In July, on the manicured grounds of President Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with the European Union. The agreement—centered on a 15 percent tariff on most European exports—was an uneasy compromise designed to avoid a bigger clash.
By early fall, the deal was headed into the rough. Lawmakers in the European Parliament—rattled by Trump’s renewed talk of acquiring Greenland—questioned the durability of any agreement tied so closely to Trump’s coercive and shifting demands. Inside the Trump administration, officials were already discussing a far steeper tariff regime—up to 50 percent—if Europe didn’t yield, two U.S. officials told me. This month, after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. was being “humiliated” by Iran at the negotiating table, Trump accused the EU of backsliding on the deal and threatened new duties of 25 percent on European cars, an escalation that was poorly received in Brussels. “A deal is a deal, and we have a deal,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said recently. “And the essence of this deal is prosperity, common rules, and reliability.”
Reliability. It’s a word I hear constantly from officials around the world when the conversation turns to the Trump administration—and especially, these days, the Iran war. In the past, Trump supporters, and even many U.S. allies, viewed Trump’s famous unpredictability as unorthodox but at times effective, a useful means of wrong-footing opponents or shaking up the tired status quo.
Many now see something more unsettling in Trump’s international relations, including in the 10-week war: What once was viewed as strategic unpredictability now feels like destabilizing unreliability. The foreign officials I spoke with pointed to sharp reversals in U.S. policy and the wide disconnect between official administration doctrine and Trump’s social-media pronouncements. “Unpredictability is one thing; reliability is another,” one Arab official told me. “If the Iranians only worried about Trump’s unpredictability, maybe we would have a deal now.”
Anna Kelly, the White House deputy press secretary, told me that Trump “maintains strategic ambiguity and flexibility to ensure maximum options at all times,” adding that the approach helped him “obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer, arrest narcoterrorist Nicolas Maduro in Operation Absolute Resolve, and more.”
But that new sense that Trump is unreliable, the officials told me, has slowed efforts to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, because U.S. allies and Iranian negotiators don’t know whether to believe U.S. diplomatic outreach or the president’s apocalyptic comments (which on Thursday included an apparent threat of nuclear war). Longtime U.S. allies have accelerated their efforts to find alternatives to American leadership, especially because Trump’s goals in Iran haven’t been met and the global economy continues to suffer the war’s consequences. U.S. standing has also been eroded as Washington seeks to renegotiate the terms of trade with China, an effort that Trump will seek to kick-start with a visit this week. For Beijing, which has endured years of stop-and-start negotiations with Washington, Trump’s trip is a test of whether a functional working relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries is still possible.
Can anyone rely on Trump?
Trump’s supporters and some analysts argue that his strategic unpredictability—often called the “madman theory”—has been an asset, keeping adversaries off balance. The theory holds that by appearing borderline irrational, a leader can extract concessions that conventional diplomacy can’t.
The clearest historical example comes from the Nixon administration’s effort to end the Vietnam War. In his memoirs, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman recounted the president’s attempt to convince North Vietnam that he was unhinged enough to use nuclear weapons. “The threat was the key, and Nixon coined a phrase for his theory,” Haldeman wrote, saying that Nixon told him in 1968: “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.” The following year, Nixon ordered a covert, multiday nuclear alert code-named Operation Giant Lance that dispatched bombers to patrol the Arctic polar ice caps, near Soviet airspace, in an effort to suggest to Moscow that the American president was dangerously volatile. The goal was to pressure the Soviet Union and North Vietnam into concessions. The operation was called off when, after a few days, no discernible response came.
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The Soviets sometimes used similar theatrics. Leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1960 shoe-banging episode at the United Nations helped cement his reputation in the West as erratic. In 2000, his granddaughter Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at the New School in New York, wrote: “The shoe-banging incident conveyed, for the West, a convenient ideological message: Our enemy is ridiculous and uncivilized, therefore he is capable of everything.”
Joshua Schwartz, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has written extensively about Trump and the madman theory, told me that the president’s first term benefited from uncertainty about whether Trump was “truly mad or not.” Since then, however, the behavior that other governments once found surprising has instead evolved into a pattern of escalation and belligerent rhetoric followed by a foreseeable climbdown, usually prompted by economic or political pressure. “Trump’s modus operandi has therefore become relatively predictable,” Schwartz told me, citing Trump’s inconclusive dealings with North Korea, his ever-changing tariff regime, and his exaggerations and inconsistencies during the Iran war.
Throughout Trump’s first term, for instance, his “fire and fury” rhetoric and public insults toward Kim Jong Un created a crisis atmosphere that some analysts believe pushed Pyongyang toward diplomacy. The strategy culminated in the 2018 Singapore summit, the first meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader. Months later, Trump told a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia, that after being “tough” with each other, he and Kim exchanged “beautiful letters” and “fell in love.” Yet their second summit, in Hanoi the following year, collapsed without agreement. The two men have not spoken directly since Trump returned to office, U.S. officials told me, adding that inquiries about a possible meeting during Trump’s Asia trip last year went nowhere.
