 "Trump’s politics of chaos: how unpredictability became a tool of power in a world losing stability")
“The crisis consists in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Antonio Gramsci’s line was meant for another era, but it feels uncomfortably familiar today.
There is a temptation to treat US President Donald Trump’s unpredictability as spectacle. A personality quirk amplified by social media and a permanent news cycle. But step back, and a more unsettling picture emerges. What looks like chaos is, at times, the point.
For all the arguments for or against Trump, even his fiercest critics agree on one thing: he is quite hard to read. Positions shift. Certainties dissolve. Threats are issued, withdrawn, and revived. Allies are praised one day and publicly undermined the next. He has elevated unpredictability, once considered a liability for any head of state, into a governing style. In a world of muted signals, Trump introduced noise.
Over time, this noise has hardened into leverage for Trump, and chaos for the rest of the world.
Political scientists have long had language for this kind of behaviour: the Madman Theory. This style of diplomacy works on the idea that if a leader appears volatile enough, rivals may hesitate rather than escalate. But seeing it play out so visibly, so publicly, feels different from reading about it in theory.
The Madman Theory gained prominence during the Cold War, most famously under US President Richard Nixon. Nixon wanted adversaries to believe he was volatile enough to escalate beyond reason. But his performance of instability was largely private, carefully signalled through aides and back channels. The madness, such as it was, was meant to be controlled.
Trump’s version of madman diplomacy is different from Nixon’s in that he performs his madness openly. Loudly. Often impulsively. His diplomacy unfolds on social media, and in off-the-cuff remarks that leave allies scrambling to interpret intent.
History offers plenty of precedents. Leaders across eras have ruled by keeping others off balance. Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe at the United Nations and pushed the world to the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Saddam Hussein cultivated ambiguity about his weapons capabilities, fuelling fear that ultimately justified invasion. Kim Jong-un continues to weaponise spectacle, pairing missile launches with sudden diplomatic overtures.
Trump belongs to this small and unsettled league. He has become its most visible modern practitioner. Madman on the loose. But this isn’t just a story about one man or one presidency.
What feels new is how exposed and shaky the system suddenly looks.
For a long time, many of us grew up believing that the worst chapters of global politics were behind us. World wars belonged to history books. Borders, we were told, were settled. Powerful countries could no longer simply take what they wanted. There were institutions, alliances, checks and balances. These global systems were imperfect, yes, but holding. The world felt rough around the edges but broadly stable.
That belief has been quietly unravelling. Donald Trump did not invent this shift, but he made it visible. He ripped apart the fabric.
For decades, global order has rested not just on power, but on shared expectations that treaties mattered, that alliances held, that norms restrained wild impulses. Watching the madness of Trumpism unfold, it becomes harder to pretend that the old guarantees were as solid as we thought.
In Davos, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney made it absolutely plain. Quoting Václav Havel, he said that we have been “living within a lie”. A lie that suggested history could be controlled, that human folly could be regulated, that the sanity of institutions alone could outgrow humanity’s madness.
Trump did not invent this chaotic style of leadership. But he dragged it back into the open, platformed it, stripped it of its subtlety, amplified it through social media, and made it the official gospel of the most powerful nation-state in the world.
The world may not collapse anytime soon. But it will find ways to recalibrate, and slowly and painfully adapt. Mark Carney has given the world a new doctrine. The middle powers have to be at the table or, as Canada’s PM said, they’ll be gobbled by power-hungry hegemons.
A third way — of multilateralism, of a widening web of middle-power connections — may yet emerge with guardrails to protect the middle powers from the whims of the powerful countries. But in this slow and unsettling transition, the world will lose a bit of hope and become wobbly. For some time, an uncertain order will come to rule the world: one where chaos is not a breakdown of rules, but a dangerous substitute for them.
And that, perhaps, is the quietest and most disquieting shift of all.
(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views)