Generous Tit-for-Tat

Jeffrey Sachs says the strategy of generous tit-for-tat is the key to avoiding disastrous confrontation:

Threats of War, Chances for Peace, by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Scientific American: Although climate change, deforestation and depletion of groundwater are all serious threats to sustainable development, the biggest threat to future well-being remains the specter of war. The world was at the brink of a nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and could quickly find itself there again in South Asia, the Middle East, the Korean peninsula or some other hot spot. The Cuban crisis was transformed, through President John F. Kennedy’s political vision and dexterity, into the beginning of arms control in the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That historic breakthrough offers timely lessons for today.

The events of late 1962 through mid-1963 are well known. . . . . After coming within hours of war, the U.S. and the Soviet Union went on a few months later to sign a test ban agreement.

How does one go from the brink of war to a breakthrough peace treaty in under a year? Kennedy’s methodological starting point was to avoid ... declaring the adversary to be evil. At every step, Kennedy assumed that Soviet counterparts were rational, though not necessarily beyond mistakes in their chosen actions. He assumed that the Soviet Union would seek tactical advantages ... but would pull back from self-annihilation.

Today’s game theorists would describe Kennedy’s strategy as “generous tit-for-tat” (GTFT). A player adopts a position of cooperation as long as the other side does, too. If the second player begins to cheat, the first player stops cooperating as well, to show the cheater that there are adverse consequences... The door remains forgivingly open to future cooperation, however, if the cheater reverts... And generously, the first player might initiate renewed cooperation, with a view to enticing the former cheater to reciprocate. GTFT is so successful and robust that many evolutionary biologists suppose that the basic strategy is somewhat hardwired in human attitudes....

Kennedy ... stressed the need to avoid humiliating one’s adversary. “And above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Kennedy’s sentiments were radical at the time, but he believed that the potential for cooperation was grounded in our common humanity. “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” As we face today’s challenges and threats, we will do well to grasp the insight that our counterparts and adversaries, like us, are searching for survival and for a future for their children. As occurred 45 years ago, that critical insight might prove to be the key to keeping us alive and secure.

Comments

[bakho]

Does this strategy operate within the current administration? Mostly we get "kick the dog".

says...

To assume a strategy is to assume rationality in the first place. It's a strong assumption concerning the present Bush administration.

[donna]

This apparently only works if you actually HAVE nukes.

North Korea gets $400 million in aid, Iran gets threats and missiles from our carriers aimed at them.

No wonder they want a nuke so badly.

[Bruce Wilder]

"strong" assumption or "wrong" assumption?

The Bush Administration is rational, but stupid. "Stupid" implies limitations on learning, related not to the availability of information, but to the model used in its interpretation.

Kennedy was a fairly smart, well-educated man, with a lot of respect for intelligence and expertise. He was surrounded by advisers notable for their intellectual capabilities -- the "best and the brightest" and all that. He was accustomed to thinking deeply about politics -- he'd written "While England Slept" and "Profiles in Courage" (and yes, Virginia, he, not Ted Sorenson wrote "Profiles in Courage"), his Secretary of Defense was one of the "Whiz Kids" famed for the application of novel analytical ideas to practical problems in World War II, etc.

Kennedy, in his observation of Eisenhower's handling of the U-2 incident, of his own experience of the Bay of Pigs and then, the Missile Crisis, among others, that the government was being carried along by a process not controlled for a human purpose.

And, the general intellectual climate of the time focused a lot on these issues. Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" and Francis Knebel's "Seven Days in May" were published in 1962. Game theory was just coming into its own.

The political climate was favorable, as well. Kennedy had run as a militant Democrat against Nixon, a relatively intellectual Republican anti-communist. Eisenhower had spent 8 years dampening down the worst impulses of his party.

The test ban treaty was not the only result of the growing awareness of strategic frames. There was the hotline between White House and Kremlin, for example, which was also the result of game theory insights. The CIA was given a different strategic direction, vis a vis the Soviets, and the competition between intelligence services changed in character.

