Deterrence, costs, and the least-greatest generation

 I maintain that the most important book for you to read on war, strategy or bargaining is The Strategy of Conflict, by Thomas Schelling.  Schelling laid out several of the foundational developments in game theory, while explaining the nature of the Cold War, deterrence, and the applicability of those concepts to a wider array of circumstances.  Once you understand the concepts Schelling explained, you understand why Putin wins, why Taiwan is fucked, and why 2022 America guarantees its own failure.

A few days ago, I posted a snarky allegory about Vladimir Putin walking into a shop, and "buying" Ukraine with sanctions, but of course, commerce is a different thing.  Capitalism works through the principle of positive sum interaction.  A customer walks into a shop, sees a good for sale, decides that he values the good more than the money, the shopkeeper values the money more than the good, so through the voluntary exchange, both the shopkeeper and the customer are made happier.  Invisible hand, Adam Smith, and so forth.  The only one happier today is Vladimir Putin, because this wasn't voluntary.  This was a failure of deterrence.

Here's how deterrence works.  There is a thing that I don't want you to do.  I threaten you.  I don't carry out the threat if you accede.  I carry out the threat if and only if my threat fails to achieve my desired effect.  Biden and the West threaten sanctions if Putin invades Ukraine.  The threat fails to deter an invasion.  Sanctions are imposed.  Why?  Because the threat failed.  A threat is only ever carried out if it failed.  Carrying out the threat means you're a fuckin' failure.  Schelling 101.

But it's worse.  Here's the thing about threats.  They are unimportant, strategically, unless they are costly to carry out.  If I threaten you with taking a sip of my coffee and slurping loudly because you don't like the sound of slurping, well... so what?  I mean, I can do that, or rather, I could if this were not a text-based interface, but that's not anything like an interesting strategic interaction.  Why not?  Because it costs me nothing to slurp my coffee like a philistine.  Threats, as strategic puzzles, matter when they are costly.

As, for example, sanctions.  Sanctions are costly.  If we reduce our business interaction with Russia, we lose too.  Why?  Capitalism.  Trade works, as everyone who isn't a mercantilist moron understands.  This is, actually, the lesson of the shopkeeper and the customer.  If I punish a store by not patronizing it, I pay a cost because the transaction that would have occurred would have been a net positive for me.

Costly threats are a strategic challenge.  If I threaten to do something that is costly to me, um... how do I make that threat credible?  This is the big thing for Schelling.  There are a few solutions.  One approach is a sort of randomization of the method by which the threat is carried out.  Make the process probabilistic so that I'm not directly hurting myself, I'm just making it likely that some external process hurts us both.  Escalation of risk, to see if I can get you to back down.  Schelling's famous analogy is as follows.  Suppose we are chained to each other, and I demand something of you.  If we are standing at the edge of a sheer cliff, I cannot rationally, credibly threaten to jump if you don't give in to my demand, because even if you'd die, so would I.  However, if we are on a slope that gets ever-steeper as one steps further down, increasing the likelihood of losing footing, I can credibly threaten to take a step, incrementally increasing the probability that we'd both stumble, slip and fall to our mutual deaths.

But that's not where we are.  Other solutions include what eventually came to be called "the madman theory."  If I can convince you that I'm not actually rational, I can convince you that I'd carry out a threat, even if that threat hurt me.  Biden can't credibly threaten to nuke Putin for a Ukraine invasion.  Could a sufficiently crazy person?  Maybe, but that's not where we are.

We are in a world of sanctions.  Sanctions which are harmful to our economy, to the economies of European countries, and generally, not a good thing.

But here's the other question.  How much economic pain are we willing to absorb?  The Biden administration has admitted that the answer is... not much.  We have inflation, COVID (waning but not gone), and yadda-yadda.  What that means is, yeah, we'd like to punish Russia, but we don't wanna pay any price for it!

Y'all just gave up the game.  This is Schelling-ville, where at least we aren't the ones getting shelled.  A country just got invaded, and if you are stupid enough to think that it stops with Ukraine, I've got a degree from Trump University to sell you.

Oh, no!  This is terrible!  The end of the post-WWII order!  We need to do something!

As long as it doesn't cost us anything!

Carrying out a threat-- a meaningful threat, that is-- is costly.  If you are unwilling to pay the price for carrying out a threat, your threats are meaningless, and you are a toothless tiger.  When you announce your unwillingness to pay the price for costly threats, you announce your toothlessness.

Once upon a time, the phrase, "the greatest generation," was a thing.  A silly thing, to be sure, and naming generations is intrinsically silly anyway.  My generation, such as it is, at least has a cool-sounding name, and our music was cooler'n yours,* but the superlative moniker came about because a particular cohort had to go through the Great Depression, then Hitler tried to take over the world while exterminating a bunch of us.  Also, Japan tried to take over the part that was too far away from Hitler, and... holy shit.

People enlisted, dealt with rations and all sorts of stuff.  You are weak and soft.  I am too, honestly, and if I didn't get my morning coffee, I'd crumple into a little ball and cry.  But the thing is, if we are serious about this, it's time to toughen up, kiddies.  All this talk about biggest-land-war-in-Europe-since-Hitler, and all that?  Putin is a serious threat.  He is trying to undermine smash the world order.

