The Drunkard's Dance and the Broken Telescope
Why Trump's chaos is neither strategy nor madness, but something more dangerous than both
There is a style of combat in Chinese martial arts called zuì quán, the drunken style. The practitioner appears off-balance, unpredictable, on the verge of collapse. He sways, stumbles, seems to have lost all control over his own body. His opponent cannot anticipate a single movement, because there is no visible pattern from beginning to end. And at the very moment the opponent attacks, convinced he is facing a man who can barely stay on his feet, the drunkard strikes with devastating precision. Because everything that looked like chaos was, in fact, a perfectly controlled dance.
In recent weeks, alongside other people of good faith, free both of naivety and of a taste for conspiracy, I have kept asking myself the same question. Does Trump, perhaps, know better what he is doing? Is the chaos we find ourselves in deliberate, carefully planned? What if we are the ones deceived by appearances?
Why the hypothesis is tempting
There are several solid reasons why it may seem reasonable to believe that the current chaos in the Gulf is calculated. First, the Venezuela precedent. The operation to capture Maduro was swift, precise, well coordinated, carried out while everyone was looking elsewhere. Trump demonstrated, at least that one time, that he can act surgically under the cover of apparent disorder.
Second, the method of postponed deadlines. Every postponement of the ultimatum — from 48 hours to 5 days, from 5 days to 10, from 10 days to April 6 — is interpreted by analysts as weakness. But in negotiation, repeated delay combined with a standing threat creates a specific kind of nervous exhaustion, because the other side never knows whether you are bluffing. It is exactly the principle of the drunken fighter: the opponent cannot read the movement because there is no pattern. And Trump is known for this kind of negotiation — the real estate deals that made him rich relied to a large extent on precisely this tactic.
Third, the contradictions expressed publicly in recent days may be deliberate. Here is one example, offered to reporters yesterday aboard Air Force One: “The negotiations are going extremely well, but you never know with Iran, because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.” Setting aside the absurdity of the statement, what remains worth noting is its structure: Trump praising negotiations and announcing bombardment in the very same sentence. It could be a calculated message meant to convey that it does not matter what you agree to, because we decide what happens next. If it is not irrationality, it could be the intimidation of the adversary through unpredictability.
Finally, there is a historical precedent for this type of approach based on deliberately cultivating unpredictability. Richard Nixon called it the “madman theory” and wanted the Vietnamese and the Soviets to believe he was unstable enough to use nuclear weapons, and that it was therefore safer to negotiate with him than to test his madness. Trump may be practicing the same strategy, projecting irrationality in order to obtain concessions that a rational actor could never secure. None of these hypotheses is fantastical, so each deserves to be assessed on its merits.
Why it does not work
The drunkard’s dance requires three necessary conditions, and all three are absent.
The first condition is the need for a trained body. In zuì quán, the movements look chaotic, but the muscles execute the sequence with microscopic precision. The fighter’s reflexes are trained over years. Every apparently accidental sway is in fact calculated positioning. The decisive question is whether Trump has the institutional muscles to afford such a dance. The current cabinet is made up of people whom even supporters of the administration describe as extremely servile. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent, a special forces veteran personally chosen by Trump, resigned publicly after concluding that the information reaching the president bore no relation to reality. Director of National Intelligence Gabbard produced a report stating that the war’s objectives are not achievable, and then fell silent. President Trump receives two-minute briefings in the form of video clips of explosions. And his special envoys — a golf buddy and a son-in-law — are described by diplomatic sources on three continents as men devoid of any credibility. Even if Trump wanted to execute a precise move, with what would he execute it? The drunkard in zuì quán has reflexes. The current administration appears to have no reflexes — only reactions.
The second condition requires a hidden plan. Beneath the apparent chaos, there must be an objective, a destination, a point toward which all the staggering converges. What might that point be, beneath the story? The official objectives of the war have been abandoned one by one: regime change (abandoned), seizure of enriched uranium (abandoned), destruction of ballistic missiles (abandoned). The current objective is opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was perfectly open before the war began. It is as if you set the house on fire and then declared that your objective is to put out the blaze. And Trump’s previous moves consistently show the same pattern of chaos with no tangible result, followed by a declaration of victory and a pivot to the next subject. The tariffs of 2025 were supposed to produce “the best trade deal in history” and instead destabilized the world economy without producing any deal. The withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018 was supposed to lead to “a better deal,” and eight years later there is no deal — only a war in progress. The negotiations with North Korea, complete with that shocking “we fell in love,” ultimately produced nothing. If this is the drunkard’s dance, where are the precision strikes? Where is the moment when the staggering turns into victory?
