U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026.
For a time, some argued that there was a method to President Donald Trump’s madness. This was in reference to the so-called “madman theory,” in which a head of state acts with intentionally erratic belligerence to force concessions from opponents. But increasingly, writes the Atlantic foreign affairs reporter Vivian Salama, “allies and rivals alike are less likely to give the president what he seeks” as they’ve gone from viewing him as “unpredictable” to “unreliable.”
She cites as an example last year’s trade deal with the European Union. While a deal was struck to avoid the worst of Trump’s tariff threats, after he renewed his talk of acquiring Greenland, word that he was considering leveling a 50 percent tariff against Europe to force them to yield the island nation to the U.S. caused the initial deal to collapse.
Trump’s handling of North Korea offers another example. During his first term, Trump used his “fire and fury” rhetoric to create a fearsome atmosphere in which Kim Jong Un was forced into diplomatic talks. According to Salama, “The strategy culminated in the 2018 Singapore summit, the first meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader. Months later, Trump told a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia, that after being ‘tough’ with each other, he and Kim exchanged ‘beautiful letters’ and ‘fell in love.’ Yet their second summit, in Hanoi the following year, collapsed without agreement. The two men have not spoken directly since Trump returned to office, U.S. officials told me, adding that inquiries about a possible meeting during Trump’s Asia trip last year went nowhere.”
In these and other cases, Trump’s madman approach delivered no results except for a growing sense that the president — and by extension the U.S. — is unreliable and not worth dealing with. This is proving to have stark consequences on the war with Iran.
“What once was viewed as strategic unpredictability now feels like destabilizing unreliability,” explains Salama. “The foreign officials I spoke with point to sharp reversals in U.S. policy and the wide disconnect between official administration doctrine and Trump’s social-media pronouncements. ‘Unpredictability is one thing; reliability is another,’ one Arab official told me. ‘If the Iranians only worried about Trump’s unpredictability, maybe we would have a deal now.’” Or as Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi put it, “Every time a diplomatic solution is on the table, the U.S. opts for a reckless military adventure.”
Officials informed Salama that rather than exacting concessions from Iran, Trump’s approach “has slowed efforts to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, because U.S. allies and Iranian negotiators don’t know whether to believe U.S. diplomatic outreach or the president’s apocalyptic comments (which on Thursday included an apparent threat of nuclear war.) Longtime U.S. allies have accelerated their efforts to find alternatives to American leadership, especially because Trump’s goals in Iran haven’t been met and the global economy continues to suffer the war’s consequences.”
According to Joshua Schwartz, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has written extensively about Trump and the madman theory, the president’s first term benefited from uncertainty about whether Trump was “truly mad or not.” But during his second term, “the behavior that other governments once found surprising has instead evolved into a pattern of escalation and belligerent rhetoric followed by a foreseeable climbdown, usually prompted by economic or political pressure.”
While Trump has attempted a similar approach regarding China, “using abrupt tariff escalations and contradictory public statements to keep Chinese negotiators guessing,” “his keep-them-guessing approach has yielded diminishing returns” as “many experts have concluded that Beijing now believes it has the stronger hand — particularly as countries around the world seek alternatives to doing business with the U.S. As one senior European official said of Trump: ‘He’s been unpredictable for so long that we are now forced to think of a future that doesn’t rely so heavily on U.S. partnership.’ The official added: ‘It’s forcing us to take care of ourselves.’”
As this suggests, the fallout from Trump’s unreliable leadership will be felt long after he’s left office. As Salama concludes, “After Trump’s first term, many global leaders were keen to return to a business-as-usual approach when working with Washington. Trump’s second term has changed that. Finding ways to survive and thrive without heavy reliance on the U.S. is the new imperative.”