Violence, especially war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable, depending on decisions made by fallible human beings orga- nized into imperfect governments, depending on fallible com- munications and warning systems and on the
untested
perfor- mance of people and equipment.
Schelling - The Manipulation of Risk
?
?
?
THE MANIPULATION OF RISK
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 93
But uncertainty exists. Not everybody is always in his right mind. Not all the frontiers and thresholds are precisely defined, fully reliable, and known to be so beyond the least temptation to test them out, to explore for loopholes, or to take a chance that they may be disconnected this time. Violence, especially war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable, depending on decisions made by fallible human beings orga- nized into imperfect governments, depending on fallible com- munications and warning systems and on the untested perfor- mance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own.
This last is particularly true, because what one does today in a crisis affects what one can be expected to do tomorrow. A governmentneverknowsjusthowcommitteditistoactionuntil the occasion when its commitment is challenged. Nations, like people, are continually engaged in demonstrations of resolve, tests of nerve, and explorations for understandings and misun- derstandings.
One never quite knows in the course of a diplomatic confron- tation how opinion will converge on signs of weakness. One never quite knows what exits will begin to look cowardly to oneself or to the bystanders or to one's adversary. It would be possible to get into a situation in which either side felt that to yield now would create such an asymmetrical situation, would be such a gratuitous act of surrender, that whoever backed down could not persuade anybody that he wouldn't yield again tomorrow and the day after.
This is why there is a genuine risk of major war not from "accidents" in the military machine but through a diplomatic process of commitment that is itself unpredictable. The unpre- dictability is not due solely to what a destroyer commander might do at midnight when he comes across a Soviet (or Ameri- can) freighter at sea, but to the psychological process by which particular things become identified with courage or appease- ment or how particular things get included in or left out of a diplomatic package. Whether the removal of their missiles from
If all threats were fully believable (except for the ones that were completely unbelievable) we might live in a strange world
-
on enforceable law. Countries would hasten to set up their threats; and if the violence that would accompany infraction were confidently expected, and sufficiently dreadful to outweigh the fruits of transgression, the world might get frozen into a set of laws enforced by what we could figuratively call the Wrath of God. If we could threaten world inundation for any encroach- ment on the Berlin corridor, and everyone believed it and un- derstood precisely what crime would bring about the deluge, it might not matter whether the whole thing were arranged by human or supernatural powers. If there were no uncertainty about what would and would not set off the violence, and if everyone could avoid accidentally overstepping the bounds, and if we and the Soviets (and everybody else) could avoid
perhapsa safe one, with many of the marks of a world based
making simultaneous and incompatible threats, every nation would have to live within the rules set up by its adversary. And if all the threats depended on some kind of physical positioning of territorial claims, trip-wires, troop barriers, automatic alarm systems, and other such arrangements, and all were completely infallible and fully credible, we might have something like an
? old fashioned western land rush, at the end of which -
? as long as nobody tripped on his neighbor's electric fence and set the
? whole thing off -
the world would be carved up into a tightly bound status quo. The world would be full of literal and figura- tive frontiers and thresholds that nobody in his right mind
would cross.
? 92
c
? 94 ARMS AND 1NFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 95
not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully pre- dictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control. War has always involved uncertainty, especially as to its outcome; but with the technol- ogy and the geography and the politics of today, it is hard to see how a major war could get started except in the presence of un- certainty. Some kind of error or inadvertence, some miscalcula- tions of enemy reactions or misreading of enemy intent, some steps taken without knowledge of steps taken by the other side, some random event or false alarm, or some decisive action to
hedge against the unforeseeable would have to be involved in the process on one side or both. '
This does not mean that there is nothing the United States would fight a major war to defend, but that these are things that the Soviet Union would not fight a major war to obtain. And there are undoubtedly things the Soviet Union would fight a major war to defend, but these are not things the United States would fight a major war to obtain. Both sides may get into a position in which compromise is impossible, in which the only visible outcomes would entail a loss to one side or the other so great that both would choose to fight a major nuclear war. But neither side wants to get into such a position; and there is noth- ing presently at issue between East and West that would get both sides into that position deliberately.
The Cuban crisis illustrates the point. Nearly everybody ap- peared to feel that there was some danger of a general nuclear war. Whether the danger was large or small, hardly anyone seems to have considered it negligible. To my knowledge, though, no one has ever supposed that the United States or the
1. A superb example of this process, one involving local incidents, accidents of darkness and morning mist, overzealous commanders, troops in panic, erroneous assessment of damage, public opinion, and possibly a little "catalytic action" by warmongers, all conjoining to get governments more nearly committed to a war that might not have been inevitable, occurred within drum-call of my own home. See the detailed account in Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1963). It is chastening to consider that the "shot heard round the world" may have been fired in the mistaken belief that a column of smoke meant Concord was on fire.
? Cuba while leaving behind 15,000troops is a "defeat" for the Soviets or a "defeat" for the United States depends more on how it is construed than on the military significance of the troops, and the construction placed on the outcome is not easily foreseeable.
? The resulting international relations often have the character of a competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve. Particularly in the relations
? between major adversaries -
-
are decided not by who can bring the most force to bear in a locality, or on a particular issue, but by who is eventually will- ing to bring more force to bear or able to make it appear that
sincethecloseofWorldWarI1
more is forthcoming.
There are few clear choices -
-
between East and West
issues
? there have been but a few clear choices
between war and
peace. The actual decisions to engage in war -
whether the Korean War that did occur or a war at Berlin or Quemoy or
Lebanon that did not -
were decisions to engage in a war of un- certain size, uncertain as to adversary, as to the weapons in- volved, even as to the issues that might be brought into it and the possible outcomes that might result. They were decisions to embark on a risky engagement, one that could develop a momentum of its own and get out of hand. Whether it is bet- ter to be red than dead is hardly worth arguing about; it is not a choice that has arisen for us or has seemed about to arise in the
nuclear era. The questions that do arise involve degrees ofrisk- what risk is worth taking, and how to evaluate the risk in-volved in a course of action. The perils that countries face are not as straightforward as suicide, but more like Russian roulette. The
the sheer unpredictability of dangerous
? ? fact of uncertainty
events -
- notonlyblursthings,itchangestheircharacter. Itadds
? ? an entire dimension to military relations: the manipulation of risk.
There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and the Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a major nuclear war cannot occur. Itonlymeansthatifitoccursitwillresultfromaprocessthatis
? 96 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 97
advertent war appears to go up. This is why they are called "crises. " The essence of the crisis is its unpredictability. The "crisis" that is confidently believed to involve no danger of things getting out of hand is no crisis; no matter how energetic the activity, as long as things are believed safe there is no crisis. And a "crisis" that is known to entail disaster or large losses, or great changes of some sort that are completely foreseeable, is also no crisis; it is over as soon as it begins, there is no sus- pense. It is the essence of a crisis that the participants are not fully in control of events; they take steps and make decisions that raise or lower the danger, but in a realm of risk and uncer- tainty.