The third condition, the decisive one, is that the drunkard’s dance presupposes an opponent who reacts. The technique works only against an opponent who is thrown off by unpredictability, who attacks convinced he faces a vulnerable man, and thereby exposes himself. Iran is not reacting to chaotic American moves. Iran is profiting from them. Every day of war increases Iran’s bargaining power. Oil profits have doubled. Sanctions were lifted by a United States acting in desperation. The Strait has been transformed from a free corridor into a selective taxation barrier operating in Chinese yuan. Iran not only does not seem impressed by the dance — it controls the music. A drunkard’s dance performed in front of a wall is not a dance. It is just a man smashing himself against the wall.
So what is it?
If it is not strategy and it is not madness, then what is it? The answer, I believe, is more serious than either.
Imagine a telescope. It works only if the lenses are aligned: light enters through the first, passes through the second, then the third, and forms a coherent image at the end of the tube. Now imagine that each lens works perfectly, but the tube itself has warped. Every lens sees clearly — no problem there — but the complete, coherent image no longer forms anywhere. And no one knows that the image is missing at the end of the tube, because from each person’s own floor, everything looks fine.
This is the world we are living in today. It is not a world run by an evil genius orchestrating chaos. Nor is it a world run by a madman destroying everything at random. It is a world in which each level of the system sees a fragment of reality, acts rationally according to what it sees, and cumulatively produces a catastrophe that no one perceives in its entirety.
In this whole story, Trump probably sees a real estate negotiation and acts according to the rules he learned in the New York of his youth. You reach an agreement, then demand more. The other side is already committed and cannot pull out, so it gives way. If it does not give way, you threaten, you delay, you bring in the lawyers, you drag things out until the other party is exhausted. In the end, you declare victory regardless of the outcome. It worked very well in New York, because that is how things worked there. In consequence, Trump is rational on his floor.
Netanyahu sees, first and foremost, personal survival. He has been on trial since 2020 for fraud, breach of trust, and bribery in three separate cases — the first head of government in Israeli history to stand criminal trial while in office. He faces up to ten years in prison. In November 2025, he requested a presidential pardon without admitting any guilt, but the Pardons Department of the Ministry of Justice rejected the request on March 11, 2026, calling it “extremely problematic.” A former Supreme Court justice said days ago that the president of Israel would risk violating the law by granting such a pardon. In other words, if Netanyahu loses power, he goes to prison. But he is the only one among the players who does not panic. If he were panicking, he would not be sending troops into southern Lebanon — where they are taking heavy losses — simultaneously with the war in Iran. This suggests that Netanyahu does not want to end the war; he wants to prolong it. So he too is rational on his floor.
The United States Congress has the midterm elections before its eyes and sees only that, and accordingly has voted eight times since last June that the war is not its business. It seems correct and rational on its floor. The markets see only higher or lower yields and Brent prices calculated strictly by the book, and they react according to preset algorithms. They are rational on their landing and do their job as markets. The generals see historical precedents such as Gallipoli and regard the islands proposed for conquest as traps, and they sound the alarm. They too are rational on their armored floor. The Iranians see forty-seven years of aggression and a civilization attacked while it was negotiating, and they wait. They seem very rational on their floor. A specialist in the effects of nuclear weapons sees firestorms and more than 300,000 dead on the first day. He too is rational on his floor. A Filipino sailor lying on one of the 3,000 ships stranded in ports sees only water. All are right. Each, on his own floor, is trying to adapt and come to terms with the situation. And no one sees the whole picture.
Why information no longer travels vertically
In a healthy system, information travels between floors through corrective mechanisms. The press asks questions, Congress checks, advisers disagree, the military reports, markets impose discipline. Each mechanism is a joint in the telescope that keeps the lenses aligned.
What has happened, imperceptibly, over the past years is that each joint has given way. The damage did not occur simultaneously, nor through conspiracy. One by one, for different reasons, all of present-day humanity’s organs have failed. The press split into two worlds that no longer communicate with each other. Congress discovered that it is electorally safer not to know than to find out and be held accountable. Advisers who contradict the one they advise are fired or leave on their own, and those who remain quickly learn that professional survival depends on alignment with the narrative, not with the facts. The military reports, but the reports stop at the door of an office into which no one enters anymore bearing bad news. And the markets — the one mechanism that ought to sanction things automatically, procedurally — have been transformed from an instrument of correction into an instrument of profit, with trades worth more than a billion dollars placed minutes before critical presidential announcements, situations documented by the BBC and the Financial Times yet left uninvestigated by anyone.
