By Paul Whiteley, University of Essex, The Conversation
Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections has left many across the world unsure about what he might do in his next term, and whether some of the threats he made about international policy will be followed through.
There are several dramatic policy changes that the president-elect has threatened to make once he takes office.
For some, one of the most serious foreign policy concerns is the way the Trump administration might go about ending the war in Ukraine. Trump stated he could stop the war in a day. If the end result of any negotiation or peace deal is seen by Vladimir Putin as a victory, other countries on Russia’s borders are worried it could lead to plans for further military aggression.
Similarly, if Trump abandons the US’s historic support for the self-governing island of Taiwan, it could prompt China into an attack. Beijing sees the island as a breakaway province, and wants it to become part of China. But historically, US support of Taiwan has been a factor in China holding back.
Xi Jinping wants to cement his legacy as the leader who unified China, something which Mao Zedong failed to do after the civil war. The Chinese president has ratcheted up the pressure on Taiwan in recent years, and there are significant signs that he wants to go further.
But neither Xi or Putin can guarantee that Trump will do what he has previously suggested he might. Here’s why.
A lesson from game theory, the mathematical study of cooperation and competition, might be relevant here – in particular, the scenario referred to as the “chicken game” or the “hawk-dove” game, which provides a model of conflict between two actors.
It’s called the “chicken game” because it follows the same logic as contests between American adolescents in the 1950 and ’60s. They would drive their cars at each other at high speed, and the first one to swerve aside and avoid a potentially fatal crash would be described as “chicken” and so lose the game.
To describe the logic of this game, we can use a payoff matrix (see below). This is a table showing the hypothetical payoffs resulting from the different outcomes that are possible when player A is confronted by player B. In each pair of outcomes, player B’s payoff from their combined actions is given first, followed by player A’s.
The worst possible outcome for both players is a crash, so this gets a payoff of 0 for both. The best possible outcome for Player A is to carry on driving when player B swerves, with the payoffs seen in the top-right cell (1,3). The equivalent outcome for player B is in the bottom left cell. If both swerve, the payoff is 2 for each player.
Thus, swerving is better than crashing – but the top prize goes to the player who drives straight at his opponent, who backs down.
The chicken game has been used to model nuclear deterrence. In this case, a first strike which destroys the opponent is the equivalent of driving when the opponent swerves. Needless to say, when both players launch strikes simultaneously, the outcome is a lot worse than the zero depicted in the matrix.
The key to winning the game is to convince your opponent that you are willing to keep on driving at all costs. Some American teenagers would, for example, ostentatiously throw the steering wheel out of the vehicle, signalling to their opponent that they could not swerve at the last minute even if they wanted to. This amounts to saying that to win, you need to convince your opponent you will take that risk.
This is similar to what Trump does in some circumstances. He makes big statements about what he is going do – in part, this may be to see what his opponents do next, and whether they will back down.
Trump also has the advantage of unpredictability. The gap between what he says and does is significant, as Michael Wolff, the biographer of his first term in office, has detailed. Woolf said in an interview: “Donald Trump is deeply unpredictable, irrational, at times bordering on incoherent, self-obsessed in a disconcerting way, and displays all those kinds of traits that anyone would reasonably say: ‘What’s going on here, is something wrong?’”
A couple of examples from Trump’s first term make the point that the president-elect often chooses moves that, historically, other US leaders have ruled out. Sometimes these moves are successful; in other cases, they aren’t.
In 2019, Trump made a historic visit to North Korea, the first US leader to do so. At this meeting, Trump suggested it was the beginning of a new era of friendship between the nations, and suggested he was the only person who could do this. But his attempt to forge an alliance with North Korea and halt its nuclear programme failed. In this case, Trump’s unpredictability did not work.
But there is another example when his unpredictablity succeeded in achieving an outcome the US had been wanting for decades. In his first term, Trump sought to weaken the Nato alliance by “insulting and alienating US allies”. And his threats to cut US support helped achieve his objective of persuading Nato member countries to increase their defence spending. This is exactly what he hoped.
So, Trump’s unpredictability could be a deterrent to opponents such as Putin and Xi, as they don’t know how he is likely to react, or when he might take offence. If Putin refuses a Ukraine peace deal proffered by Trump, or accepts it and then resumes the war during his presidency, the US president could take this personally and could even turn against Putin.
The lesson from game theory is that unpredictability and recklessness can pay off in conflict and negotiation situations. And this means no one knows what Trump will do next.
Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
