Some are criticizing U. S. President Trump for threatening force against North Korea — and this may be exactly what Trump wants, the Fiscal Times reports.
In the past 72 hours, President Trump has threatened North Korea with a nuclear attack, suggested that threat may not have been « tough enough » and then, on Friday morning, boasted that the U. S. military is « locked and loaded » in preparation for an attack on the Kim Jong-un regime in Pyongyang.
At no time in recent history has an American president been so free with threats of nuclear war. The flurry of bellicosity has, even more than usual over the first six months of Donald Trump’s presidency, led to critics of the president loudly questioning his sanity.
That may be exactly what Trump wants.
In 1969, another American president in his first term in the Oval Office faced an intractable problem in Asia — one that he had repeatedly promised to solve while on the campaign trail just a few months before. Having made no progress by his first summer in the White House, he decided to dramatically raise the stakes.
The president was Richard Nixon, and the problem frustrating him was the war in Vietnam. In the summer after taking office, despite the serious reservations of U. S. military leaders, he ordered the armed forces to high alert and sent nuclear-armed bombers to skirt the eastern border of the Soviet Union on three consecutive says.
Nixon was attempting a complex foreign policy bank shot that he hoped would lead to an end of the war in Vietnam. The idea was not to actually attack anybody, but to convince Russia that Nixon was unstable enough that he would risk a « first use » of nuclear weapons to finally decide the conflict, potentially plunging the world into nuclear war in the process. If it succeeded, Nixon hoped, Russia would pressure the North Vietnamese to come to the bargaining table and end the war.
Nixon’s former chief of staff H. R. « Bob » Haldeman wrote in his book The Ends of Power that Nixon had explicitly outlined a version of the strategy the previous summer:
« I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war.
