Senator J.D. Vance was right to praise what he considered former President Donald Trump's greatest political success: he did not wage war during his tenure.

This could be an achievement, especially since recent presidents who preceded Trump could not achieve it.

That's what Trump's former special aide Clive Sims argues in a National Interest article titled "The Trump Doctrine: Achieving Peace through Excessive Use of Force."

Sims says Trump's approach goes without saying one thing to America's enemies: he is likely to resort to overwhelming and shocking violence if he feels they have insulted or offended the United States.

That unrestrained brutality does not fit the euphemism of the foreign policy elite, such as "targeted killing" and "kinetic military action," but regardless of the names of those military actions, Trump's doctrine has proven effective in deterring America's fiercest enemies, Sims said.

Soleimani and Trump's Madness

The former US official, who served as deputy director of US national intelligence for strategy and communications during 2020-2021, gave an example of Trump's doctrine of using excessive force to deter the killing of the US military, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

When Trump's military advisers proposed a list of options for dealing with Soleimani — "with American blood on his hands," who was planning more attacks against U.S. interests, Trump chose the most aggressive option.


"In the middle of the night, while Soleimani was being transported from an Iraqi airport, a US drone fired a Hellfire missile at him, which tore him to pieces, along with several elite members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who were accompanying him," Sims said.

The move was so provocative that Joe Biden warned it could put the Middle East on the brink of a "major conflict," but that didn't happen.

After the strike, Trump escalated his rhetoric, warning the Iranians that the United States would target 52 Iranian sites, with the number of American hostages previously held by Iran, explaining that some of these sites are of great importance to Iran and Iranian culture.

Trump also warned the Iranians that they would be "badly and very quickly" hurt if they hurt Americans in response to Soleimani's killing.

Sims commented on those warnings: "In other words, you can't guess what (Trump) might do. The only thing the Iranians — and other adversaries of America — can be sure of is that if they violate Trump's red lines, he won't bother to take strenuous political steps to decide how to respond to them.

Trump's former special aide said Iranian attacks had escalated dramatically since Joe Biden took office, most recently an Iranian drone attack in Syria last week that killed an American and wounded six others.


Where did the "madman theory" come from?

Sims says Trump has been criticized for threatening Iranian cultural sites — even by his cabinet officials — for his lack of restraint and willingness to use excessive force, but Sims sees Trump's approach as rooted in U.S. foreign policy traditions.

Walter Russell Mead, a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College, argued in his paper on "the Jackson tradition in American foreign policy" — meaning the era of the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson.

"Those who prefer to believe that the current U.S. hegemony over the world occurred through an impeccable process turn a blind eye to the many painful moments of U.S. rise," Mead argues in his paper.

U.S. strikes at the end of World War II killed nearly a million Japanese civilians, a staggering number more than double the total number of people killed in combat by the United States in all of its foreign wars combined.

Mead also notes that U.S. forces have killed about a million civilians in North Korea, that is, 30 civilians for every U.S. soldier killed in battle.

In 1968, former U.S. President Richard Nixon told his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, that he intended to use what he called the "madman theory" to convince the North Vietnamese that he "might do anything to stop the (Vietnam) war."

Sims commented that Nixon, as Vice President Dwight D. Eisenhower, saw how he managed to contain the communist tide and convince China to end the war on the Korean Peninsula through the terrifying threat of nuclear weapons in war.

The former U.S. official concludes that the "madman theory" may have been the most prominent way for Trump to keep Americans safe without resorting to war.