I fear that our present situation is, in many unfortunate ways, quite the opposite. When I say Bush is stupid, I don't mean that to be only a partisan insult. I think the man is stubbornly resistant to analytical deliberation and insight; his is the very opposite of the prepared mind -- it's the bunkered mind. He is surrounded by people, of limited talent or ability, whose ambitions have been satisfied by their personal association with Bush, an association enabled by sychophancy. His policies are informed by threads of the very sort of nutty ideologies, which the country was rejecting in the early 1960's as crazy and destructive. Far from the "best and the brightest", the U.S. government is staffed by the likes of Doug Feith, famed as the "stupidest f* guy on the planet".

Our present "intellectual climate" includes "24" and other television dramas with most unfortunate premises. [See the New Yorker profile of 24's creator. Scary stuff. http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070219fa_fact_mayer ] Journalism has been replaced by journamalism at the leading organs of what is now a uniformly corporate right-wing Media.

I don't know what a nation or a world can or should do about stupid leadership and its dangers. I know Sach's simplistic naivete is of no particular use.

[realpc]

It's a dangerous game. Maybe Sachs is right, and maybe this is the best strategy. But no strategy works every time. And if your opponent is more devious -- and less interested in survival -- than you, it could backfire. The Soviet Union was atheist, and therefore not as anxious to leave this world as some of our more radical enemies today.

On the other hand, our current belligerent stance is not working. We create enemies faster than we kill them.

[ken melvin]

Subtle is the highest form of all. Seeing this requires intellect.

[calmo]

Ultra subtle. Turbo Ultra subtle.
Oh, wait --those were varieties of gas at the pump. I see that now...just a slight delay with the after-burner intellect.
Bruce writesThe Bush Administration is rational, but stupid. "Stupid" implies limitations on learning, related not to the availability of information, but to the model used in its interpretation. and I feel motivated to make some adjustments to this view. Yes , not on the basis of 'Loyalty' and that window on how this administration works, but more on the contributions of some regular posters here for whom I will be forever in debt. I mean you realpc.
No, the clue comes from GWB's explanation for his turn around on Rummy being "aspirational". Had the election results been different, Rummy would still be in.
This administration imagines the future, *wills* it into being, foregoing all that ground breaking information collection, and is often surprised when the future comes about not quite as willed....which only means that there was not enough "willing".
It is this feature of the administration that makes it irrational in my book. Heavy subtle tome that it is.

[STS]

"Generous Tit-for-Tat" is nothing but the "an eye for an eye" ethic expressed in the Old Testament (Exodus 21) with an admixture of "Love thy neighbor" (Leviticus + Gospels of Matthew and Mark, etc.) in that you 'preemptively' try to take the high road. It ought to be the single most intuitive approach to any kind of negotiation that springs to an educated mind in the Western world. This should be true even for those who haven't read the Bible closely (or at all) given the vast range of ways these same ideas have been expressed throughout our cultures.

HOWEVER, our ostentatiously "Christian" administration can't be expected to hit upon this approach after 6 years of foreign policy disasters. I would find this funny if ... well ...

[cm]

Somebody tell me what the "tit" and the "tat" are when talking about the current Iraq gambit.

[Bruce Wilder]

calmo: "This administration imagines the future, *wills* it into being, foregoing all that ground breaking information collection, and is often surprised when the future comes about not quite as willed....which only means that there was not enough 'willing'.
It is this feature of the administration that makes it irrational in my book."

calmo raises an interesting point. it made me think of Arthur C. Clarke's dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology would 'seem' like magic to those not prepared to comprehend it, and suggested reversing it: any sufficiently stupid behavior looks like wishful or magical thinking to anyone of normal intelligence and maturity.

Imagine Isaac Newton, who dedicated most of his scientific life to a fruitless exploration of alcemy. Was Newton 'irrational'? Or, just in no position to stumble upon the table of elements?

But, of course, Bush and company are in a position to stumble upon the political and foreign policy equivalent of the table of elements, and work hard to avoid doing so. Bush has a degree in history from Yale; of course, he had a less than stellar grade point average. I know when I went through school, if I understood what was being taught, I got an "A", and when I didn't, I got a "B". Bush got a "B".