Trump in his first term employed similar tactics in trade negotiations with China, using abrupt tariff escalations and contradictory public statements to keep Chinese negotiators guessing. The strategy at times yielded concessions, including commitments to purchase U.S. agricultural goods. But in Trump’s second term, his keep-them-guessing approach has yielded diminishing returns; many experts have concluded that Beijing now believes it has the stronger hand—particularly as countries around the world seek alternatives to doing business with the U.S. As one senior European official said of Trump: “He’s been unpredictable for so long that we are now forced to think of a future that doesn’t rely so heavily on U.S. partnership.” The official added: “It’s forcing us to take care of ourselves.”
In April 2024, seven months before Trump was elected for a second term, the academics Stephen Nagy and Satoru Nagao argued that Trump’s unpredictability made a difference to friends and rivals alike. “Trump’s approach compels allies of the U.S. to invest in their own defence to demonstrate their commitment to the U.S.,” they wrote in an article for the Australian Institute of International Affairs. For China and Russia, that unpredictability “places the U.S. in the position where it can maximise the use of its power.” I asked Nagy, a Canadian scholar based in Tokyo, whether, after the first year of Trump’s second term, he still viewed the president as unpredictable.
“Yes and no,” Nagy told me. “We’ve learned his stylistic patterns—transactional, ego-driven, attention-seeking—but his strategic end goals remain genuinely opaque” and therefore difficult for other countries to rely on.
Nagy explained that the “institutional guardrails” that once constrained Trump and made his foreign policy more consistent are largely gone. (He cited Secretary of State Marco Rubio as an exception.) That deficit in expertise and discipline has produced a new uncertainty. “While we can anticipate Trump’s theatrical moves, we struggle to identify a coherent vision driving them,” Nagy told me.
Chinese officials have spent years adapting to Trump’s style. During his first term, Beijing often treated Trump’s unpredictability as a negotiating tactic—disruptive, but manageable. This time, the concern is different. Chinese officials and policy advisers question whether commitments made by Trump, his Cabinet, or U.S. negotiators will survive the next social-media post, tariff threat, or sudden reversal, according to U.S. and foreign officials (although U.S. officials say Beijing’s wavering is often to blame when agreements don’t materialize). Even before Trump’s trip, the administration has sent mixed signals on tariffs, semiconductor controls, and the scope of any broader trade détente.
That has narrowed expectations for the summit itself. Officials on both sides have signaled that the goal is stability, not a breakthrough. One U.S. official told me the focus in Trump’s second term is less about announcing new deals than enhancing the ones already in place—and, ultimately, keeping the peace. Preparatory talks have centered on extending tariff pauses, expanding Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural goods while curtailing unfair trade practices, and preventing another spiral of retaliatory restrictions on rare-earths and advanced-technology exports. Chinese leaders are reportedly interested in a “Board of Trade” framework to preserve commerce in nonsensitive goods.
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Beijing is also expected to press Trump to scale back military and political support for Taiwan even as the U.S. seeks to deter Chinese coercion of the island without triggering a broader Indo-Pacific conflict. Unlike some of his predecessors, Trump avoids public declarations about Taiwan’s sovereignty, a move aimed at preserving good relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Administration officials tell me, however, that U.S. policy toward Taiwan—and military support for the island—remain unchanged.
Iran, U.S. officials frequently emphasize, is a bad-faith actor. There are plenty of signs that Tehran feels the same way about Trump. Iranian officials note that Iran was at the negotiating table with the U.S., both last June and earlier this year, when the U.S. and Israel began bombing campaigns. And Iran’s leaders have cited Trump’s shifting stances—at times threatening to “erase” Iran, at other times calling for peace and appearing to view the regime favorably—as evidence that he is an unreliable negotiator. On Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote on X that “every time a diplomatic solution is on the table, the U.S. opts for a reckless military adventure.”
Trump-administration officials say the parallel tracks of pushing for negotiations while threatening military destruction are successful because they keep Iran off balance and should ultimately extract concessions on Trump’s key goals, such as ending Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions. But for Iranian officials, and for the nations watching closely as the economic costs mount, the risks are that Trump’s abrupt reversals and contradictory signals could lead to a needless lengthening of the conflict—and diminish the chances that an eventual deal will prove lasting.
Robert Malley, the lead negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—who later served in the Biden administration, told me unpredictability can be an asset in negotiations by instilling fear and urgency in the other side. “But when unpredictability veers toward unreliability, the asset quickly can become a liability,” he told me. “At that point, the other side doesn’t so much have fear as lack of confidence, and it loses motivation for a deal because it can’t trust that a putative agreement can stick.” The likely outcome, Malley warned, “is chaos.”
What comes next is heavily contingent on how this war ends. Despite the unpopularity of Trump’s overseas military adventurism with his core supporters, the president has his eye on Cuba next. After Trump’s first term, many global leaders were keen to return to a business-as-usual approach when working with Washington. Trump’s second term has changed that. Finding ways to survive and thrive without heavy reliance on the U.S. is the new imperative.
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