If President Trump called off an Iranian attack in order to save innocent civilians, he deserves praise. Render to God what is God’s, and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But, as a Wall Street Journal editorial emphasized, there is something off in this story (“Iran Calls Trump’s Bluff,” June 21, 2019):
It’s important to understand how extraordinary this is. The Commander in Chief ordered ships and planes into battle but recalled them because he hadn’t asked in advance what the damage and casualties might be? While the planes were in the air, he asked, oh, by the way? This is hard to take at face value. …
More likely, he changed his mind because he had second thoughts about the military and political consequences of engaging in a conflict he promised as a candidate to avoid.
Strategic threats have long been modeled with the help of game theory. A classic is economist Thomas Schelling’s 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press). In game-theoretic terms, if you play a chicken game without having credibly committed to staying in the middle of the road, expect to lose one way or another: the other player is likely not to swerve; and you will have to swerve yourself, or else a crash will occur. As the Journal puts it,
This is the reality of geopolitics in which credibility is crucial to deterrence. The more that adversaries think Mr. Trump’s threats of force aren’t credible, the more they will seek to exploit that knowledge.
A second explanation of Mr. Trump volte-face in the drone affair, then, is that he just discovered he is not the only bully on the world scene; and that tussles of war between states are not like rivalry in the New York real estate market. As most Americans may not be eager for another foreign war, he decided to call off the retaliatory attack.
Other questions must be asked, of course. Would this be a just war? Should the president have the power to start it? Why did he pull out of the Iranian nuclear accord? Wasn’t the accord a good way to keep the Iranian government under some control while minimizing the risk of war? Aren’t the silent threats of diplomacy better than the open threats of war?
In a public-choice perspective, it is quite possible that the electorate, or the third of registered voters who voted for Mr. Trump, want to both avoid war and put foreigners in their place: A and non-A. Such incoherence is well known in voting processes (see my post “Condorcet’s Brexit,” April 9, 2019). It is compounded by the incoherence of Mr. Trump himself, who lacks any philosophical or economic compass. His foreign policy looks as rational as his trade policy. The Journal editorialist is slightly more charitable:
The great weakness of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is its volatility. He is unpredictable to a fault. He has doubted his own Venezuela policy from the first week he signed off on it. He called Kim Jong Un crazy but now says he’s a swell guy. He signed a trade deal with Mexico then threatened it with new tariffs.
So another explanation of Mr. Trump’s volte-face is that he is inconsistent and incoherent.
I had written this post and scheduled it for publication when new information emerged in a Saturday night Journal story (“Trump Bucked National-Security Aides on Proposed Iran Attack,” June 22, 2019):
In private conversations Friday, Mr. Trump reveled in his judgment, certain about his decision to call off the attacks while speaking of his administration as if removed from the center of it.
“These people want to push us into a war, and it’s so disgusting,” Mr. Trump told one confidant about his own inner circle of advisers. “We don’t need any more wars.”
…
It was unclear whether the division within the team—which includes Mr. Trump’s third national-security adviser, second secretary of state and third official in charge of the Defense Department—would heal or continue to fester.
This would bring grist to the mill of those who believe that Mr. Trump has suddenly seen the light and changed his mind, perhaps moved by the possible loss of civilian lives in Iran. But the new sanctions that he is considering against Iran may also cost lives there, besides of course using Americans (and Europeans) as pawns to be prosecuted if they trade with Iranians. I would guess that the hypotheses of the bully’s retreat and general incoherence better explain Mr. Trump behavior.
We might consider another hypothesis: the president’s sort of autism (I am playing the behavioral economist here!) or at least his ignorance regarding what is happening in the world, how things fit in time and space.
Perhaps a presidential tweet will soon help us discriminate between these or other explanatory hypotheses.
READER COMMENTS
PeakTrader
Jun 23 2019 at 2:40am
Trump is much smarter than “conventional wisdom” or the negative and ignorant “talking heads.”
Trump succeeded in the tough NYC construction and housing markets. Also, he did very well in the entertainment industry, became a billionaire, raised a great family, and won a Presidential election with no experience.
