US President Donald Trump’s approach is not negotiation; it’s meaningless theatre. Nowhere is that more clear than in the ongoing standoff with Iran, where threats, uncertainty, retreats and declarations of victory intentionally cloud the landscape.
It’s all about disruption and attention, and far divorced from the staying power needed to deliver longer-term wins. What is presented as leverage is often little more than volatility, and while dramatic, volatility is not the same as control.
This is transaction, not diplomacy. There is no binding commitment, and any momentary agreement can be cut whenever leverage shifts, appealing perhaps in an era of geopolitical churn. But it ignores the value of trust, which, once diluted, cannot replace credibility. And credibility, unlike tariffs or sanctions, cannot be reimposed at will; it is accumulated slowly and squandered quickly.
By mixing escalation and conciliation and delivering uncertainty, Trump creates an informational fog reminiscent of the “madman theory”, most famously associated with Richard Nixon, where a covering presence of unpredictability is used to leverage demand. But while Nixon’s posture was tightly controlled and held close to the chest, Trump’s every movement is telegraphed in real time. What then happens is opponents discount and discard the noise the madmen create. Over time, unpredictability ceases to intimidate and instead becomes background static noise.
By mixing escalation and conciliation and delivering uncertainty, Trump creates an informational fog reminiscent of the “madman theory”, most famously associated with Richard Nixon, where a covering presence of unpredictability is used to leverage demand.
Intermittent escalations with regard to Iran, rhetorical and material, have been used to raise the price of defiance and probe Tehran’s thresholds, while simultaneously signalling some space for negotiation, making any path to an agreement more difficult. Being an Iranian negotiator must make codebreaking at Bletchley Park seem like a picnic. The result is not clarity but paralysis, where neither escalation nor compromise can be cleanly pursued.
The comparison to Bletchley Park captures the strain of negotiating in an environment where signals are deliberately scrambled. At Bletchley Park, codebreakers worked to decipher the structured logic of the Enigma code, a system that, however complex, was internally consistent. Trump’s signalling, by contrast, lacks stable pattern or hierarchy. Positions shift publicly, messages contradict, and intent is obscured not by encryption but by excess. For negotiators, the challenge is inverted: not decoding a hidden order, but determining whether any coherent order exists at all, and whether today’s signal will still hold tomorrow.
Enter a similar approach to regional alignments, where alliances look less like constants and more like tools, enhancing manoeuvrability but adding uncertainty to relationships that usually rely on clarity for deterrence. Partners are left hedging, adversaries probing, and the system as a whole becomes less predictable in ways that are not strategically useful.
And then there’s the question of narrative. Trump’s negotiations cannot be considered apart from their packaging; that risks confusing announcement with achievement. It’s all about the moment of declaration, with the harder work of institutionalising agreements taking a back seat. The headline becomes the outcome, even when the substance remains thin or reversible.
This may be reminiscent of some aspects of Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy, but it’s inverted, upside down, and zero-sum impulses erode joint stability. The man’s legacy will be the shifting of diplomacy away from careful statecraft and toward diplomacy as a high-profile show.
Can this produce an attainable understanding with Iran? Can it endure? In the absence of substance and clear diplomatic leverage, the answer is no. And in a part of the world already defined by mistrust, that is an insecure foundation on which to build peace or secure stability. In local parlance, die poppe gaan dans, without the purpose of an encompassing ball — once a “theatre of society” designed to structure relationships, not unravel them.
• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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