How Trump Differs From Predecessors In The Handling Of Foreign Crises

A chaotic and unpredictable approach for communicating about and managing crisis situations cam be as dangerous and unsettling in the corporate world as on the international stage. Business executives who have any doubts how a leader’s personality and management style can affect a company’s response to a crisis should compare President Donald Trump’s management of foreign affairs and international crises in his second term against those of many of his predecessors.

Trump’s approach to international affairs “is significantly more chaotic than prior administrations. [He] seems to be governed more by emotions, particularly anger and frustration, than clear actionable information from the intelligence services,” Joseph W. Roberts, Professor and Chair of Politics and International Relations at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, told me in an email interview. Trump “is quick to post on Truth Social before the facts are clear and without regard to the potential consequences for the U.S. and her allies,” he pointed out.

Generating Concerns And Headlines

Trump’s penchant for announcing decisions or issuing warnings and ultimatums on social media has generated international headlines and concerns. There are few if any boards of directors that would tolerate a CEO who relied on social media the way he does to address or try to resolve a crisis.

As the tensions between Israel and Iran increased, and after the surprise U.S. attacks on Iran last week, Trump “has been carrying out the delicate art of diplomacy through blunt social media posts, full of the bravado—and capital letters—that characterize much of his communications….The president’s social media diplomacy, often carried out in his signature all-caps style, has garnered renewed attention, remarkable for its break from what presidents traditionally do,” NBC News reported.

A Dramatic Departure From Obama And Biden

Trump’s style of international crisis management is a dramatic departure from that of former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “For one thing, Obama and Biden favor a leadership style that relies on broad consultation and pretty much all-hands-on-deck consensus-building within both their immediate staff and the larger allied community,” Mike Fahey, CEO and founder of Fahey Communications, a national PR firm specializing in political campaigns, observed in an email interview with me.

Compared to other presidents, Trump has been more of a maverick and solo act. “His circle of advisors is much smaller; his consultation, much less. And in using his obviously very personal and instinct-driven (and often quite combustible) leadership style, Trump tends to favor what might be called the ‘Crisis on Demand’ approach to decision-making,” Fahey noted.

A Shift In Strategy

His direct approach for dealing with a crisis can manifest itself in in surprising and unexpected actions to address a crisis. “The key shift in strategy from Trump’s predecessors has obviously been to take direct action against Iranian nuclear sites. Although the Bush, Obama, and Biden Administrations, all worked to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, they also avoided military action to achieve that goal,” Jim Ronan, an adjunct professor of political science at Villanova University, told me in an email interview.

Academics need to go back to the 1960s and 1970s to find another president who compares with Trump’s foreign crisis management style. “Whether intentional or not, Trump seems to be utilizing the Madman Theory employed by [President]

Richard Nixon during Vietnam. Nixon sought to increase his leverage with both the North Vietnamese and Soviet Union by urging staffers to communicate to other nations that Nixon was growing irrational and may seek to utilize nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The hope was that both North Vietnam and the Soviets would be motivated by fear to work with Nixon to forestall a wider war,” Ronan concluded.

Foreign leaders who must deal with the apparent zig-zag nature and comparatively hectic pace of Trump’s orders, threats and social media posts, find that they “can send him pinging from the priority of one moment to another. He describes himself as ‘flexible’ in negotiations, such as those in which he threatened big tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China only to back down during talks,” according to the Associated Press.

Those who depend on freewheeling and shoot-from-the-hip strategies and tactics to address a crisis are ignoring or disregarding fundamental crisis management best practices that favor a calm, deliberate, and thoughtful approach.