The result is not a conspiracy. It is the progressive degradation of all the joints, producing a system in which all the lenses function and none can see what the others see.
Ghosts in the hallway
If no one inside the American telescope can still see the whole image, then who outside it can?
Russia stands in the hallway, between floors, with access to several lenses at once. Trump called Putin three weeks ago, asking for help. Putin listened to Witkoff from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., five hours of proposals about Ukraine and, probably, about Iran. Russia has two million citizens in Israel but also direct contacts with Tehran. And it appears to have tempered its offensive in Ukraine — not out of generosity, but because its adversary is disarming itself. Every day of Russian inaction is a day in which the United States consumes its munitions, loses allies, and shifts military resources from the Pacific to the Gulf. Russia has a view across more floors than anyone, and for that very reason it does not intervene, because every day of American chaos benefits it on several dimensions at once. But the hallway has an end too, and that end is called nuclear escalation. If the nuclear scenario materializes, Russia will no longer be a spectator but part of the crisis, whether it wants to be or not.
China is not looking through the existing telescope; it is building a new one. With the yuan as a petroleum currency, with security partnerships with Gulf states drifting away from America, and with the China–Russia–Iran land route as a supply chain invulnerable to maritime blockades. Who was thinking about such a thing last year? In the short term, China gains on nearly every dimension without lifting a finger. But an economist who looks more closely sees something else, given that 40 percent of China’s energy comes from the Gulf states. The entire Chinese economic model — based on cheap energy coming in and manufactured products, good or less good but affordable for every wallet, going out — is destroyed. The transition to domestic consumption is not working; the Chinese save instead of spending. And the bet on AI has a fatal vulnerability: artificial intelligence consumes enormous amounts of energy — precisely what is becoming rare and expensive. China is building a new house while the old one is burning, and the building materials are still inside the burning house.
India has remained trapped between floors, in the midst of climbing. Sixty percent of its oil comes from the Gulf. It looked like the next China to global investors, a manufacturing alternative with a growing market. And at the exact moment it was ready to climb higher, the energy feeding that climb disappeared. India has reserves for a few days more. Pakistan, its neighbor and nuclear rival, for two or three. If Pakistan collapses, India inherits a humanitarian and security crisis on its border, with an unstable nuclear state next door.
So the logical conclusion is rather unpleasant. The only actors who could realign the lenses from outside — Xi, Putin, and Modi — are precisely those who each have excellent reasons not to do so. At least not yet. Which means the telescope will not be repaired from the outside. Either it is repaired from within, or it is not repaired at all. Until then, the distorted image becomes the reality in which we all live — not because someone wanted it so, but because no one stopped it. Then again, why would others repair a telescope whose owner insists he can see perfectly?
Why the broken telescope is more dangerous than the drunkard and the madman
If it were strategy — if Trump were truly dancing the drunkard’s dance — then somewhere there would be a plan, a destination, and at the end a precise blow. We might judge the plan, but at least we would know one existed. Strategy, by its nature, self-corrects, because if it does not work, the strategist adjusts his movements.
If it were merely madness, it would be unpredictable but brief. Even in chess, the bishops are sacrificed first. In recent days, various voices have remembered that there is a constitutional amendment, the Twenty-Fifth, created precisely for situations of this kind. When the madman falls, someone picks him up or replaces him.
But a telescoped system is neither controlled nor uncontrolled. It is structurally incapable of self-correction. It does not repair itself, because no part of the system can see that it is broken. Each floor functions “normally” according to its own logic. Trump sincerely believes he is negotiating, even though the negotiating partners vehemently deny it. The secretary of state sincerely believes that “in weeks, not months” the objectives will be reached, though no one can any longer remember what those objectives were. The secretary of defense, who seems to have stepped out of a movie, sincerely believes that bombing is the most efficient form of negotiation. Congress sincerely believes the war is not its business. No one feels the need to repair anything because, from his own floor, everything seems fine.
That is probably how it felt at the World Trade Center too, on the lower floors, after the plane hit.
And us?
We are not spectators. We would like to be.
We are not facing a genius of chaos, nor a madman. We are facing a system that has lost its ability to transform partial realities into a coherent image, perceived by all. This is the form of danger no one anticipates, because it resembles nothing we have seen before. Strategy can fail and correct itself. Madness can be isolated. But a system blinded by its own lenses moves forward convinced it can see. The machine keeps moving because all its parts, lubricated and cold, are still in motion. The engine purrs, the headlights shine, the dashboard reads normal, the driver cracks jokes with aplomb, the passengers kibitz and discuss procedures. Only no one can see the abyss that has suddenly opened ahead.