by
Mel Goodman
Early in
Richard Nixon’s presidency, he told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman
that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten
the use of nuclear weapons. Nixon opined that President Eisenhower’s
nuclear threats in 1953 brought a quick end to the Korean War, and
that he planned to use the same principle of threatening maximum
force. Nixon called it the “madman theory,” getting the North
Vietnamese to “believe…I might do anything to stop the war.”
Ironically,
Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, may have
been responsible for introducing the theory in his lectures in 1959
to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar on the conscious political use
of irrational military threats. Ellsberg called the theory the
“political uses of madness,” and he noted that any extreme threat
would be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived
as not being fully rational. Ellsberg couldn’t imagine that an
American president would ever consider such a strategy, but he
believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool.
It is
noteworthy that Kissinger, who became Nixon’s national security
adviser ten years later, said that he “learned more from Dan
Ellsberg than any other person about bargaining.” And in his book
“Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” he advocated a “strategy
of ambiguity” in any discussion of the use of tactical nuclear
weapons. Kissinger’s writings in the 1950s, moreover, suggest that
Nixon’s madman theory was an extension of Kissinger’s belief that
power wasn’t power unless one was willing to use it.
Of
course, nuclear weapons weren’t used in Vietnam, but the secret war
in Cambodia and the unconscionable carpet bombing in Vietnam were
designed to convince Hanoi to make concessions to the United States.
These tactics didn’t elicit concessions from Hanoi and didn’t
curtail the operational abilities of North Vietnamese forces, but
Kissinger loved “playing the bombardier” along with his military
aide General Alexander Haig. He loved screening the raids and
demanded the raw intelligence on the bombing. Kissinger and Nixon
believed in the logic of escalation, although the results indicated
futility and failure.Let’s fast forward several decades to the
current situation. The United States has an authoritarian president
who is attracted to power and has surrounded himself with “yes
men.”
In the
past several days, Trump has appointed a new director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, who was a key player in the use of
sadistic torture and abuse in secret prisons. He has appointed a new
secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who believes in torture and abuse,
and supports the idea of regime change in both Iran and North Korea.
And now we have a new national security adviser, John Bolton, who has
recommended the use of force and regime change in Iran and North
Korea as well.
Over the
past year, there has been accumulating evidence that Donald Trump is
unfit to serve as the commander in chief. He is an extreme and
unbridled hedonist who has no interest in the consequences of his
actions. His personal life style, his personnel policies, his
Twitter rants, and his political actions point to self-absorption
that overrides any such concerns. Trump is not a theoretician so we
are not talking about a considered “madman” approach. Rather, we
have to consider an actual “madman” president who has appointed
another “madman” to run his National Security Council
The
thought of Trump and Bolton discussing national security and the use
of force in the White House is simply frightening. Both men have
displayed an impulsiveness and explosiveness that seems to point to
megalomania. Nixon’s biographers described him as sharp and
analytical with a remarkable memory; Trump’s biographers point to
dangerous elements of irritability and aggressiveness as well as a
pattern of deceitful behavior in his personal and professional life.
Bolton is more hawkish than Trump.
Both
Trump and Bolton have engaged in irresponsible talk about nuclear
weapons. Trump told interviewers that there is no point in having
nuclear weapons if we’re not willing to use them. Bolton still
defends the use of force in Iraq, and favors it in dealing with both
Iran and North Korea. He played a key role in politicizing the
intelligence to justify the war in Iraq and, as UN ambassador,
misused intelligence to make false statements in the General Assembly
and the Security Council regarding policy toward Syria and Cuba.
Two
secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Rex Tillerson, refused to
accept Bolton as a deputy secretary because of his extremist views
and his brutal treatment of underlings. It is interesting that
Bolton has already described his job of national security adviser as
making sure that the bureaucracy doesn’t impede the decisions of
the president. One of the primary tasks of the national security
adviser is to be an honest broker, bringing different views to the
president. This is clearly not Bolton’s modus operandi.
Our
democracy depends to a large degree on citizens having trust in the
sense and sensibility of our leaders. In a world that appears to be
spinning out of control, it is simply not possible to have faith in
the decision making of our current leadership. The madman theory of
policy is a debatable subject, but the thought of having actual
madmen in positions of power is frightening. At the point of its
dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union found that its leaders were no
longer believable to its people. The increased cynicism of Americans
and their opinion leaders will change the nature of our democracy.
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