Deterrence has to be understood in relation to this uncer- tainty. We often talk as though a "deterrent threat" was a credible threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliber- ately in response to some enemy transgression. People who voice doubts, for example, about American willingness to launch war on the Soviet Union in case of Soviet aggression against some ally, and people who defend American resolve against those doubts, both often tend to argue in terms of a once- for-all decision. The picture is drawn of a Soviet attack, say, on Greece or Turkey or West Germany, and the question is raised, would the United States then launch a retaliatory blow against theSovietUnion? Someansweradisdainfulno,someanswera proud yes, but neither seems to be answering the pertinent question. The choice is unlikely to be one between everything and nothing. The question is really: is the United States likely to
do something that is fraught with the danger of war, something that could lead- through a compounding of actions and reac- tions, of calculations and miscalculations, of alarms and false alarms, of commitments and challenges- toa major war?
This is why deterrent threats are often so credible. They do not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge. A response that carries some risk of war can be plausible, even reasonable, at a time when a final, ultimate decision to have a general war would be implaus- ible or unreasonable. A country can threaten to stumble into a
Soviet Union had any desire to engage in a major war, or that there was anything at issue that, on its merits, could not be set- tled without general war. If there was danger it seems to have been that each side might have taken a series of steps, actions and reactions and countermeasures, piling up its threats and its commitments, generating a sense of showdown, demonstrat- ing a willingness to carry the thing as far as necessary, until one
sideortheotherbegantobelievethatwarhadalreadystarted,or was so inevitable that it should be started quickly, or that so much was now at stake that general war was preferable to ac- commodation.
The process would have had to be unforeseeable and unpre- dictable. If there were some clearly recognizable final critical steps that converted the situation from one in which war was unnecessary to one in which war was inevitable, the step would not have been taken. Alternatives would have been found. Any transition from peace to war would have had to traverse a re-
-
or misinterpretations, or actions with unforeseen consequences,
gion of uncertainty
of misunderstandings or miscalculations
in which things got out of hand.
There was nothing about the blockade of Cuba by American
realizing that they
? naval vessels that could have led straightforwardly into general war. Any foreseeable course of events would have involved
steps that the Soviets or the Americans -
would lead straightforwardly to general war -
would not have taken. But the Soviets could be expected to take steps that, though not leading directly to war, could further compound risk; they might incur some risk of war rather than back down
completely. The Cuban crisis was a contest in risk taking, in- volving steps that would have made no sense if they led predict- ably and ineluctably to a major war, yet would also have made no sense if they were completely without danger. Neither side needed to believe the other side would deliberately and know- ingly take the step that would raise the possibility to a certainty.
What deters such crises and makes them infrequent is that they are genuinely dangerous. Whatever happens to the danger of deliberate premeditated war in such a crisis, the danger of in-
? ? ? 98 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
war even if it cannot credibly threaten to invite one. In fact, though a country may not be able with absolute credibility to threaten general war, it may be equally unable with absolute credibility to forestall a major war. The Russians would have been out of their minds at the time of the Cuban crisis to incur deliberately a major nuclear war with the United States; their missile threats were far from credible, there was nothing that the United States wanted out of the Cuban crisis that the Rus-
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 99
"superior" country has some advantage. But this is a far cry from the notion that the two sides just measure up to each other and one bows before the other's superiority and acknowledges that he was only bluffing. Any situation that scares one side will scare both sides with the danger of a war that neither wants, and both will have to pick their way carefully through the crisis, never quite sure that the other knows how to avoid stumbling over the brink.
Brinkmanship: The Manipulation of Risk If "brinkmanship" means anything, it means manipulating the
shaved risk ofwar. It means exploiting the danger that some- body may inadvertently go over the brink, dragging the other with him. If two climbers are tied together, and one wants to intimidate the other by seeming about to fall over the edge, there has to be some uncertainty or anticipated irrationality or it won't work. If the brink is clearly marked and provides a firm footing, no loose pebbles underfoot and no gusts of wind to catch one off guard, if each climber is in full control of himself and never gets dizzy, neither can pose any risk to the other by approaching the brink. There is no danger in approaching it; and while either can deliberately jump off, he cannot credibly pretend that he is about to. Any attempt to intimi- date or to deter the other climber depends on the threat of slipping or stumbling. With loose ground, gusty winds, and a propensity toward dizziness, there is some danger when a climber approaches the edge; one can credibly threaten to fall off accidentally by standing near the brink.
Without uncertainty, deterrent threats of war would take the form of trip-wires. To incur commitment is to lay a trip-wire, one that is plainly visible, that cannot be stumbled on, and that is manifestly connected up to the machinery of war. And if effective, it works much like a physical barrier. The tripwire will not be crossed as long as it has not been placed in an in- tolerable location, and it will not be placed in an intolerable lo- cation as long as there is no uncertainty about each other's
sians could have rationally denied at the cost of general war.
just might, in spite of all their care and all our care -
the brink and over it in a general war, had some substance. If we were anywhere near the brink of war on that occasion, it was a war that neither side wanted but that both sides might have been unable to forestall.
The idea, expressed by some writers, that such deterrence depends on a "credible first strike capability," and that a coun- try cannot plausibly threaten to engage in a general war over anything but a mortal assault on itself unless it has an appre- ciable capacity to blunt the other side's attack, seems to depend
on the clean-cut notion that war results
- lead up to
? Yet their implicit threat to behave in a way that might
that
? result -
or is expected to
-
only from adeliberate yes- no decision. But if war tends
to result from aprocess, a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved, more and more expectant, more and more concerned not to be a slow second in case the war starts, it is not a "credible first strike" that one threatens, but just plain war. The Soviet Union can indeed threaten us with war: they can even threaten us with a war that we eventu- ally start, by threatening to get involved with us in a process that blows up into war. And some of the arguments about "superiority" and "inferiority" seem to imply that one of the two sides, being weaker, must absolutely fear war and concede while the other, being stronger, may confidently expect the other
to yield. There is undoubtedly a good deal to the notion that the country with the less impressive military capability may be less feared, and the other may run the riskier course in a crisis; other things being equal, one anticipates that the strategically
? ? ? 100 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT
motives and nothing at issue that is worth a war to both sides. Either side can stick its neck out, confident that the other will not chop it off. As long as the process is a series of discrete steps, taken deliberately, without any uncertainty as to the con- sequences, this process of military commitment and maneuver
101
never end in disaster. It could only terminate in disaster if one of the players made a deIiberate move that he knew would cause disaster, and he would not. Second, the possibility of dis- aster will be reflected in the players' tactics. White can effec- tively keep Black's queen on her own side of the board by gettingaknightacrossfirst;orhecankeepbothBlack'sknights on their own side by getting his queen across first. This ability to block or to deter certain moves of the adversary will be an im- portant part of the game; the threat of disaster will be effective, so effective that the disaster never occurs.
