"What is the information or communication structure, or the complex of incentives, that makes dogs, idiots, small children, fanatics and martyrs immune to threats?"
As President-Elect, Trump threatened American companies who produced goods outside the United States for sale inside the United States with punitive taxes. He has also promised major & beneficial changes to the corporate tax code to US domiciled companies.
"For Trump's stratagem to work, foreign leaders must continue to believe that he's erratic and prone to irrational overreaction. "We must as a nation be more unpredictable," Trump often said on the campaign trail. "We have to be unpredictable!"
The particular strategy of both issuing a threat & then making a promise, conditional on the threat's success, was explored by Thomas Schelling, in Strategy of Conflict, Chapter 5, Enforcement, Communication & Strategic Moves, pages 123-134.
This strategic play requires two separate sources of credibility: one for the threat which hurts both of us & the other for the promise to refrain from taking advantage of the situation after the threat does its job.
And the two sources may in fact conflict, weakening their collective force.
For example, a threat of mutual harm may be more credible because the threatener is known to be unpredictable. Yet, a partner who cultivates an aura of unpredictability cannot be relied upon when they offer to make a promise, a promise to ignore their best interest. Because "a deal is a deal, until another better deal comes along."
The Strategic Problem with Threats - What We Can learn From Literature & Film
Threats which make both parties worse off, if the threat does not work & has to be carried out, are explored in both literature and film.
Film provides good demonstrations of negotiation technique -- good in part, because we can re-wind the movie and reverse what just happened. Ordinary life has no such mechanism.
What makes a threat credible? If you can do T or D and I prefer you to do D, I might threaten R in retaliation for you doing T. Hoping to deter you from T & compelling you to do D. You may plausibly respond that once you have done T, then my retaliation of R would not be in my interest. And if I have no immediate reply to your response, my threat fails to deter or compel you.
Three types of replies which enhance the credibility of retaliation, or R.
Reply 1. R may not be in my interest, but it is certainly not in your interest, either.
Simple example - Withholding Information
I prefer you to tell me the location of a hidden treasure rather than you keep silent. You keep silent. I threaten to kill you. Dying is certainly not in your interest, but my threat may fail if you can persuade me that you know that it is not in my interest to have you dead -- because I would lose forever the location of the treasure.
For example, in the book, A High Wind in Jamaica.
"The pirate captain, Chavez, wants his captive to tell where the money is hidden and puts his knife to the man's throat to make him talk. After a moment or two, during which the captive keep his mouth shut, the mate laughs. "If you cut his throat, he cannot tell you. He knows it and knows you know it." Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence, page 70.
But, of course I may anticipate your intended reply. And instead not threaten you, but rather someone you care for.
Also from, A High Wind in Jamaica.
"The pirates first pretend they need to seize the ship's cargo and will refund the price of the goods taken, but when the lie becomes obvious, they menace Captain Marpole by threatening to shoot the children if he does not disclose where the Clorinda´s safe is kept.
Other times, the threat to resort to violence is only partially deterred. Because the information when extracted will prove to be incomplete. In the Good, Bad & the Ugly, Angel Eyes resorts to beating Tuco to extract information about the location of buried treasure. But, Angel Eyes doesn't know that Tuco only has some of the information. When he finds out that Blondie has the rest of the information, Angel Eyes declines to torture Blondie, Clint Eastwood's character. For reasons we will talk about later.
Angel Eyes: [as Wallace is beating Tuco] How's your digestion now?
Reply 2. R may not be in my full control, independent of my interests, your interests, or anyone's interests.
And in the movie National Treasure, we see another type of reply, Brinkmanship.
Ian Howe: Quiet, Riley. Your job's finished here.
[Ben lights flare, Shaw turns gun back to Ben and looks astonished along with Ian]
Ben: Look where you're standing. All that gunpowder. You shoot me, I drop this, we all go up.
Riley: Ben?!
Ian Howe What happens when the flare burns down? [Ben looks questionably] You just tell me what I need to know.
Ben: You need to know... If Shaw can catch.
[throws flare, Riley squints scared, Ian catches it before it hits gunpowder]
Ian Howe: Nice try, though. [coat sleeve catches on fire and drops flare on gunpowder]
In effect, Ben becomes the Doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove. If Ian follows through on his threat to shoot Ben, the flare will drop --blowing everyone up.
"Brinkmanship both scales down the size of threat by making it a probability rather than a certainty and makes the diminished threat credible by leaving the outcome to chance", write Dixit & Nalebuff in Making Strategies Credible.
In an updated or modern version of A High Wind in Jamaica, the captain could replace his knife with a revolver loaded with one bullet. By repeatedly subjecting the captive to Russian Roulette this threat can no longer be deterred with mere silence because the captive cannot rely upon the Captain to act in full accordance with his own best interests.
It might be just as effective if the bullets were blanks, or that the Captain was able to arrange the revolver to be spun in a non random manner -- as long as the captive cannot guess at this strategy.
Reply 3. I am just the sort of person who would play R, no matter what.
In National Treasure, it would have made more sense for Riley and not Ben to be holding the flare. After all, Riley was being being directly threatened and it is not clear how Ben could switch the attention only to himself. Ben isn't going to automatically drop the flare if Riley gets shot.
But, some people are characters -- you believe that they will retaliate, perhaps as a matter of pride, stubborness, just inborn cussedness, or even for reasons that are unfathomable.
Riley doesn't have this character; Ben might. And clearly, Angel Eyes thought Blondie, Clint Eastwood, had sufficient character to resist torture.
We end with one of the great demonstrations of character, from John Wayne's movie: Big Jake
Jacob 'Big Jake' McCandles: And now *you* understand. Anything goes wrong, anything at all... your fault, my fault, nobody's fault... it won't matter - I'm gonna blow your head off. No matter what else happens, no matter who gets killed I'm gonna blow your head off.
That's a character who knew how to threaten. For automatic notifications of updates to this series, subscribe to: Gamesmanship & Theory in Business - Stories from Film & Literature, click here
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