People keep reaching for Cold War analogies to make sense of Donald Trump. Khrushchev. Nixon. Reagan, if they are feeling charitable. It is an understandable reflex, but it is wrong. Those comparisons do not explain Trump. They flatter him.
The mistake is assuming he belongs in the same category as leaders who practised brinkmanship. Brinkmanship implies an understanding of the edge. It assumes awareness of escalation, consequence, and restraint. Nikita Khrushchev was reckless, theatrical, and volatile, but he operated inside a system that understood limits. That did not make him benign. It made him legible. When the Cuban Missile Crisis reached the brink, he stepped back, not out of virtue, but because he understood that some lines, once crossed, end the game itself.
That instinct does not exist in Donald Trump, or in the executive culture he has assembled around him. This is not a moral argument - it's a structural one.
What we are watching now resembles less a coherent foreign policy than a dysfunctional action film. Lots of noise, rapid cuts, dramatic set pieces, and an unspoken assumption that nothing truly bad will happen because it hasn’t yet. Each escalation rolls straight into the next scene. The absence of consequences is treated as proof of brilliance rather than dumb luck.
It is John Wick, but badly. All the violence, none of the rules. In a John Wick film, the absurdity works because the world has internal logic. There is a code. Actions have consequences. Escalation is bounded, even when it is extravagant. Here, there is no code, only impulse. No continuity, only spectacle. No understanding that what you do in one scene constrains what is possible in the next.
The toddler analogy is not an insult; it is descriptive. Toddlers act on immediacy, have no sense of deferred consequence, and mistake survival for success. That is manageable when the object is a toy. It is dangerous when the object is international law, maritime order, or the use of force.
Trump does not rattle cages to test their strength. He kicks them to hear the noise. Declaring blockades. Seizing heads of state. Treating sanctions as licences for force. These are not unprecedented acts of power. What is unprecedented is the absence of consolidation or explanation afterwards. There is no strategic arc, only the next stunt.
Cold War leaders feared escalation because they understood it. Trump barely recognises escalation as a concept. Where earlier leaders worried about miscalculation, Trump embodies it. He mistakes the absence of immediate retaliation for deterrence, and the fact that the film has not yet ended for proof that it cannot end badly.
In a functioning system, impulsive leaders are constrained by institutions, norms, and advisers empowered to say no. In today’s America, those buffers have been hollowed out, mocked, or removed. What remains is executive power exercised with minimal friction, where restraint is treated as weakness and continuity as betrayal.
And then there are the people watching. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are not toddlers. They are patient, calculating, and fully aware of how systems break. They already violate norms when it suits them, but they do so incrementally, calibrating reaction and preserving deniability. They understand that rules matter most when others still believe in them.
Trump is useful to them not because he is strong, but because he is careless. Every time international law is treated as optional, enforcement as performative, and precedent as disposable, the ability of the United States to argue restraint elsewhere weakens. This is not hypocrisy being exposed. It is restraint being devalued.
This is the asymmetric danger. Trump smashes crockery for effect. Putin and Xi take notes. One thinks he is the star of the film. The others are planning what happens after the credits roll.
That is why the Khrushchev analogy fails. It grants Trump coherence he has not earned. It implies calculation, intent, and a learning curve. Trump does not learn. He moves on. The spectacle is the point, not the outcome.
Khrushchev was dangerous because he knew how fragile the system was. Trump is dangerous because he doesn’t know why the system exists.
And this is not cinema. There is no editor, no safety glass, and no guarantee the protagonist survives the final act.
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