In fact, the result is no different from a rule that says no queen can cross a center line if an opponent's knight has al- ready crossed it, and no knight can cross the center line if an opponent's queen has already crossed it. Prohibitive penalties imposed on deliberate actions are equivalent to ordinary rules.
The characteristic that this chess game shares with the trip- wire diplomacy, and that accounts for its peculiar safety, is the absence of uncertainty. There is always some moment, or some final step, in which one side or the other has the last clear chance to turn the course of events away from war (or from disaster in our game of chess) or to turn it away from a political situation that would induce the other to take the final step to- ward war. The skillful chess player will keep the knight across the center line or near enough to cross before his opponent's queen can get across, with due allowance for the cost of having to devote resources to the purpose. Skillful diplomacy, in the absence of uncertainty, consists in arranging things so that it is one's opponent who is embarrassed by having the "last clear
chance" to avert disaster by turning aside or abstaining from what he wanted to do.
But off the chess board the last chance to avert disaster is not always clear. One does not always know what moves of his own would lead to disaster, one cannot always perceive the moves that the other side has already taken or has set afoot, or what interpretation will be put on one's own actions; one does not al- ways understand clearly what situations the other side would not, at some moment, accept in preference to war. When we
? would not lead to war. Imminent war -
- continually threatened, but the threats would work. They would work unless one side were pushed too far; but if the push-
would be ing side knows how far that is, it will not push that far.
The resulting world -
- discriminate in favor of passivity against initiative. It is easier to deter than to compel. Among a group of arthritics moving deli- cately and slowly at a cocktail party, no one can be dislodged from his position near the bar, or ousted from his favorite chair; bodily contact is equally painful to his assailant. By standing in the doorway, one can prevent the entrance or exit of another
the world without uncertainty
would
ailing guest who is unwilling to push his way painfully through. In fact, without uncertainty all the military threats and ma- neuvers would be like diplomacy with rigid rules and can be illustrated with amodified game of chess. A chess game can end in win, lose, or draw. Let's change the game by adding a fourth outcome called "disaster. " If "disaster" occurs, a heavy fine is levied on both players, so that each is worse off than if he had simply lost the game. And the rules specify what causes dis- aster: specifically,if either player has moved his knight across the
center line and the other player has moved his queen across the center line, the game terminates at once and both players are scored with a disaster. If a white knight is already on the black side of the board when the black queen moves across to the white side, the black queen's move terminates the game in dis- aster; if the queen was already across when White moved his knight across the center line, the knight's move terminates the game in disaster for both players. And the same applies for the
white queen and the black knight.
What does this new rule do to the way a game is played? If a
game is played well, and both players play for the best score they can get, we can state two observations. First, a game will
possible war
? ? 102 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 103
in Wlxte's favor; he created the pressure, but both are subject to the same risk. White's advantage is that he can back out more quickly, as we have set up the game in this example; even he cannot retreat, though, until Black has made his next move, and for the moment both have the same incentive to come to terms. (White'sabilitytoretreat,andBlack'sinability,mayseemmore of an advantage to White than it actually is; his ability to retreat is an ability to save both players, equally, from disaster. If no bargain is reached, the white knight has to return, because he is the only one who can. If Black can avoid entering any nego- tiation- can absent himself from the room or turn off his hear- ingaid- White's soleremainingobjectivewillbetogethisown knight back before he blows things up. ) If "disaster" is only somewhat worse, not drastically worse, than losing the chess game, the side that is losing may have more incentive to threaten disaster, or more immunity to the other's threat, and perhaps in consequence a stronger bargaining position. Note, in particular, that all of this has nothing to do with whether a knight is more or less potent than a queen in the chess game; queen and knight can be interchanged in the analysis of this paragraph. If the clash of a squad with a division can lead to unintended war, or of a protest marcher with an armed police-
man to an unwanted riot, their potencies are equal in respect of the threats that count.
In this way uncertainty imports tactics of intimidation into the game. One can incur a moderate probability of disaster, sharing it with his adversary, as a deterrent or compellent de- vice, where one could not take, or persuasively threaten to take, a deliberate last clear step into certain disaster. 2
2. To clarify the theoretical point it may be worth observing that the uncertainty and unpredictability need not arise from a genuine random mechanism like the dice. It is unpredictability, not "chance," that makes the difference; it could as well arise in the clumsiness of the players, some uncertainty about the rules of the game or the scoring system, bad visibility or moves made in secret, the need to commit certain moves invisibly in advance, meddling by a third party, or errors made by the referee. Dice are merely a convenient way to introduce unpredictability into an artificial example.
? add uncertainty to this artificial chess game we are not so sure that disaster will be avoided. More important, the risk of disas- ter becomes a manipulative element in the situation. It can be exploited to intimidate.
To see this, make one more change in the rules. Let us not have disaster occur automatically when queen and knight of op- posite color have crossed the center line. Instead, when that occurs, the referee rolls a die. If an ace comes up the game is over and both players are scored with disaster, but if any other number appears the play goes on. If after the next move the queen and knight are still across the center line the dice are rolled again, and so on.
This is a very different game. And not just because disaster may or may not occur when queen and knight get into those positions, instead of occurring with certainty. The difference is that now queen and knight may actually be moved into those positions. One can deliberately move his knight across the line in an attempt to make the queen retreat, if one thinks his ad- versary is less willing to incur a continuing risk of disaster, or thinks his adversary can be persuaded that oneself will not re- treat, and if the momentary risk of disaster is not prohibitive. In fact, getting one's knight across and blocking its return with one's own pieces, so that it clearly takes several moves to re- treat, may persuade the adversary that only he, by withdrawing his queen, can reduce the risk within a tolerable time.
? If the black queen cannot retreat- if her exit is blocked against timely retreat- the white knight's tactic to force her withdrawal is ineffectual and gratuitously risky. But it can pos- sibly serve another end (another risky one), namely, to enforce "negotiation. " By crossing over,once the queen has crossed and cannot readily return, the knight can threaten disaster; White can propose Black's surrender, or a stalemate, or the removal of a bishop or the sacrifice of a pawn. What he gets out of this is wide open; but what began as a chess game has been converted into a bargaining game. Both sides are under similar pressure to settle the game or at least to get the white knight out of mis- chief. The outcome, it should be noticed, will not necessarily be
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Violence, especially war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable, depending on decisions made by fallible human beings orga- nized into imperfect governments, depending on fallible com- munications and warning systems and on the untested perfor- mance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own.
