In classical international relations, power has long rested on two pillars: the strength of your military and the sanctity of your signature. But when transactional politics replace institutional permanence, a fundamental shift occurs. We are no longer operating within a rules-based order: we have entered the era of the deal-based order.

Across dialogues on foreign policy, security, and systemic risk, a recurring tension surfaces: Is erratic, disruptive governance a calculated stroke of strategic genius, or is it slowly dismantling the very foundation of global stability?

The Mechanics of “Strategic Unpredictability”

To understand the current posture of U.S. foreign policy, one must turn to game theory—specifically Thomas Schelling’s formulation of the “rationality of irrationality.”

In a classic game of Chicken, two drivers speed toward each other on a single track. A strictly rational player will swerve at the final second to avoid mutual annihilation. But if Player A tears the steering wheel off the dashboard and flings it out the window in plain view of Player B, the dynamic flips. Player B is forced to swerve. Feigning madness—or genuine, unrestrained recklessness—becomes a rational gambit to force the other side to blink.

From Richard Nixon’s covert Operation Giant Lance to Donald Trump’s modern, public-facing brand of unpredictable diplomacy, the goal remains the same: disrupt the opponent’s script, raise the perceived probability of accidental catastrophe, and coerce immediate concessions.

Where the Model Breaks Down

The flaw in treating global statecraft like a Manhattan real estate dispute is that sovereign nations do not simply pack up and leave the negotiating table. When applied at scale, the “madman” approach triggers systemic points of failure:

1. The Asymmetry of Credibility: Deterrence requires more than a credible threat; it demands a credible promise. If an adversary believes that compliance will not guarantee relief—because agreements like the JCPOA or long-standing treaties can be discarded on a whim—they conclude negotiation is futile. The rational countermove is not to capitulate, but to sprint toward irreversible deterrence: nuclear weapons and ballistic arsenals.
2. The Domestic Mirage: While rapid policy pivots capture news cycles and rally core political bases against “stagnant global elites,” they carry compounding real-world costs. Unpredictable tariffs, energy shocks, and shifting security commitments breed inflation and market paralysis. Disruption delivers short-term leverage at the cost of long-term governance.
3. The Multi-Player Dilemma: The Game of Chicken assumes only two cars on a flat road. In a multipolar world, erratic maneuvers send shockwaves through an entire convoy of allies, neutral states, and competitors. When everyone begins throwing their steering wheels out the window, mutual catastrophe ceases to be a theoretical risk—it becomes a mathematical certainty.

The Real Cost to Europe

For decades, Europe relied on the baseline assumption of American predictability. That era is over.

When security pacts like NATO’s Article 5 are treated as transactional protection policies rather than enduring civilizational commitments, the message to Europe is unmistakable: strategic autonomy is no longer a rhetorical luxury; it is an urgent requirement for survival.

When global rules are subordinated to the personal whim of whichever leader occupies the executive office in Washington, medium-sized powers cannot afford passivity. We are witnessing the fragmentation of supply chains, the quiet erosion of dollar hegemony, and a rush by regional powers to hedge against abandonment.

Beyond the Bonfire

Blowing up multilateral architecture is easy; building durable trust takes generations.

The critics are right when they argue that postwar institutions had grown bureaucratic, rigid, and occasionally hypocritical. But abandoning institutional legitimacy in favor of raw power politics does not solve those failures—it merely hands moral and legal cover to revisionist autocracies.

If Europe wishes to navigate this bifurcation point, it must avoid confusing tactical spectacle with genuine power. The defense of open societies begins not with adopting our rivals’ volatility, but with demonstrating the resilience, integrity, and strategic clarity of an order that keeps its word.

Note: I published a more formal piece on this topic on ResearchGate, connecting previous work on physics, system theory, and epistemology directly to the mechanics of trust and the game-theoretical limits of the “Madman Theory” in multilateral deterrence:

📄 The Entropy of Deterrence on ResearchGate (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32287.93606)