Asked last month whether he planned to join Israel in attacking Iran, US President Donald Trump said:
"I might. Or maybe I won't. No one knows what I'll do."
He allowed the world to believe that he had agreed to a two-week break to allow Iran to resume negotiations.
And then he bombed them anyway.
A pattern began to emerge: the most predictable thing about Trump is his unpredictability.
He changes his mind. He is contradictory. He is inconsistent.
"Trump has put together an extremely centralized decision-making operation, perhaps the most centralized, at least in the area of foreign policy, since Richard Nixon," says Peter Trubowitz, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.
"And that makes political decisions increasingly dependent on Trump's personality, his preferences, his temperament."
Trump is using this for political purposes; he has made his own unpredictability a key strategic and political advantage.
He elevated unpredictability to the status of doctrine.
And now, that character trait he brought to the White House drives its foreign and security policy.
And that began to reshape the entire world.
Political scientists call this the Madman Theory, in which a world leader wants to convince his enemies that he is inherently capable of anything, in order to force concessions from them.
If used successfully, it can be a form of coercion, and Trump believes it pays off many times over, putting America's allies in the position he wants them to be.
But is this an approach that can also work against the enemy?
And could its flaw be that, rather than being a magic trick designed to fool opponents, it is actually based on well-established and clearly documented character traits, with the consequence that its behavior becomes increasingly predictable over time?
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Attacks, insults and hugs
Trump began his second presidential term by embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin and attacking American allies.
He insulted Canada by saying it should become The 51st American state.
He said he was prepared to consider using military force to annex Greenland, an autonomous territories of American ally Denmark.
And he also said that America should regain ownership and control of the Panama Canal.
Article 5 of the NATO Charter obliges each member country to come to the aid of all others in their defense.
Trump has questioned America's commitment to doing so.
"I think Article 5 is on the cards," said Ben Wallace, a former British defense secretary.
Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve said: "For now, the transatlantic alliance has done its job."
A series of leaked text messages have revealed a culture of contempt for European allies in the Trump White House.
"I fully share your disdain for European scrappers," US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his colleagues, adding:
"POOR."
Earlier this year in Munich, Trump's Vice President J.D. Vance declared that the US would no longer be the guarantor of European security.
It seemed to turn things upside down. 80 years of transatlantic solidarity.
"What Trump has managed to do is cast serious doubt on the credibility of America's international obligations," says Professor Trubowitz.
"Whatever tacit agreements those countries in Europe may have had with the United States, on security, on economic and other issues, they are now subject to new negotiations at a split second."
"My impression is that most people in Trump's orbit think that unpredictability is a good thing, because it allows Donald Trump to exert American influence for maximum gain..."
"It's something he learned from negotiating in the real estate world."
Trump's approach has paid off in many ways.
Just four months ago, Sir Keir Starmer told the House of Commons that the UK would increase its defence and security budget from 2,3% of GDP to 2,5%.
Last month, at the NATO summit, this increased to as much as 5 percent, a huge increase, which is now being followed by all other member states of the Alliance.
The predictability of unpredictability
Trump is not the first American president to use the Doctrine of Impunity.
When US President Richard Nixon tried to end the Vietnam War in 1968, he found the North Vietnamese enemy to be implacable.
"At one point, Nixon told National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, 'You need to tell the North Korean negotiators that Nixon is crazy and you don't know what he's going to do, so they better agree to a deal before things get really crazy,'" says Michael Dash, a professor of international relations at the University of Notre Dame.
"That's your theory about a madman."
Julie Norman, professor of politics at University College London, agrees that there is now a Doctrine of Unpredictability.
"It's very difficult to know what's coming from day to day," she claims.
"And that's always been Trump's approach."
Trump has successfully used his own reputation for instability to change transatlantic defense relations.
And, apparently, to keep Trump on their side, some European leaders have started to flatter and cajole him.
Last month's NATO summit in The Hague was a demonstration of submissive adulation.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte previously sent President Trump (aka "Dear Donald") a text message, which Trump released to the public.
"Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary," he wrote.
Regarding the upcoming announcement that all NATO members had agreed to increase their defense budget to 5 percent of GDP, he added:
"You will accomplish something that NO president has been able to do in decades."
Anthony Scaramucci, who previously served as Trump's communications director during his first term, said: "Mr. Rutte, he's trying to humiliate you, sir. He's literally sitting on Air Force One laughing at you."