This last is particularly true, because what one does today in a crisis affects what one can be expected to do tomorrow. A governmentneverknowsjusthowcommitteditistoactionuntil the occasion when its commitment is challenged. Nations, like people, are continually engaged in demonstrations of resolve, tests of nerve, and explorations for understandings and misun- derstandings.
One never quite knows in the course of a diplomatic confron- tation how opinion will converge on signs of weakness. One never quite knows what exits will begin to look cowardly to oneself or to the bystanders or to one's adversary. It would be possible to get into a situation in which either side felt that to yield now would create such an asymmetrical situation, would be such a gratuitous act of surrender, that whoever backed down could not persuade anybody that he wouldn't yield again tomorrow and the day after.
This is why there is a genuine risk of major war not from "accidents" in the military machine but through a diplomatic process of commitment that is itself unpredictable. The unpre- dictability is not due solely to what a destroyer commander might do at midnight when he comes across a Soviet (or Ameri- can) freighter at sea, but to the psychological process by which particular things become identified with courage or appease- ment or how particular things get included in or left out of a diplomatic package. Whether the removal of their missiles from
If all threats were fully believable (except for the ones that were completely unbelievable) we might live in a strange world
-
on enforceable law. Countries would hasten to set up their threats; and if the violence that would accompany infraction were confidently expected, and sufficiently dreadful to outweigh the fruits of transgression, the world might get frozen into a set of laws enforced by what we could figuratively call the Wrath of God. If we could threaten world inundation for any encroach- ment on the Berlin corridor, and everyone believed it and un- derstood precisely what crime would bring about the deluge, it might not matter whether the whole thing were arranged by human or supernatural powers. If there were no uncertainty about what would and would not set off the violence, and if everyone could avoid accidentally overstepping the bounds, and if we and the Soviets (and everybody else) could avoid
perhapsa safe one, with many of the marks of a world based
making simultaneous and incompatible threats, every nation would have to live within the rules set up by its adversary. And if all the threats depended on some kind of physical positioning of territorial claims, trip-wires, troop barriers, automatic alarm systems, and other such arrangements, and all were completely infallible and fully credible, we might have something like an
? old fashioned western land rush, at the end of which -
? as long as nobody tripped on his neighbor's electric fence and set the
? whole thing off -
the world would be carved up into a tightly bound status quo. The world would be full of literal and figura- tive frontiers and thresholds that nobody in his right mind
would cross.
? 92
c
? 94 ARMS AND 1NFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 95
not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully pre- dictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control. War has always involved uncertainty, especially as to its outcome; but with the technol- ogy and the geography and the politics of today, it is hard to see how a major war could get started except in the presence of un- certainty. Some kind of error or inadvertence, some miscalcula- tions of enemy reactions or misreading of enemy intent, some steps taken without knowledge of steps taken by the other side, some random event or false alarm, or some decisive action to
hedge against the unforeseeable would have to be involved in the process on one side or both. '
This does not mean that there is nothing the United States would fight a major war to defend, but that these are things that the Soviet Union would not fight a major war to obtain. And there are undoubtedly things the Soviet Union would fight a major war to defend, but these are not things the United States would fight a major war to obtain. Both sides may get into a position in which compromise is impossible, in which the only visible outcomes would entail a loss to one side or the other so great that both would choose to fight a major nuclear war. But neither side wants to get into such a position; and there is noth- ing presently at issue between East and West that would get both sides into that position deliberately.
The Cuban crisis illustrates the point. Nearly everybody ap- peared to feel that there was some danger of a general nuclear war. Whether the danger was large or small, hardly anyone seems to have considered it negligible. To my knowledge, though, no one has ever supposed that the United States or the
1. A superb example of this process, one involving local incidents, accidents of darkness and morning mist, overzealous commanders, troops in panic, erroneous assessment of damage, public opinion, and possibly a little "catalytic action" by warmongers, all conjoining to get governments more nearly committed to a war that might not have been inevitable, occurred within drum-call of my own home. See the detailed account in Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1963). It is chastening to consider that the "shot heard round the world" may have been fired in the mistaken belief that a column of smoke meant Concord was on fire.
? Cuba while leaving behind 15,000troops is a "defeat" for the Soviets or a "defeat" for the United States depends more on how it is construed than on the military significance of the troops, and the construction placed on the outcome is not easily foreseeable.
? The resulting international relations often have the character of a competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve. Particularly in the relations
? between major adversaries -
-
are decided not by who can bring the most force to bear in a locality, or on a particular issue, but by who is eventually will- ing to bring more force to bear or able to make it appear that
sincethecloseofWorldWarI1
more is forthcoming.
There are few clear choices -
-
between East and West
issues
? there have been but a few clear choices
between war and
peace. The actual decisions to engage in war -
whether the Korean War that did occur or a war at Berlin or Quemoy or
Lebanon that did not -
were decisions to engage in a war of un- certain size, uncertain as to adversary, as to the weapons in- volved, even as to the issues that might be brought into it and the possible outcomes that might result. They were decisions to embark on a risky engagement, one that could develop a momentum of its own and get out of hand. Whether it is bet- ter to be red than dead is hardly worth arguing about; it is not a choice that has arisen for us or has seemed about to arise in the
nuclear era. The questions that do arise involve degrees ofrisk- what risk is worth taking, and how to evaluate the risk in-volved in a course of action. The perils that countries face are not as straightforward as suicide, but more like Russian roulette. The
the sheer unpredictability of dangerous
? ? fact of uncertainty
events -
- notonlyblursthings,itchangestheircharacter. Itadds
? ? an entire dimension to military relations: the manipulation of risk.
There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and the Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a major nuclear war cannot occur. Itonlymeansthatifitoccursitwillresultfromaprocessthatis
? 96 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 97
advertent war appears to go up. This is why they are called "crises. " The essence of the crisis is its unpredictability. The "crisis" that is confidently believed to involve no danger of things getting out of hand is no crisis; no matter how energetic the activity, as long as things are believed safe there is no crisis. And a "crisis" that is known to entail disaster or large losses, or great changes of some sort that are completely foreseeable, is also no crisis; it is over as soon as it begins, there is no sus- pense. It is the essence of a crisis that the participants are not fully in control of events; they take steps and make decisions that raise or lower the danger, but in a realm of risk and uncer- tainty.
Deterrence has to be understood in relation to this uncer- tainty. We often talk as though a "deterrent threat" was a credible threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliber- ately in response to some enemy transgression. People who voice doubts, for example, about American willingness to launch war on the Soviet Union in case of Soviet aggression against some ally, and people who defend American resolve against those doubts, both often tend to argue in terms of a once- for-all decision. The picture is drawn of a Soviet attack, say, on Greece or Turkey or West Germany, and the question is raised, would the United States then launch a retaliatory blow against theSovietUnion? Someansweradisdainfulno,someanswera proud yes, but neither seems to be answering the pertinent question. The choice is unlikely to be one between everything and nothing. The question is really: is the United States likely to
do something that is fraught with the danger of war, something that could lead- through a compounding of actions and reac- tions, of calculations and miscalculations, of alarms and false alarms, of commitments and challenges- toa major war?