What are you willing to pay?

Ukraine's gone.  What now?  What are you willing to do to deter him from sending storm troopers across another border, or to deter China from just fucking taking Taiwan, now that they have seen Putin waltz into Ukraine?

Remembering that carrying out a threat is costly.  If you aren't willing to carry out the threat, to pay the cost, you've already lost.  Putin can take whatever the fuck he wants, and so can Xi.  Why?  Because you won't pay a fucking cost.

And Biden has already admitted that he doesn't want the sanctions to be costly for us.  We have inflation, and fuel prices, and yadda-yadda.  Boo hoo.

That's conceding defeat.

No.  The point is that you need to show willingness to carry out those threats.  For the next time.  Repeated interaction.  Schelling 102.  There must come a point at which you carry out the threat, even when it hurts you, because if you don't, you just keep losing, as your adversaries observe your unwillingness to carry out threats, because you won't pay those costs.

Are you watching what Putin just did?  What China has been eyeing for years?  This is serious.  You don't want troops on the ground?  Missiles flying?  OK, kiddies.  Here's it.  The thing.

Russia needs to be apartheid South Africa, right now.  No more fucking around.  Russia is out of SWIFT immediately.  Yes, the Europeans are resisting.  Threaten them.  We are doing this, now.  Confiscate literally every piece of Russian-owned property outside Russia.  Every account, every house, every fucking thing.  All that London property the oligarchs have been buying up?  Boris needs to confiscate it, right now.  Fuck the law and the courts.  It belongs to the British government now.  Auction it, send the proceeds to the Ukrainian resistance.  Kick literally every Russian out of every country.  Prohibit any business of any kind with anyone in Russia.  No imports, no exports, period.  No business whatsoever.  Tell the CIA and the NSA to go fucking nuts on their nuts.  Release the fucking Kraken of economic warfare, spycraft, hacking, and yeah, Bond and Bourne are fictional, but there are some badasses in our arsenal, and set 'em loose to do their thing, faster pussycat, kill, kill.  Every bit of sabotage and covert action.  Do it.  Now.  Everything.  We aren't using troops?  OK, then we use every other fucking thing, right now.

We are holding back because Americans don't want to feel the pain of it.  And that's why it won't work.  That's why Putin knows he can keep going.

In order to deter future action that you wish to deter, you must demonstrate your willingness to pay the cost of carrying out a punishment.  When you do the very opposite-- when you demonstrate your unwillingness to absorb those costs-- you demonstrate that you have no credible threat to deter action.

Worse, when you carry out modestly costly punishments which you know cannot deter anything, you are pointlessly absorbing costs.  The sanctions announced by Biden will not deter anything.  We know that.  They will impose costs on everyone-- on Russia, on Europe, on us-- but not sufficient to deter anyone or anything.  Carrying out a punishment is pointless unless you both demonstrate your willingness to absorb costs by carrying out large punishments, and your capacity to carry out deterrent threats.  These are neither.  They demonstrate our unwillingness to absorb costs, and they deter nothing.  Yet they cost.

Go all the way, or do nothing.  Either we confront Putin, or we don't.

Either we isolate Putin, and turn Russia into a hermit state, or we do nothing.  China will remain their ally, as will Hungary, and the autocratic dictator alliance can creep along while giving the Cult of Trump/the Republican Party priapism for years to come, but if you want a model of this working?  It's South Africa.  Either we do this, or we don't, and yeah, it's more costly with a larger country, but the math doesn't change.

Sure, take troops off the table.  But this?   This?!  Read Thomas Schelling.  Crack down.  Crack the fuck down on Russia.  Pound it into the fucking dirt, ground it to shit and smithereens.  Smash it, destroy it, fucking end it.  Kim Jong Un has a sufficiently impoverished and isolated populace that he can operate a hermit state and live as dictator indefinitely.

Smash the motherfucking shit out of Russia.  Everything.  Do everything.  Take troops off the table?  Fine.  Then do literally every other fucking thing, right now.

What, you're afraid of inflation?

This is why he'll win.  The Keyser Soze rule.  It doesn't take money, or guns, or anything like that.  It just takes the will to do what the other guy won't.  He has the will.  You don't.  He wins.  Everyone else loses.

Liz Cheney for President.

Geoff Achison, "Living In Fear."  This is a live performance of the track from Little Big Men.  At about 2:30, Achison starts in on one of the most badass guitar solos you will ever hear, but he is a very different kind of player.  He can play fast, but you either need to be a guitarist, or listen to a hell of a lot of guitar music to develop the ear necessary to understand what he's doing, because it isn't about speed here.  Achison is playing with tone in this, and most of his playing.  Compare this to some speed demon.  What Achison is doing?  It's actually harder.  Or maybe I'm insisting that the emperor's suit is well-tailored.  If you aren't a guitarist, find one and ask.

*Whether or not this is a conscious reference to John Cage is unclear, but the problem is one of Poe's law, and the fact that Cage embodied it decades before the internet.  Fuck the avant-garde, and anyone weak enough to praise the emperor's sartorial choices.  Which... is all of humanity.