He’s great at game theory. He keeps our adversaries off balanced. The business tax cuts and deregulation strengthened the economy and created a better relative position to renegotiate trade agreements, particularly for Rust Belt States and dealing with the cheating and stealing Communist Chinese.
Economist David Rosenberg:
“Maybe Trump is a genius, after all. What if he finally gets the steep Fed rate cuts he has been demanding? After that, he ends the trade wars, tariffs go to zero, and the stock market surges to new highs — just in time for the 2020 election!“
Phil H
Jun 23 2019 at 9:49am
And yet… and yet… I still don’t see these events as moving the needle on Trump’s national popularity. Nor is it obvious that they should! For the most part, it’s probably a good thing that people who have a clue about Iran decide our policy on Iran, and most people don’t have a clue about Iran.
But where is his party? This should be the kind of thing that makes a political party overturn its decision. The great failure of 2016 was never that the populace voted for Trump, it was that the Republican Party made him their candidate. And they continue to fail in the same way. Note the contrast with the Democrats – they let through a celebrity candidate in 2016 as well, but she was a politician. They are having a reasonably serious policy debate in the form of Sanders and Warren. I don’t know about the local level, but at the national level, the GOP just looks unift for purpose.
Robert EV
Jun 23 2019 at 12:38pm
Here’s one of the keys. Trump knows he will lose some support from Congressional Republicans if he goes to war.
And heck, with Alito’s recent concurrence in Gundy v. US, he could lose the support of the Supreme Court if Congress does try to take back this power.
Robert EV
Jun 23 2019 at 12:40pm
Forgot to add: He gains political points, and keeps his presidential powers and support, by acting (or pretending to act?) magnanimously and proportionate.
zeke5123
Jun 23 2019 at 9:22pm
Are we sure the President was unaware of deaths before ordering the initial strike? Is it possible that new live-data suggested a strike would have more casualties compared to the initial plan? If so, perhaps Trump was okay with X deaths but not okay with X+Y deaths?
Seems reasonable — any chance it is true?
Jon Murphy
Jun 24 2019 at 11:04am
I suppose it’s possible, but I’d wonder what information came in between the order and the rescind that changed the calculus that much (unless we want to argue that Trump’s calculus was exactly at the indifference point; in other words, adding just one single civilian death was enough to tilt the scale).
nobody.really
Jun 26 2019 at 2:49am
Given the current Administration, if the argument seems reasonable, then on that basis alone I’d suspect it can’t be true.
Benjamin Cole
Jun 24 2019 at 12:00am
A review of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff strongly recommended an invasion of Cuba, is worthy.
About that same time, the Joint Chiefs also seriously framed a policy proposal to launch a first-strike nuclear attack on Russia, which would just about wipe Russia off the map but would incur perhaps only the loss of 10 million lives in the US.
It is plausible that Trump was pressured into action, and then hit the brakes, and yes he was erratic. But consider his milieu (I used a French word for Pierre L).
There was a time when the US demobilized after a war. The US demobilized after WWII. The Founding Fathers loathed, detested and reviled standing militaries. Today the US maintains a hyper-mobilized, mercenary and global military, and which has official daily briefings with the President. Only “left-wingers” contest this norm (and perhaps a few oddball libertarians).
Let us hope Trump relies on his businessman’s instincts more. What is the upside from these foreign entanglements? It takes a strong personality, like a JFK, or a Trump to stand up to the global security complex. Obama and Bush jr., were easily absorbed.
Trump made a big mistake in ever getting into the Iran issue in the first place. Let us hope he does a Venezuela or Syria and simply loses interest and wants out.
Jon Murphy
Jun 24 2019 at 11:10am
Now he’s talking about “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if Iran provokes the US (see Meet the Press’ interview last night). Obliteration certainly implies heavy civilian casualties, which makes his comments about wanting to save civilian lives even more strange.
This reminds me a lot of the incident last summer where Trump was loudly proclaiming how much he loved free markets and wanted no tariffs, so the EU offered to eliminate all tariffs on US goods if the US did the same, and Trump did an about-face and claimed that “they” needed to buy more from “us” before he’ll agree to anything (this was then followed a few months later by his “tariff man” proclamation).
A lot of Trump seems to be post-hoc justifications for his random behavior.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 24 2019 at 6:28pm
Good points, Jon.