This is why deterrent threats are often so credible. They do not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge. A response that carries some risk of war can be plausible, even reasonable, at a time when a final, ultimate decision to have a general war would be implaus- ible or unreasonable. A country can threaten to stumble into a
Soviet Union had any desire to engage in a major war, or that there was anything at issue that, on its merits, could not be set- tled without general war. If there was danger it seems to have been that each side might have taken a series of steps, actions and reactions and countermeasures, piling up its threats and its commitments, generating a sense of showdown, demonstrat- ing a willingness to carry the thing as far as necessary, until one
sideortheotherbegantobelievethatwarhadalreadystarted,or was so inevitable that it should be started quickly, or that so much was now at stake that general war was preferable to ac- commodation.
The process would have had to be unforeseeable and unpre- dictable. If there were some clearly recognizable final critical steps that converted the situation from one in which war was unnecessary to one in which war was inevitable, the step would not have been taken. Alternatives would have been found. Any transition from peace to war would have had to traverse a re-
-
or misinterpretations, or actions with unforeseen consequences,
gion of uncertainty
of misunderstandings or miscalculations
in which things got out of hand.
There was nothing about the blockade of Cuba by American
realizing that they
? naval vessels that could have led straightforwardly into general war. Any foreseeable course of events would have involved
steps that the Soviets or the Americans -
would lead straightforwardly to general war -
would not have taken. But the Soviets could be expected to take steps that, though not leading directly to war, could further compound risk; they might incur some risk of war rather than back down
completely. The Cuban crisis was a contest in risk taking, in- volving steps that would have made no sense if they led predict- ably and ineluctably to a major war, yet would also have made no sense if they were completely without danger. Neither side needed to believe the other side would deliberately and know- ingly take the step that would raise the possibility to a certainty.
What deters such crises and makes them infrequent is that they are genuinely dangerous. Whatever happens to the danger of deliberate premeditated war in such a crisis, the danger of in-
? ? ? 98 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
war even if it cannot credibly threaten to invite one. In fact, though a country may not be able with absolute credibility to threaten general war, it may be equally unable with absolute credibility to forestall a major war. The Russians would have been out of their minds at the time of the Cuban crisis to incur deliberately a major nuclear war with the United States; their missile threats were far from credible, there was nothing that the United States wanted out of the Cuban crisis that the Rus-
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 99
"superior" country has some advantage. But this is a far cry from the notion that the two sides just measure up to each other and one bows before the other's superiority and acknowledges that he was only bluffing. Any situation that scares one side will scare both sides with the danger of a war that neither wants, and both will have to pick their way carefully through the crisis, never quite sure that the other knows how to avoid stumbling over the brink.
Brinkmanship: The Manipulation of Risk If "brinkmanship" means anything, it means manipulating the
shaved risk ofwar. It means exploiting the danger that some- body may inadvertently go over the brink, dragging the other with him. If two climbers are tied together, and one wants to intimidate the other by seeming about to fall over the edge, there has to be some uncertainty or anticipated irrationality or it won't work. If the brink is clearly marked and provides a firm footing, no loose pebbles underfoot and no gusts of wind to catch one off guard, if each climber is in full control of himself and never gets dizzy, neither can pose any risk to the other by approaching the brink. There is no danger in approaching it; and while either can deliberately jump off, he cannot credibly pretend that he is about to. Any attempt to intimi- date or to deter the other climber depends on the threat of slipping or stumbling. With loose ground, gusty winds, and a propensity toward dizziness, there is some danger when a climber approaches the edge; one can credibly threaten to fall off accidentally by standing near the brink.
Without uncertainty, deterrent threats of war would take the form of trip-wires. To incur commitment is to lay a trip-wire, one that is plainly visible, that cannot be stumbled on, and that is manifestly connected up to the machinery of war. And if effective, it works much like a physical barrier. The tripwire will not be crossed as long as it has not been placed in an in- tolerable location, and it will not be placed in an intolerable lo- cation as long as there is no uncertainty about each other's
sians could have rationally denied at the cost of general war.
just might, in spite of all their care and all our care -
the brink and over it in a general war, had some substance. If we were anywhere near the brink of war on that occasion, it was a war that neither side wanted but that both sides might have been unable to forestall.
The idea, expressed by some writers, that such deterrence depends on a "credible first strike capability," and that a coun- try cannot plausibly threaten to engage in a general war over anything but a mortal assault on itself unless it has an appre- ciable capacity to blunt the other side's attack, seems to depend
on the clean-cut notion that war results
- lead up to
? Yet their implicit threat to behave in a way that might
that
? result -
or is expected to
-
only from adeliberate yes- no decision. But if war tends
to result from aprocess, a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved, more and more expectant, more and more concerned not to be a slow second in case the war starts, it is not a "credible first strike" that one threatens, but just plain war. The Soviet Union can indeed threaten us with war: they can even threaten us with a war that we eventu- ally start, by threatening to get involved with us in a process that blows up into war. And some of the arguments about "superiority" and "inferiority" seem to imply that one of the two sides, being weaker, must absolutely fear war and concede while the other, being stronger, may confidently expect the other
to yield. There is undoubtedly a good deal to the notion that the country with the less impressive military capability may be less feared, and the other may run the riskier course in a crisis; other things being equal, one anticipates that the strategically
? ? ? 100 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT
motives and nothing at issue that is worth a war to both sides. Either side can stick its neck out, confident that the other will not chop it off. As long as the process is a series of discrete steps, taken deliberately, without any uncertainty as to the con- sequences, this process of military commitment and maneuver
101
never end in disaster. It could only terminate in disaster if one of the players made a deIiberate move that he knew would cause disaster, and he would not. Second, the possibility of dis- aster will be reflected in the players' tactics. White can effec- tively keep Black's queen on her own side of the board by gettingaknightacrossfirst;orhecankeepbothBlack'sknights on their own side by getting his queen across first. This ability to block or to deter certain moves of the adversary will be an im- portant part of the game; the threat of disaster will be effective, so effective that the disaster never occurs.
In fact, the result is no different from a rule that says no queen can cross a center line if an opponent's knight has al- ready crossed it, and no knight can cross the center line if an opponent's queen has already crossed it. Prohibitive penalties imposed on deliberate actions are equivalent to ordinary rules.