As for the "will" thing, I believe that might be a confusion between function and meaning. Humans are story-telling animals; we have a natural gift for drama and it helps organize our experience. It has been with us for at least 60,000 years, and its advent made us homo sapiens sapiens. The whole science and technology thing is a late addition: cause-and-effect was just a narrative trope until Aristotle noticed the difference between logic and persuasion.

My point is that, in this technological world we live in, a person can still get along, functioning entirely in the symbolic world of shared meaning. Lots of people do that, with only highly selective awareness of functional mechanisms, relationships and requirements underlying it. People don't know how their iPods work, or their televisions, computers, microwave ovens or automobiles. I have met people, who don't know why they have to check the oil in their cars. Some people get really upset to find out that their kids have to learn just a little bit about biology in high school, and that little bit is not entirely consistent with the religious tapestry of meaning they have wrapped around themselves at home.

If you don't know that there is a mechanism -- a functional system -- underlying the process you are dealing with, then all you see, all you are aware of, is the symbolic representation, and, of course, you attempt to manipulate that symbolic representation as best you can. Keep in mind that manipulating a symbolic representation is what most of us do, most of the time with respect to most of what we do: whether it is earning and spending money (can't get more purely symbolic than money) or, say, operating a PC.

But, that symbolic representation is the matrix, as they say. Unlike the movie, in the real world, clever manipulation of the symbolic representation, of the matrix, is not power; real power in the real world comes from an awareness of the underlying functional mechanisms and learning how to control systematic functional processes: science and technology, as it were, where symbols form systems of notation, not narratives of moral meaning.

I think Bush, despite the Harvard MBA, has no idea of how large, bureaucratic organizations work and very little idea about the mechanisms underlying the relations between nation-states. In the absence of such an understanding, he manipulates meaningful symbols: he acts "tough" and so on. It's politics without policy. He gets the politics, which is all about selling a narrative which casts good guys and bad guys and right and wrong, almost pitch perfect. But, he scarcely does policy, at all. Or, its policy based on metaphors drawn from the social relations experience of a fifth grader on the playground.

I would not call Bush, "irrational" though, because, despite the politically self-interested references to his supposed religious faith, I don't really think he wilfully believes in mechanisms, which he ought to know are not there. I doubt he is really allocating much in the way of personal resources, say, to fervent prayer or healing crystals. He may not pay much attention to his CIA briefer, but that's because he is not well enough educated to take it in, not because he'd rather be playing with his Ouija board.

[STS]

Bruce,

Interesting take on the pre-causal mode of thinking Bush exhibits. I'm reminded of that anonymous quote about "we're an Empire now" and we "create our own reality" that came from a "senior administration figure" a year or two ago.

That open mike incident with Bush talking to Blair (same meeting where he tried to give Angela Merkel a back rub) was an enlightening glimpse into his world view. He said something along the lines of "they just need to call it off, and it's over" -- the "they" was the Syrian government and the thing they were supposed to be able to stop was the mini-war between Israel and Hizbollah. As if nobody in Israel or Lebanon actually had any share in what was happening.

I think of this as the "personalized" view of the world. Each and every action or event has a unique individual human actor as its "cause." Executives often take this point of view as a short cut to rewarding results they like. Something good happened, so reward the guy nominally in charge. Something bad happened, so punish the guy nominally in charge. Don't trouble yourself as to causes. It's a reasonable approximation but starts to go haywire when an executive doesn't examine the storyline his subordinates are feeding him.

This "personalized" view of events is also symptomatic of evangelical Christianity with its focus on the God who spends a whole lot of time worrying about *your* career and family, etc. God amounts to "the actor you attribute events to when you have trouble identifying a single human agent." So perhaps the mindset is reinforced for Bush by his brand of religion. Or maybe the causality runs the other way? But then 'causality' is such a bias of that liberal "reality based" world view. What was I thinking?!

[Anthony Gillis]

The mistake in this comparison is the assumption of rationality. If your opponent is primarily motivated irrational, unlimited, and ideological motives playing the "game" as if they were acting on rational, limited ones will not work. The Soviets, as secular Marxists, wanted to reorganize the world according to their views, but they were not willing to die or to bring the world crashing down around their own ears in order to "win". Today's Jihadis ARE.