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Do as I say or I might be crazy enough to blow everyone up. That is the essence of the Dr Strangelove playbook — that acting the madman will scare your enemies into concessions. In the movie, budget-constrained US generals save dollars by nuking the Soviet Union. Donald Trump is highly unlikely to launch nuclear weapons. But he would surely be happy if others thought that he might. Nor is he insane for believing the Strangelovian approach might work. It has served him well for his first 78 years.
There is no need to retread how a serially bankrupted Trump menaced creditors during his casino days, or how supporters storming Capitol Hill to stop the count became a rallying cry for his re-election. Playing the lunatic has been a routine tool of Trump’s career. Never give the middle finger to your creditors; avoid at all costs describing fallen soldiers as losers. Had Trump heeded such advice he would not be president. In his mind, reasonable people are clueless about power and negotiating. “It is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds,” wrote GK Chesterton. “He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.”
Reactions to Trump’s first week in office are unlikely to dampen his instinct for unpredictability. His avalanche of executive orders, collective firings and sweeping pledge to usher in a new golden age was meant to give the shock and awe impression that he was remaking the world. One of Trump’s billionaire donors even compared his first seven days to the almighty. In fact, Trump’s big win — securing a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza — came several days before he was inaugurated (or said “Let there be light!”, depending on your grip on reality). Neither Hamas nor the Israelis cared that Joe Biden had been pushing for a ceasefire for many months. With Trump, they obeyed in advance.
Trump can also claim that he shocked Colombia into accepting his terms for sending them illegal immigrants. But the moral of last weekend’s scrap is fuzzier than that. Trump announced a tariff war and a visa ban on the South American republic after it refused to accept two US military planes carrying shackled deportees. President Gustavo Petro responded with florid insults while quietly sending a civilian plane to collect them. Cue Trump victory dance. In reality, Colombia has accepted hundreds of US deportee flights in recent years, which means Petro did not concede much. Yet other countries might now think twice before crossing Trump.
Denmark’s European neighbours have also been prompted to rethink their ideas about standing up to bullies. Trump shocked Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, by haranguing her for 45 minutes earlier this month over why the US should acquire Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. The principled stance would be for France, Britain and others to link arms with Denmark and say, “Enough! America cannot trample over other countries’ sovereignty.” But that would be a crazy thing to do, right? Their actual response has been predictably supine. Europe’s liberal democracies are behaving exactly how Trump expected they would — with fawning towards the source of the problem. They might as well have invited Trump to keep going.
The bigger test case is the Panama Canal Zone, where the US is treaty-bound to accept Panamanian sovereignty. Even if Trump browbeats Panama to revoke its ports contracts with CK Hutchison, the Hong Kong-based conglomerate, his win could be pyrrhic. Panama’s president has been notably more robust than his Danish counterpart. So have Panama’s neighbours. In contrast to Canada’s outgoing Justin Trudeau, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum set limits before Trump took office in her gutsy response to his threat of a tariff war. Colombia’s Petro was also tenacious. It is no coincidence that a Chinese diplomat on Sunday said that Colombia-China relations were their strongest in 45 years.
In the short term, Trump’s tactics could well yield more wins than Biden, whose diplomacy looked better on paper than in practice. It is likely that Europeans will step up defence spending for fear of Trump’s ire. He has said that Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” with allies that spend too little. Over time, however, Trump will sow distrust about America’s word. Deals will start to dry up. Large parts of the world long ago gave up on the notion of a US-led liberal international order, which makes them sanguine about the ascent of the “ugly American”. Yet they will be hunting for insurance. It would be no surprise were China in the near future to win more friends and influence in Trump’s hemisphere.
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