The characteristic that this chess game shares with the trip- wire diplomacy, and that accounts for its peculiar safety, is the absence of uncertainty. There is always some moment, or some final step, in which one side or the other has the last clear chance to turn the course of events away from war (or from disaster in our game of chess) or to turn it away from a political situation that would induce the other to take the final step to- ward war. The skillful chess player will keep the knight across the center line or near enough to cross before his opponent's queen can get across, with due allowance for the cost of having to devote resources to the purpose. Skillful diplomacy, in the absence of uncertainty, consists in arranging things so that it is one's opponent who is embarrassed by having the "last clear
chance" to avert disaster by turning aside or abstaining from what he wanted to do.
But off the chess board the last chance to avert disaster is not always clear. One does not always know what moves of his own would lead to disaster, one cannot always perceive the moves that the other side has already taken or has set afoot, or what interpretation will be put on one's own actions; one does not al- ways understand clearly what situations the other side would not, at some moment, accept in preference to war. When we
? would not lead to war. Imminent war -
- continually threatened, but the threats would work. They would work unless one side were pushed too far; but if the push-
would be ing side knows how far that is, it will not push that far.
The resulting world -
- discriminate in favor of passivity against initiative. It is easier to deter than to compel. Among a group of arthritics moving deli- cately and slowly at a cocktail party, no one can be dislodged from his position near the bar, or ousted from his favorite chair; bodily contact is equally painful to his assailant. By standing in the doorway, one can prevent the entrance or exit of another
the world without uncertainty
would
ailing guest who is unwilling to push his way painfully through. In fact, without uncertainty all the military threats and ma- neuvers would be like diplomacy with rigid rules and can be illustrated with amodified game of chess. A chess game can end in win, lose, or draw. Let's change the game by adding a fourth outcome called "disaster. " If "disaster" occurs, a heavy fine is levied on both players, so that each is worse off than if he had simply lost the game. And the rules specify what causes dis- aster: specifically,if either player has moved his knight across the
center line and the other player has moved his queen across the center line, the game terminates at once and both players are scored with a disaster. If a white knight is already on the black side of the board when the black queen moves across to the white side, the black queen's move terminates the game in dis- aster; if the queen was already across when White moved his knight across the center line, the knight's move terminates the game in disaster for both players. And the same applies for the
white queen and the black knight.
What does this new rule do to the way a game is played? If a
game is played well, and both players play for the best score they can get, we can state two observations. First, a game will
possible war
? ? 102 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 103
in Wlxte's favor; he created the pressure, but both are subject to the same risk. White's advantage is that he can back out more quickly, as we have set up the game in this example; even he cannot retreat, though, until Black has made his next move, and for the moment both have the same incentive to come to terms. (White'sabilitytoretreat,andBlack'sinability,mayseemmore of an advantage to White than it actually is; his ability to retreat is an ability to save both players, equally, from disaster. If no bargain is reached, the white knight has to return, because he is the only one who can. If Black can avoid entering any nego- tiation- can absent himself from the room or turn off his hear- ingaid- White's soleremainingobjectivewillbetogethisown knight back before he blows things up. ) If "disaster" is only somewhat worse, not drastically worse, than losing the chess game, the side that is losing may have more incentive to threaten disaster, or more immunity to the other's threat, and perhaps in consequence a stronger bargaining position. Note, in particular, that all of this has nothing to do with whether a knight is more or less potent than a queen in the chess game; queen and knight can be interchanged in the analysis of this paragraph. If the clash of a squad with a division can lead to unintended war, or of a protest marcher with an armed police-
man to an unwanted riot, their potencies are equal in respect of the threats that count.
In this way uncertainty imports tactics of intimidation into the game. One can incur a moderate probability of disaster, sharing it with his adversary, as a deterrent or compellent de- vice, where one could not take, or persuasively threaten to take, a deliberate last clear step into certain disaster. 2
2. To clarify the theoretical point it may be worth observing that the uncertainty and unpredictability need not arise from a genuine random mechanism like the dice. It is unpredictability, not "chance," that makes the difference; it could as well arise in the clumsiness of the players, some uncertainty about the rules of the game or the scoring system, bad visibility or moves made in secret, the need to commit certain moves invisibly in advance, meddling by a third party, or errors made by the referee. Dice are merely a convenient way to introduce unpredictability into an artificial example.
? add uncertainty to this artificial chess game we are not so sure that disaster will be avoided. More important, the risk of disas- ter becomes a manipulative element in the situation. It can be exploited to intimidate.
To see this, make one more change in the rules. Let us not have disaster occur automatically when queen and knight of op- posite color have crossed the center line. Instead, when that occurs, the referee rolls a die. If an ace comes up the game is over and both players are scored with disaster, but if any other number appears the play goes on. If after the next move the queen and knight are still across the center line the dice are rolled again, and so on.
This is a very different game. And not just because disaster may or may not occur when queen and knight get into those positions, instead of occurring with certainty. The difference is that now queen and knight may actually be moved into those positions. One can deliberately move his knight across the line in an attempt to make the queen retreat, if one thinks his ad- versary is less willing to incur a continuing risk of disaster, or thinks his adversary can be persuaded that oneself will not re- treat, and if the momentary risk of disaster is not prohibitive. In fact, getting one's knight across and blocking its return with one's own pieces, so that it clearly takes several moves to re- treat, may persuade the adversary that only he, by withdrawing his queen, can reduce the risk within a tolerable time.
? If the black queen cannot retreat- if her exit is blocked against timely retreat- the white knight's tactic to force her withdrawal is ineffectual and gratuitously risky. But it can pos- sibly serve another end (another risky one), namely, to enforce "negotiation. " By crossing over,once the queen has crossed and cannot readily return, the knight can threaten disaster; White can propose Black's surrender, or a stalemate, or the removal of a bishop or the sacrifice of a pawn. What he gets out of this is wide open; but what began as a chess game has been converted into a bargaining game. Both sides are under similar pressure to settle the game or at least to get the white knight out of mis- chief. The outcome, it should be noticed, will not necessarily be
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 104 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 105
The route by which major war might actually be reached would have the same kind of unpredictability. Either side can
engaging in a limited war would usually be such a
gains to the other side. The white knight is as potent as the black queen in creating a shared risk of d i ~ a s t e r . ~
Limited War as a Generator of Risk
Limited war, as a deterrent to continued aggression or as a compellent means of intimidation, often seems to require inter- pretation along these lines, as an action that enhances the risk of a greater war. The danger of major war is almost certainly increased by the occurrence of a limited war; it is almost cer- tainly increased by any enlargement in the scope or violence of a limited war that has already taken place. This being so, the threat to engage in limited war has two parts. One is the threat to inflict costs directly on the other side, in casualties, expendi- tures, loss of territory, loss of face, or anything else.
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 93
But uncertainty exists. Not everybody is always in his right mind. Not all the frontiers and thresholds are precisely defined, fully reliable, and known to be so beyond the least temptation to test them out, to explore for loopholes, or to take a chance that they may be disconnected this time. Violence, especially war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable, depending on decisions made by fallible human beings orga- nized into imperfect governments, depending on fallible com- munications and warning systems and on the untested perfor- mance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own.
