Tariffs go up and down. Military options are brandished and then withdrawn. In some foreign policy circles erratic behavior and unpredictability are treated as if they were strategic advantages rather than political liabilities.
This is not a new phenomenon. For decades leaders have used extreme threats, abrupt reversals and mixed signals to unsettle rivals and extract concessions. In international relations scholarship this repertoire is often labeled the ‘madman theory.’ Thinkers like Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Schelling argued that projecting a willingness to take drastic action can change an opponent’s calculations by raising the perceived risk of escalation.
What began as a descriptive way to explain apparently irrational conduct has sometimes been taken up as a deliberate tactic. The most famous case is Richard Nixon, who reportedly cultivated a madman image to pressure North Vietnam. His 1969 nuclear alert may have helped restrain Soviet calculations even if it did not end the war. But any partial success rested on three background conditions that are now largely gone.
First, information scarcity. During the Cold War, signals moved slowly through formal channels—diplomats, analysts, military hierarchies. Ambiguity could be preserved; a leader could appear dangerously unpredictable without immediate public decoding. The mystique of the madman depended on that opacity.
Second, a relatively stable adversary with shared risk aversion. Nixon’s gambit relied on cautious, hierarchical Soviet decision-making that feared catastrophic miscalculation. That common sense of risk made erratic signaling more coercive.
Third, credibility grounded in restraint elsewhere. The madman posture worked because it was exceptional, set against an otherwise orderly system. Threats that stand out from a baseline of restraint feel more believable.
Those conditions are fading. Signals now spread instantly across social and traditional media, are parsed in real time, and join a constant stream of noise. Unpredictability can quickly dissolve into chatter rather than produce sober fear. Many rivals already operate in volatile political environments where instability is the norm; apparent irrationality in that context often invites probing, reciprocal escalation, or hedging rather than deference.
When unpredictability becomes routine, it loses coercive power. Repeated bluster, public contradictions and last-minute backdowns create a recognizable pattern: predictable unpredictability. Recent episodes in U.S. policy illustrate the risks. Ambiguous threats toward Iran and surprising comments about Greenland strained relationships and raised doubts about aims and limits without delivering durable leverage. Coercive signals directed at allies risk eroding alliances instead of bending behavior.
Allies and adversaries respond by hedging or testing boundaries. Tariff threats have pushed some countries closer to alternative partners; India, for example, has deepened ties with China. Russia appears to have read ambiguous U.S. messaging on Ukraine as license to press territorial claims.
That said, measured ambiguity still has strategic uses. Deliberate uncertainty about specific responses can strengthen deterrence by preventing opponents from locking into automatic escalation. U.S. strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan remains a classic case: leaving Washington’s exact response unspecified discourages a Chinese rush to force and deters a unilateral Taiwanese move that could spark crisis.
What no longer works is volatility untethered to clear objectives and visible limits. The madman approach was conceived for a slower, more rule-bound international system. In today’s fast, noisy, and already unstable world untamed unpredictability more often breeds confusion, hedging, reciprocal risk-taking and frayed alliances than the paralyzing fear the theory once promised.
Andrew Latham is professor of political science at Macalester College. Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