And that could prove to be a weakness at the core of Trump's Unpredictability Doctrine: their actions could be based on the idea that Trump craves adulation.
Or that he wants short-term victories, which he likes more than long and complicated processes.
If this is indeed the case and their assumptions are correct, then this limits Trump's ability to perform magic tricks to fool his enemies - instead, he has established and clearly documented character traits that they have all now become aware of.
Watch video: NATO chief calls President Trump 'daddy'
Enemies immune to charms and threats
And then there's the question of whether the Doctrine of Unpredictability or the Madman Theory can work on enemies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an ally of Trump and Vance read the alphabet in the Oval Office, he later agreed to cede lucrative rights to exploit Ukraine's mineral resources to America.
Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, seems to remain immune to both Trump's charm and threats.
On Thursday, after a phone call, Trump said he was "disappointed" that Putin was not ready to end the war against Ukraine.
But what about Iran?
Trump has promised his supporters that he will end America's involvement in "eternal wars" in the Middle East.
His decision to strike Iran's nuclear facilities was perhaps the most unpredictable political choice of his second term so far.
The question is whether it will have the desired effect.
Former British Foreign Secretary William Hague argued that it would achieve exactly the opposite: it would be more likely to induce Iran to try to acquire nuclear weapons than to give them up.
Professor Deš agrees with that.
"I think it's now very likely that Iran will make a decision to get nuclear weapons," he says.
"And so I wouldn't be surprised if they calmed down now and did everything they could to complete the full cycle and conduct a nuclear test."
"I think the lesson of Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Gaddafi has not been lost on other dictators facing the US and potential regime change...
"Therefore, the Iranians will feel a desperate need for a superior deterrent and will look to Saddam and Gaddafi as negative examples and North Korea's Kim Jong Un as a positive example."
One likely scenario is the consolidation of the Islamic Republic, according to Mohsen Milani, a professor of political science at the University of South Florida and author of The Rise of Iran and the Rivalry with the United States in the Middle East.
"When Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980, his goal was the fall of the Islamic Republic," he says.
"The exact opposite happened."
"It was both an Israeli and an American calculation... If we get rid of the top people, Iran will quickly surrender or the whole system will collapse."
Loss of confidence in negotiations?
Looking ahead, unpredictability may not work on enemies, but it is also unclear whether the recent changes it has brought about among allies can be sustained.
Although possible, this process is largely built on impulse.
And there could be concerns that the US will be seen as an unreliable negotiator.
"People will not want to do business with America if they do not trust America in negotiations, if they are not sure that America will stand by them on defense and security issues," Professor Norman argues.
"And that's why I think the isolation that many in the MAGA world desire will backfire on them."
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was the first to say that Europe must now become operationally independent of America.
"The importance of the Chancellor's comment is that it is an acknowledgement that America's strategic priorities are changing," says Professor Trubowitz.
"They're not just going to go back to the state they were in before Trump took office."
"So, yes, Europe will indeed have to become operationally independent."
This will require European countries to develop a much larger European defense industry, to acquire equipment and acquire capabilities that only the US currently has, argues Professor Dash.
For example, the Europeans have some sophisticated global intelligence capabilities, he says, but much of it is provided by America.
"Europe, if it were to become independent, would also have to increase its ability to produce weapons independently," he adds.
"Manpower could also be a problem. Western Europe would have to look to Poland to see how much manpower it needs."
And it will take years to achieve all of that.
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So, were Europeans sufficiently intimidated by Trump's unpredictability to make the most dramatic change to the Western world's security architecture since the end of the Cold War?
"That did contribute," says Professor Trubovic.
"But more importantly, Trump has released something into the world... Politics in the United States has changed. Priorities have changed. For the MAGA coalition, China is a bigger problem than Russia. That may not be true for the Europeans."
And according to Professor Milani, Trump is trying to consolidate American power in the world order.
"It is highly unlikely that he will change the order established after World War II. He wants to consolidate America's position in that order because China threatens America's position in it."
But all this means that the defense and security imperatives facing America and Europe are diverging.
European allies may be pleased that, using flattery and real policy changes, they have managed to keep Trump largely on their side; he did, after all, reaffirm his commitment to Article 5 at the most recent NATO summit.
But unpredictability means that this cannot be guaranteed – and they seemed to accept that they could no longer complacently rely on the US honouring its historic commitment to their defence.
And, in that sense, even if the Unpredictability Doctrine stems from a mix of conscious choice and Trump's very real character traits, it still works, at least on some.
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