This last is particularly true, because what one does today in a crisis affects what one can be expected to do tomorrow. A governmentneverknowsjusthowcommitteditistoactionuntil the occasion when its commitment is challenged. Nations, like people, are continually engaged in demonstrations of resolve, tests of nerve, and explorations for understandings and misun- derstandings.
One never quite knows in the course of a diplomatic confron- tation how opinion will converge on signs of weakness. One never quite knows what exits will begin to look cowardly to oneself or to the bystanders or to one's adversary. It would be possible to get into a situation in which either side felt that to yield now would create such an asymmetrical situation, would be such a gratuitous act of surrender, that whoever backed down could not persuade anybody that he wouldn't yield again tomorrow and the day after.
This is why there is a genuine risk of major war not from "accidents" in the military machine but through a diplomatic process of commitment that is itself unpredictable. The unpre- dictability is not due solely to what a destroyer commander might do at midnight when he comes across a Soviet (or Ameri- can) freighter at sea, but to the psychological process by which particular things become identified with courage or appease- ment or how particular things get included in or left out of a diplomatic package. Whether the removal of their missiles from
If all threats were fully believable (except for the ones that were completely unbelievable) we might live in a strange world
-
on enforceable law. Countries would hasten to set up their threats; and if the violence that would accompany infraction were confidently expected, and sufficiently dreadful to outweigh the fruits of transgression, the world might get frozen into a set of laws enforced by what we could figuratively call the Wrath of God. If we could threaten world inundation for any encroach- ment on the Berlin corridor, and everyone believed it and un- derstood precisely what crime would bring about the deluge, it might not matter whether the whole thing were arranged by human or supernatural powers. If there were no uncertainty about what would and would not set off the violence, and if everyone could avoid accidentally overstepping the bounds, and if we and the Soviets (and everybody else) could avoid
perhapsa safe one, with many of the marks of a world based
making simultaneous and incompatible threats, every nation would have to live within the rules set up by its adversary. And if all the threats depended on some kind of physical positioning of territorial claims, trip-wires, troop barriers, automatic alarm systems, and other such arrangements, and all were completely infallible and fully credible, we might have something like an
? old fashioned western land rush, at the end of which -
? as long as nobody tripped on his neighbor's electric fence and set the
? whole thing off -
the world would be carved up into a tightly bound status quo. The world would be full of literal and figura- tive frontiers and thresholds that nobody in his right mind
would cross.
? 92
c
? 94 ARMS AND 1NFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 95
not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully pre- dictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control. War has always involved uncertainty, especially as to its outcome; but with the technol- ogy and the geography and the politics of today, it is hard to see how a major war could get started except in the presence of un- certainty. Some kind of error or inadvertence, some miscalcula- tions of enemy reactions or misreading of enemy intent, some steps taken without knowledge of steps taken by the other side, some random event or false alarm, or some decisive action to
hedge against the unforeseeable would have to be involved in the process on one side or both. '
This does not mean that there is nothing the United States would fight a major war to defend, but that these are things that the Soviet Union would not fight a major war to obtain. And there are undoubtedly things the Soviet Union would fight a major war to defend, but these are not things the United States would fight a major war to obtain. Both sides may get into a position in which compromise is impossible, in which the only visible outcomes would entail a loss to one side or the other so great that both would choose to fight a major nuclear war. But neither side wants to get into such a position; and there is noth- ing presently at issue between East and West that would get both sides into that position deliberately.
The Cuban crisis illustrates the point. Nearly everybody ap- peared to feel that there was some danger of a general nuclear war. Whether the danger was large or small, hardly anyone seems to have considered it negligible. To my knowledge, though, no one has ever supposed that the United States or the
1. A superb example of this process, one involving local incidents, accidents of darkness and morning mist, overzealous commanders, troops in panic, erroneous assessment of damage, public opinion, and possibly a little "catalytic action" by warmongers, all conjoining to get governments more nearly committed to a war that might not have been inevitable, occurred within drum-call of my own home. See the detailed account in Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1963). It is chastening to consider that the "shot heard round the world" may have been fired in the mistaken belief that a column of smoke meant Concord was on fire.
? Cuba while leaving behind 15,000troops is a "defeat" for the Soviets or a "defeat" for the United States depends more on how it is construed than on the military significance of the troops, and the construction placed on the outcome is not easily foreseeable.
? The resulting international relations often have the character of a competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve. Particularly in the relations
? between major adversaries -
-
are decided not by who can bring the most force to bear in a locality, or on a particular issue, but by who is eventually will- ing to bring more force to bear or able to make it appear that
sincethecloseofWorldWarI1
more is forthcoming.
There are few clear choices -
-
between East and West
issues
? there have been but a few clear choices
between war and
peace. The actual decisions to engage in war -
whether the Korean War that did occur or a war at Berlin or Quemoy or
Lebanon that did not -
were decisions to engage in a war of un- certain size, uncertain as to adversary, as to the weapons in- volved, even as to the issues that might be brought into it and the possible outcomes that might result. They were decisions to embark on a risky engagement, one that could develop a momentum of its own and get out of hand. Whether it is bet- ter to be red than dead is hardly worth arguing about; it is not a choice that has arisen for us or has seemed about to arise in the
nuclear era. The questions that do arise involve degrees ofrisk- what risk is worth taking, and how to evaluate the risk in-volved in a course of action. The perils that countries face are not as straightforward as suicide, but more like Russian roulette. The
the sheer unpredictability of dangerous
? ? fact of uncertainty
events -
- notonlyblursthings,itchangestheircharacter. Itadds
? ? an entire dimension to military relations: the manipulation of risk.
There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and the Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a major nuclear war cannot occur. Itonlymeansthatifitoccursitwillresultfromaprocessthatis
? 96 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 97
advertent war appears to go up. This is why they are called "crises. " The essence of the crisis is its unpredictability. The "crisis" that is confidently believed to involve no danger of things getting out of hand is no crisis; no matter how energetic the activity, as long as things are believed safe there is no crisis. And a "crisis" that is known to entail disaster or large losses, or great changes of some sort that are completely foreseeable, is also no crisis; it is over as soon as it begins, there is no sus- pense. It is the essence of a crisis that the participants are not fully in control of events; they take steps and make decisions that raise or lower the danger, but in a realm of risk and uncer- tainty.
