To keep Iran unbalanced, Trump may be employing Nixon’s Madman Theory

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Deception. Diversion. Distraction.

These were the principal elements of a remarkable mission that permitted a force of hundreds of U.S. military and intelligence personnel and 155 aircraft to pull off the daring rescue of an airman who had parachuted from his wrecked aircraft into inhospitable terrain in Iran.

They may also be the tools or − in the view of skeptics of Donald Trump’s state of mind as he prosecutes the very kind of war he repeatedly promised to avoid − the measures that, amid talk of a ceasefire in a war in danger of spinning out of control, a frustrated president is applying to the conflict in Iran.

This confluence was laid bare in the news conference Mr. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine conducted Monday afternoon in which the course of the war and what the President called “one of the likely most complex, most harrowing combat searches … ever attempted by the military” were the twin topics.

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With threats that thus far have not been carried out and war goals that have constantly changed, Mr. Trump has mobilized deception, diversion and distraction, along with a dollop of desperation, as diplomatic instruments.

Hence, in a military engagement that is consistently defying conventional narratives of warfare, there is an unusual melding of tactics and strategy.

Ordinarily the two are separate, with the former ideally working in service of the latter. In the U.S. conduct of the war − or at least in the most dramatic episode of the conflict, the astonishing extraction of a U.S. Air Force weapon systems officer after his plane was shot down − the two have merged under the unremitting, but so far not irresistible, power of the U.S. military and intelligence operations.

The tactics: With modern technology fuelled in part by AI, U.S. forces have confused and then hammered Iranian defences, winning near-mastery of the skies and bombarding strategic sites throughout the country.

The strategy: To keep Iran unbalanced, in part by suggesting with escalating threats and profane rhetorical explosions that Mr. Trump may be practising deliberate obfuscation or may himself be unbalanced − a diagnosis his critics at home and abroad believe can be applied to his state of mind. His supporters counter that the President, though perhaps not diplomatic, is nonetheless a natural genius as a negotiator and a born dealmaker.

One way or another, and consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Trump − in threatening at the Monday news conference that “the entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night” − seems to be adopting an approach Richard Nixon applied to the Vietnam War, a conflict the President, who has repeatedly emphasized the destined brevity of this conflict, is striving mightily to avoid repeating.

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“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Mr. Nixon told H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, later his White House chief of staff, during the 1968 presidential campaign. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry − and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ − and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

The analogue 58 years later might be: I want the Iranians to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Trump is obsessed with radical Islam. We can’t restrain him when he is angry − and he has his hand on the nuclear button" − and the ayatollah himself will be in Islamabad in two days begging for peace.

The news conference was marked by effusive praise of Mr. Trump and religious overtones, with Mr. Hegseth making allusions to Good Friday, Easter Sunday, “a pilot reborn,” “a nation rejoicing” and what he described as “quiet declarations of faith.” The airman, identified only as “the back-seater,” signalled his location in the rugged mountainous territory of Iran with the phrase “God is good.”

In a theatre of human endeavour where sports metaphors are dangerously and often inappropriately applied, Mr. Trump, a devoted sports fan, is encountering a juncture where such comparisons may be revealing.

Early last September, the Toronto Blue Jays fought to achieve the “magic number” of 23, where a combination of their victories and New York Yankees’ losses would allow the Jays to clinch the American League East title. Mr. Trump believes a barrage of U.S. military achievements will produce an unalloyed or − to employ a phrase he once used − unconditional victory. In this case, continued American air and, if it comes to it, land victories aren’t enough. Ultimate triumph cannot occur unless Iran declares it has lost, an eventuality that right now it is resisting.

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This may be a case of what Wake Forest University’s Charles Walldorf calls “asymmetric resolve”: the greater determination among Iranians than among Americans to fight on.

The pathfinding United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in September, 1945, that while Allied bombing of Germany was a decisive factor in the Second World War, the barrage from the air served to steel civilian resolve and demonstrated that the “power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated.”

This finding of a group of future academic and political stars − including George W. Ball, the major Kennedy and Johnson administration insider who opposed the Vietnam War; John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born economist and diplomat; and Paul Nitze, a leading Cold War defence and diplomatic theorist − may have fresh relevance 81 years later, when deception, diversion, and distraction are the leitmotifs of a new war with global implications.