Phil
Jun 24 2019 at 2:26pm
Given that the strike was a thing was not going to happen,
Is it better or worse from a game theory perspective that ‘planes were in the air’?
Does Iran feel like they have a good handle on Trump’s level of impulse control?
If the bluff was ‘calling off the strike’, we’ve yet to see whether Iran has called it.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 24 2019 at 6:45pm
I am not sure I follow you, Phil. The two cars were driving towards over each other on the white line. Trump’s car (or the US government’s car) swerved. Which player lost seems obvious (at least in the short run). Do you mean that this game was just a subgame within a larger game? If so, do you care to elaborate on what you think could be the larger game? A prisoner dilemma where one player cooperates hoping that the other one will start cooperating again at the next round? (In the terms of the simple game I was suggesting, putting the planes in the air, if indeed they were there and were detected by the Iranian army, could perhaps be thought of as a threat for next time, but this seems to me like the chicken-game driver who swerves but texts the other, “My wife just called me to dinner, but next time, believe me, I won’t swerve.”)
Mark Bahner
Jun 26 2019 at 10:42pm
🙂 Good one. But I think it should be, “I just had an urge for a hamburger and freedom fries…”
https://www.thedailymeal.com/healthy-eating/complete-guide-donald-trump-s-favorite-foods-slideshow/slide-11
Joseph E Munson
Jun 25 2019 at 5:57am
Honesty, the sheer number of leaks like this make me think its a calculated play to make it look like the U.S won’t go to war to maximize the chances that the u.s will have tactical surprise when it goes to war with Iran in a month or so (this is my suspicion anyway)
Jon Murphy
Jun 25 2019 at 8:03am
I don’t know. Trump blinks a lot when it comes to negotiations. He blinked at Europe, North Korea, China multiple times, Mexico twice, Canada, South Korea, off the top of my head. If this is some years-long strategy to appear weak so that when he actually does something he can catch people off-guard, when is that going to come into play?
Besides, if it’s all a ploy and it’s obvious to casual observers like us, then it’s a terrible ploy. The thing with esotericism is it ceases to be esoteric the second people realize it’s esoteric.
With respect, like I said above, this seems like a post-hoc justification for his behavior.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 25 2019 at 11:01am
<a href="http://
“>Trump’s tweet of this morning seems consistent with the inefficient-bully, incoherence, and autism hypotheses.
TMC
Jun 26 2019 at 3:17pm
Unreported here is that Trump switched the attack to a cyber attack which knocked out some of the Revolutionary Guard’s offensive and defensive abilities. Seems like a good non lethal response to one of their non lethal attacks.
nobody.really
Jun 26 2019 at 3:15am
Most likely interpretation of events: It’s all noise; no signal. We can analyze it until the cows come home, but we’re just reading tea leaves and imagining we see a grand design.
Now, IF I were to hypothesize a grand design, it would be that Trump can read the polling data just as well and W could, and concluded that he’s gonna lose the next election unless he starts a war in which everyone will rally around him. (“Wag the Dog.”) In that case, Trump would only be feigning to play chicken with Iran; he’s really speaking to a domestic audience. The worst case scenario for Trump would be for Iran to be docile until the next election, thereby depriving him of an excuse for war. But has we observed in Vietnam and Iraq, provocation is optional; any Administration can generate it out of thin air if they like.
But if this is the strategy, the Administration would seem to be going about this oddly. The Reagan and W Administration demonstrated how to build public expectation for a military strike, so that when the strike comes the public is primed. So why wouldn’t Trump simply use that playbook? Perhaps he is, but lacks the discipline to do it well, so we’re observing an intentional but inept rendering of a traditional policy.
Alternatively, perhaps we’re observing pure noise, and merely imagining there’s a signal in there somewhere.
Mark Bahner
Jun 26 2019 at 10:26pm
Should we follow the Constitution? Tough question!
I figure, we haven’t tried that route (following the Constitution) very often in the past, so let’s give it a shot this time. Follow the law. What a concept! 🙂
Matthias Görgens
Jun 29 2019 at 8:40am
The US constitution is up for constant reinterpretation.
Comments are closed.