Press · Yle Uutiset · 2025-02-04 · In Finnish
The Madman Tactic Behind Trump's Moves — Sami Miettinen interviewed by Yle
Published as “Trumpin toimien taustalla on klassinen hullun miehen neuvottelutaktiikka, sanoo suomalainen asiantuntija”
Hosted by: Roni Kuronen
Yle’s Roni Kuronen put a simple question to Sami Miettinen: what is actually going on when the President of the United States threatens major trading partners with substantial tariffs? Miettinen — a negotiation expert and former investment banker who has written three books on negotiation, one of them specifically about Trump’s methods — answers as a practitioner rather than a commentator. The behaviour is not new and it is not improvisation. It is the madman tactic, and Trump was using it on banks and property clients while developing hotels, long before he entered politics.
Why it works. The madman tactic depends on the counterparty taking an unpredictable threat seriously. Two things make Trump’s version credible: the exceptional formal power of the American presidency, and a demonstrated willingness to actually carry threats out. Once those two conditions hold, the threat does the work without ever needing to be executed in full.
Miettinen’s assessment of the results is deliberately unsentimental. Set the sentiment aside and look at it purely from the American side, he tells Yle, and Trump’s conduct is impressively tough — even admirably so. The concessions arrived quickly: Mexico and Canada bought temporary tariff relief with border security commitments, and Panama and Colombia gave ground as well.
The asymmetry is the point, and the problem. “These countries have no real possibility of negotiating on equal terms with the United States,” Miettinen says — which is unfortunate for the weaker party, and yet, as he puts it, negotiations do not award sympathy points to the side facing someone able to exercise hard power.
Why the United States can absorb it. His economic reading is that America takes tariff damage better than its counterparties because the domestic economy functions well on its own, and because existing tax rates are low enough that a tariff behaves something like a value-added tax rather than a crushing burden. The same measure landing on a smaller, more trade-dependent economy does not work that way.
The interview also covers Trump’s use of his positional strength and of anchoring — opening far beyond what he expects to obtain, so that the eventual settlement lands where he wanted it in the first place.
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