The media loves a predictable narrative. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to sell. For four years, the prevailing headline regarding Donald Trump’s foreign policy was some variation of "The Adults in the Room vs. the Madman." The consensus was simple: a chaotic leader follows his "gut," while a phalanx of weary, ivy-league-educated national security advisers desperately tries to prevent global collapse.
This narrative is not just lazy. It’s wrong. It fundamentally misunderstands the mechanics of power and the utility of unpredictability in high-stakes negotiation.
What the "gray suits" call chaos, a seasoned negotiator calls leverage. I’ve seen boards of directors paralyzed by the same "process-driven" thinking that defines the D.C. establishment. They mistake motion for progress and consensus for strategy. In reality, the "gut" isn't a mystical internal compass; it is a high-speed heuristic processor developed through decades of zero-sum real estate warfare.
The Institutional Failure of "The Process"
The national security establishment—often called "The Blob"—operates on the assumption that stability is the ultimate good. They believe that if you follow the "Interagency Process" long enough, a magical, correct answer will emerge. This is the same logic that kept the U.S. in Afghanistan for twenty years with no exit strategy.
When Trump bypassed the traditional briefing cycle, he wasn't just being impatient. He was short-circuiting a system designed to produce milquetoast, risk-averse options. The traditional process filters out bold moves. It favors the status quo because the status quo is what everyone in the room can agree on.
The "competitor" take suggests that advisers were "keeping up" with a runaway train. In truth, they were trying to put the brakes on a vehicle that was finally moving. Consider the Abraham Accords. Every "expert" in the State Department for thirty years insisted that no Arab nation would normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinian issue was solved. It was an article of faith. Trump ignored the experts, ignored the process, and followed a "gut" instinct that the regional players were tired of the old stalemate. He was right. The experts were wrong.
Game Theory and the Madman Strategy
There is a concept in game theory popularized by Thomas Schelling called the "rationality of irrationality." If your opponent thinks you are a rigid, predictable actor who follows a set of established rules, they can calculate exactly how much they can push you before you break. They can price in your response.
When a leader is perceived as "unpredictable" or "volatile," the cost of provocation for an adversary skyrockets. If Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping doesn't know exactly where the red line is—because the red line seems to move based on the President's mood—they have to be significantly more cautious.
The national security advisers who complained about "keeping up" were actually complaining about the loss of their own ability to signal predictability to their foreign counterparts. They wanted to tell their peers in London, Paris, and Beijing, "Don't worry, we have him under control." When they couldn't say that, their personal social capital in the diplomatic world dropped. That is why they leaked. That is why they wrote "anonymous" op-eds. It wasn't about national security; it was about professional embarrassment.
The High Cost of the "Gut"
Let’s be honest about the downsides. Operating on intuition and shattering protocol isn't a free lunch. It creates massive internal friction. I have managed teams where the CEO decides to pivot on a Friday afternoon based on a single phone call. It’s exhausting. It leads to high turnover and a "hunker down" mentality among the rank and file.
But in the context of global hegemony, "exhausting" the bureaucracy is often a prerequisite for change.
The friction described in mainstream reporting isn't a bug; it’s a feature of a disruptive leadership style. When Trump questioned the value of NATO or threatened to pull troops out of South Korea, the establishment screamed. But look at the result: NATO members actually started hitting their spending targets for the first time in decades. The "gut" realized that being a "reliable partner" is just another way of saying "the guy who always pays the bill."
Stop Asking if he’s "Fit" and Start Asking if he’s Effective
People also ask: "Can a President effectively lead without a traditional National Security Council structure?"
The answer is a brutal "yes," provided the goal is disruption rather than maintenance. If you want to maintain a declining empire, follow the manual. If you want to shake the table and force new terms, you burn the manual.
The obsession with whether a leader is "prepared" for a briefing is a distraction. I’ve seen executives who read every page of a 200-page deck and still made catastrophic decisions because they lacked the "gut" to see that the underlying assumptions of the deck were flawed. Expertise is often just a sophisticated way of justifying the past.
The Illusion of the "Adults"
We need to dismantle the "Adults in the Room" trope once and for all. This framing suggests that the generals and bureaucrats possess a monopoly on wisdom, while the political leader is a petulant child.
This is a dangerous inversion of civilian control of the military. In a constitutional republic, the "gut" of the elected leader is the only thing that has a mandate. The advisers are there to implement, not to "manage" the Principal. When the bureaucracy decides its job is to act as a "check" on the policy directions of the Commander in Chief, we no longer have a democracy; we have a technocracy.
The advisers weren't "trying to keep up." They were trying to subvert. They were attempting to maintain a world order that they built and which justifies their continued employment.
How to Navigate a Volatile Principal
If you find yourself advising a leader who operates on intuition, the worst thing you can do is try to "process" them into submission. You will fail, and you will be fired.
The contrarian approach to advising a "gut" leader involves:
- Velocity over Volume: Don’t give them a 50-page memo. Give them three bullet points and a map.
- Steel-manning the Intuition: Instead of telling them why their idea is "crazy," figure out what problem their "gut" is trying to solve. Often, the intuition is sensing a real rot that the formal data hasn't captured yet.
- Accepting Asymmetry: You are the tool, not the hand. Your job is to provide the tactical architecture for the strategic impulse.
The competitor article portrays a struggle for the soul of American foreign policy. It’s actually a struggle for the steering wheel. The establishment thinks the car should drive itself on cruise control. Trump thinks he should be able to off-road if he sees a shortcut.
The shortcut might lead to a cliff, but the highway is definitely heading toward a dead end.
Stop looking for "stability" in a world that is fundamentally shifting. The era of the predictable, process-heavy statesman is over. It died the moment the world became too fast for the Interagency Process to handle.
If you're still waiting for the "adults" to take back the room, you’re missing the fact that the room has been remodeled, and the old furniture has been burned.
Adapt or get out of the way.
Stop trying to "manage" the volatility. Start using it as a weapon.
