its terms and most of Trump’s advisers—as well as many Israeli military and intelligence officers (though not its right-wing ruling political leaders)—thought it was preferable to no deal at all. (Trump said he would negotiate a “better” deal but never even tried.)

In the weeks leading up to this spring’s U.S.-Israeli air war, Trump’s envoys negotiated with Iranian officials. In the end, Iranians put forth a fairly impressive offer, which among other things would have restricted their enrichment of uranium to levels even lower than those allowed in the Obama deal. Trump said talks would continue the following week—then he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched their massive air strikes that Saturday, killing the entire top echelon of the regime’s leadership, including some officials who had been identified as possibly more moderate successors to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This was the sort of action taken by rogue states.

On Easter weekend, after five weeks of bombarding more than 13,000 targets, Trump issued his Madman posts, giving the Iranians 48 hours to open up the Strait of Hormuz (which had been open before the war started) or “all Hell will reign [sic] down on them,” adding “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Two days later, he threatened to destroy not just Iran’s power plants and bridges (clear war crimes) but its entire civilization, from which it would take them 100 years or more to recover.

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In response, Iran proposed a 10-point peace plan. Most of the points would be unacceptable to any president (one demanded that the U.S. withdraw all its military troops from the entire Middle East, including the major air and naval bases that it’s had there for decades). Some had been rejected out of hand by Trump himself just days earlier (for instance, preserving Iran’s right to enrich as much uranium as it wanted). And yet, to avoid carrying out his threat, Trump accepted the plan as a basis for negotiation. Most people were relieved that Trump held back from wiping out the entire country of Iran—but he shouldn’t have made such a crazy threat to begin with (one peril of Madman Theory is that your bluff might be called), and now he just revealed that his threats, now and in the future, shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Trump sent emissaries, including Vice President JD Vance, to meet directly with Iranian counterparts in Islamabad. Vance emerged after 21 hours, saying Iranians had rejected America’s terms (as if any diplomacy could be up in 21 hours, even with the best of intentions—and as if take-it-or-leave-it talks were destined for anything but failure).

In response, Iran kept the Strait closed, except to favored nations (like China). Trump declared a blockade on Iranian ports, and attacked a ship that ignored the blockade. Iran then attacked a tanker that tried to pass through the Strait. And then Trump threatened once more to commit war crimes. He’s sending Vance and the others back to Islamabad for more talks with Iran this week, but if Iran doesn’t make a deal to open up the Strait, he wrote on social media:

the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!

the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!

Is this more Madman games-playing? Is it for real? How are the Iranians supposed to tell? What is he trying to accomplish? (If it’s just to open up the Strait, is that commensurate with blowing up Iran’s civilian infrastructure?) And what is “the DEAL” that Trump wants the Iranians to take? If they take it, will he keep his word? Why should they believe that he would? Or will Trump back out of his threat at the last minute, as he has before, in which case the Iranians might think they can get away with playing for time—which might not work this time, even if it has every other time.

This is not Madman Theory, but the operative word here—the word that doesn’t fit—is theory. There’s no theory here, there’s just flailing, it’s just wreaking a lot of damage, killing a lot of people, and making the rest of the world’s people very nervous. Is Trump capable of ending this war—which he said at the outset would last just two or three weeks—or is it just beginning?

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