When Donald Trump threatened several days ago to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” and obliterate Persian culture, I found myself pulled back to a very different moment, one I had lived through at close range as a CIA strategy analyst in Vietnam.
It was the period when the newly elected Richard Nixon, having campaigned on ending the war, was cultivating what came to be known as the “madman theory.”
The idea was not to go hog wild in unleashing destruction on Hanoi, but to be seen as capable of it. It was a performance—dangerous, yes, but deliberate. Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese, and more importantly their Soviet patrons, to believe he might resort to extreme measures if pushed too far.
In the moment, those orchestrated threats could be chilling and were meant to be. Nixon floated the possibility of bombing the Red River dikes, an act that could have flooded vast agricultural regions of North Vietnam and triggered famine. He also circulated word quietly, with great cunning, that nuclear options were not entirely off the table.
The earlier Rolling Thunder campaign had already established a baseline of obliterating force. And in 1972, during the Easter Offensive, the administration escalated sharply, mining Haiphong Harbor and unleashing sustained bombing around Hanoi, followed later that year by the brutal “Christmas bombing” campaign.
If you only looked at the surface, it could all feel unhinged. But beneath it, there was structure. Nixon and Henry Kissinger were not lashing out. They were signaling, sometimes covertly, sometimes through calibrated leaks. Operation Giant Lance, the secret 1969 nuclear alert that sent armed B-52s toward Soviet airspace, was designed to be detected but not announced. The point was pressure without commitment, fear without loss of control.
And crucially, Nixon stopped short. He never bombed the dikes. He never used nuclear weapons. The most extreme plans—like Operation Duck Hook, which contemplated massive strikes and even theoretical nuclear escalation—were debated, then shelved. His escalations, however devastating, were tied to a clear objective: force negotiations, buy time for Vietnamization, and extract a U.S. exit on terms he could claim as honorable.
There was, in other words, a method to the madness.
That is the benchmark that hangs over any comparison with what is happening today, and it is what makes the current moment so unsettling. When you turn to Donald Trump, the question is not whether his rhetoric is extreme. It plainly is. The question is whether it connects to any discernible strategy at all.
Some of his earlier conduct strained that connection. A sitting president publicly musing about injecting disinfectant as a treatment for COVID was not a coded signal to adversaries. It was a moment of improvisation that left even his own advisers scrambling. His inaction during the January 6 assault on the Capitol — hours of paralysis as events spiraled — did not project controlled unpredictability. It suggested something closer to disengagement at a moment requiring command.
Those incidents might have been dismissed, individually, as aberrations—gaffes, ignorance, or political theater. But taken together with more recent conduct, they begin to form a pattern that I would argue is qualitatively different from Nixon’s calculated pose.
During the ongoing Iran crisis, that pattern has sharpened. Trump has issued threats that move well beyond conventional deterrence, warning that “a whole civilization will die,” targeting not just military assets but infrastructure essential to civilian life, and pairing those threats with declarations of victory, ceasefires, and renewed escalation sometimes within the same news cycle. He has posted images of himself cast in overtly Christlike terms, blurring the line between political messaging and personal mythology.
Practiced observers like Peter Baker and Jennifer Rubin have approached this not as a question of diagnosis but of observable behavior. The issue, as they and others frame it, is not what Trump intends internally, but what his actions communicate externally, and how little those actions appear to align.
Rubin, in particular, assembles a stark record. She describes a president who threatens annihilation while also claiming diplomatic success. He demands unconditional outcomes, yet celebrates partial or unclear results as victories. He escalates rhetorically to apocalyptic levels—“you’ll be living in hell”—without explaining how those threats connect to defined military or political objectives.
Lawmakers cited in her analysis warn of increasing instability. Military figures point to the absence of a clear purpose. Major General Paul Eaton’s observation cuts to the core: a war that cannot define its own purpose cannot be won.
That is not a critique of tone. It is a critique of command.
What emerges from this record is not simply aggressiveness or even recklessness. It is disjunction. Threats do not align with outcomes. Claims of success coexist with unresolved or worsening conditions. The narrative shifts from escalation to triumphalism without passing through the discipline of explanation.
That is where the comparison to Nixon breaks down.
Nixon’s “madness” was instrumental. It was designed to produce a reaction—to push Moscow, to pressure Hanoi, to shape negotiations. It was bounded by decisions he ultimately refused to take. However ruthless his methods, they were tethered to a strategic logic that others, including adversaries, could eventually discern.
Trump’s behavior, as his critics describe it, often lacks that tether. The performance does not point clearly toward an objective beyond itself.
That shift introduces risks of its own.
Madman theory is dangerous precisely because it invites miscalculation. But Nixon’s version operated within a framework where adversaries could assume that, at some level, decisions were being weighed. Just as important, allies could make the same assumption and calibrate their responses accordingly.
What we are confronting now, critics argue, is something less contained: a pattern of conduct in which the signals themselves are unstable, where words and actions no longer reinforce each other, and where the line between strategy and impulse becomes increasingly difficult to locate.
You don’t need to speculate about motives to see the effect. It is visible on the surface, in the contradictions, the reversals, the escalation without clear endpoint.
Nixon understood that if you were going to play the madman, you had to remain in control of the act.
The question now is whether that control is still there, or whether the performance has given way to something far more unpredictable, and far more dangerous.