I'm catching on Thomas Schelling. I'm supposed to know Schelling well already, because his Strategy of Conflict (1960) is one of the seminal texts on bargaining and the application of power and influence; but in practice, I don't know him as well as I should and today I'm fixing that.
The thing about Schelling is that he's not as clever as he thinks he is.
The basic message of Strategy of Conflict is that weakness can be useful. Being constrained in various ways can strengthen one's position. An abstract example: let's say I want to sell a house and you want to buy one. This is an abstract example, so I'm the only seller in town and you're the only buyer; we don't have to consider competition. We both know that the other will probably take a range of possible prices, say from roughly $94,000 to roughly $108,000. If we negotiate, there's a good chance we'll settle on a price somewhere in the middle - maybe at $100,000 because it's a nice round number. But let's say you're leaving on a trip to Namibia tomorrow, where you won't be accessible, even by cell or email, for the next year. Just before you leave, you look at my house, decide you'd like to buy it, and send me an email that says you're willing to buy the house at $95,000. If I want to take your offer, I can settle with your lawyer, who can sign for you, but who's not empowered to negotiate price on your behalf. I'll take the offer, because it's in my range of acceptable offers, and I know it's a choice between taking the offer or not selling the house for (at best) a year. Your bargaining position improved because you lost the ability to communicate, and hence to be bargained with.
Schelling LOVES this kind of stuff, and that's pretty much what the book is about. In fact, Schelling defines strategy as follows: "A strategic move is one that influences the other person's choice, in a manner favorable to one's self, by affecting the other person's expectations on how one's self will behave. One constrains the partner's choice by constraining one's own behavior." (160)
But how to apply this to the real world? Consider the types of examples Schelling comes up with when he discusses the kind of behavior his theoretical findings might lead us to engage in in real problems (bear in mind it was written during the Cold War):
1) We might agree to an exchange of kindergarteners with Russia; all US 5-year-olds would spend their 5th year in Russia, while all Russian 5-year-olds spend their 5th year in the US. Thus, both countries constrain themselves; neither can launch a nuclear attack without killing it's own 5-year-olds.
2) We might agree with the Russians to remove, in parallel, any defensive weaponry - basically the same logic as the child exchange, except that the whole population of each country becomes a hostage.
3) "There was a time, shortly after the first atomic bomb was exploded, when there was some journalistic speculation about whether the earth's atmosphere had a limited tolerance to nuclear fission; the idea was bruited about that a mighty chain reaction might destroy the earth's atmosphere when some critical number of bombs had already been exploded. Some proposed that, if this were true and if we could calculate with accuracy that critical level of tolerance, we might neutralize atomic weapons for all time by a deliberate program of openly and dramatically exploding n - 1 bombs." (138) Hence constraining our options - removing the middle options between "no nuclear explosions" and "total destruction".
4) "When the outcome depends on coordination, the timely destruction of communication may be a winning tactic. When a man and his wife are arguing by telephone over where to meet for dinner, the argument is one by the wife if she simply announces where she is going and hangs up."
I mean, I ask you! Does a single one of these strike you as a good idea? Of course not. There are certainly specific situations in which a specific weakness is useful - but there are, on average, more situations where not having the weakness is more useful. Unless we can turn the weakness off and on at will, we're likely to weigh the probabilities and decide that on average, we're better off not having the weakness. And if we can turn it off and on at will, it's not really a weakness - and our bargaining partner is likely to realize this in fairly short order, with unpleasant consequences. The wife may get her husband to show up at the restaurant she wants by using that tactic once - but the consequences aren't likely to be pleasant.
Thus, Schelling's book in the real world is, at best, a handbook of how you might turn existing weaknesses you can't escape to advantage. North Korea may in practice derive some advantage from appearing crazy (a weakness that allows it to escape many forms of bargaining and succeed with unilateral moves it otherwise might not be able to get away with). But it doesn't act crazy because it was a powerful state that decided that was the best strategic option overall. It acts crazy either because a) it is crazy, or b) because it is a weak state that can't get what it wants any other way than by exploiting one of its apparent weaknesses. (Probably a bit of both.)
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