Deterrence has to be understood in relation to this uncer- tainty. We often talk as though a "deterrent threat" was a credible threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliber- ately in response to some enemy transgression. People who voice doubts, for example, about American willingness to launch war on the Soviet Union in case of Soviet aggression against some ally, and people who defend American resolve against those doubts, both often tend to argue in terms of a once- for-all decision. The picture is drawn of a Soviet attack, say, on Greece or Turkey or West Germany, and the question is raised, would the United States then launch a retaliatory blow against theSovietUnion? Someansweradisdainfulno,someanswera proud yes, but neither seems to be answering the pertinent question. The choice is unlikely to be one between everything and nothing. The question is really: is the United States likely to
do something that is fraught with the danger of war, something that could lead- through a compounding of actions and reac- tions, of calculations and miscalculations, of alarms and false alarms, of commitments and challenges- toa major war?
This is why deterrent threats are often so credible. They do not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge. A response that carries some risk of war can be plausible, even reasonable, at a time when a final, ultimate decision to have a general war would be implaus- ible or unreasonable. A country can threaten to stumble into a
Soviet Union had any desire to engage in a major war, or that there was anything at issue that, on its merits, could not be set- tled without general war. If there was danger it seems to have been that each side might have taken a series of steps, actions and reactions and countermeasures, piling up its threats and its commitments, generating a sense of showdown, demonstrat- ing a willingness to carry the thing as far as necessary, until one
sideortheotherbegantobelievethatwarhadalreadystarted,or was so inevitable that it should be started quickly, or that so much was now at stake that general war was preferable to ac- commodation.
The process would have had to be unforeseeable and unpre- dictable. If there were some clearly recognizable final critical steps that converted the situation from one in which war was unnecessary to one in which war was inevitable, the step would not have been taken. Alternatives would have been found. Any transition from peace to war would have had to traverse a re-
-
or misinterpretations, or actions with unforeseen consequences,
gion of uncertainty
of misunderstandings or miscalculations
in which things got out of hand.
There was nothing about the blockade of Cuba by American
realizing that they
? naval vessels that could have led straightforwardly into general war. Any foreseeable course of events would have involved
steps that the Soviets or the Americans -
would lead straightforwardly to general war -
would not have taken. But the Soviets could be expected to take steps that, though not leading directly to war, could further compound risk; they might incur some risk of war rather than back down
completely. The Cuban crisis was a contest in risk taking, in- volving steps that would have made no sense if they led predict- ably and ineluctably to a major war, yet would also have made no sense if they were completely without danger. Neither side needed to believe the other side would deliberately and know- ingly take the step that would raise the possibility to a certainty.
What deters such crises and makes them infrequent is that they are genuinely dangerous. Whatever happens to the danger of deliberate premeditated war in such a crisis, the danger of in-
? ? ? 98 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
war even if it cannot credibly threaten to invite one. In fact, though a country may not be able with absolute credibility to threaten general war, it may be equally unable with absolute credibility to forestall a major war. The Russians would have been out of their minds at the time of the Cuban crisis to incur deliberately a major nuclear war with the United States; their missile threats were far from credible, there was nothing that the United States wanted out of the Cuban crisis that the Rus-
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 99
"superior" country has some advantage. But this is a far cry from the notion that the two sides just measure up to each other and one bows before the other's superiority and acknowledges that he was only bluffing. Any situation that scares one side will scare both sides with the danger of a war that neither wants, and both will have to pick their way carefully through the crisis, never quite sure that the other knows how to avoid stumbling over the brink.
Brinkmanship: The Manipulation of Risk If "brinkmanship" means anything, it means manipulating the
shaved risk ofwar. It means exploiting the danger that some- body may inadvertently go over the brink, dragging the other with him. If two climbers are tied together, and one wants to intimidate the other by seeming about to fall over the edge, there has to be some uncertainty or anticipated irrationality or it won't work. If the brink is clearly marked and provides a firm footing, no loose pebbles underfoot and no gusts of wind to catch one off guard, if each climber is in full control of himself and never gets dizzy, neither can pose any risk to the other by approaching the brink. There is no danger in approaching it; and while either can deliberately jump off, he cannot credibly pretend that he is about to. Any attempt to intimi- date or to deter the other climber depends on the threat of slipping or stumbling. With loose ground, gusty winds, and a propensity toward dizziness, there is some danger when a climber approaches the edge; one can credibly threaten to fall off accidentally by standing near the brink.
Without uncertainty, deterrent threats of war would take the form of trip-wires. To incur commitment is to lay a trip-wire, one that is plainly visible, that cannot be stumbled on, and that is manifestly connected up to the machinery of war. And if effective, it works much like a physical barrier. The tripwire will not be crossed as long as it has not been placed in an in- tolerable location, and it will not be placed in an intolerable lo- cation as long as there is no uncertainty about each other's
sians could have rationally denied at the cost of general war.
just might, in spite of all their care and all our care -
the brink and over it in a general war, had some substance. If we were anywhere near the brink of war on that occasion, it was a war that neither side wanted but that both sides might have been unable to forestall.
The idea, expressed by some writers, that such deterrence depends on a "credible first strike capability," and that a coun- try cannot plausibly threaten to engage in a general war over anything but a mortal assault on itself unless it has an appre- ciable capacity to blunt the other side's attack, seems to depend
on the clean-cut notion that war results
- lead up to
? Yet their implicit threat to behave in a way that might
that
? result -
or is expected to
-
only from adeliberate yes- no decision. But if war tends
to result from aprocess, a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved, more and more expectant, more and more concerned not to be a slow second in case the war starts, it is not a "credible first strike" that one threatens, but just plain war. The Soviet Union can indeed threaten us with war: they can even threaten us with a war that we eventu- ally start, by threatening to get involved with us in a process that blows up into war. And some of the arguments about "superiority" and "inferiority" seem to imply that one of the two sides, being weaker, must absolutely fear war and concede while the other, being stronger, may confidently expect the other
to yield. There is undoubtedly a good deal to the notion that the country with the less impressive military capability may be less feared, and the other may run the riskier course in a crisis; other things being equal, one anticipates that the strategically
? ? ? 100 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT
motives and nothing at issue that is worth a war to both sides. Either side can stick its neck out, confident that the other will not chop it off. As long as the process is a series of discrete steps, taken deliberately, without any uncertainty as to the con- sequences, this process of military commitment and maneuver
101
never end in disaster. It could only terminate in disaster if one of the players made a deIiberate move that he knew would cause disaster, and he would not. Second, the possibility of dis- aster will be reflected in the players' tactics. White can effec- tively keep Black's queen on her own side of the board by gettingaknightacrossfirst;orhecankeepbothBlack'sknights on their own side by getting his queen across first. This ability to block or to deter certain moves of the adversary will be an im- portant part of the game; the threat of disaster will be effective, so effective that the disaster never occurs.
In fact, the result is no different from a rule that says no queen can cross a center line if an opponent's knight has al- ready crossed it, and no knight can cross the center line if an opponent's queen has already crossed it. Prohibitive penalties imposed on deliberate actions are equivalent to ordinary rules.
The characteristic that this chess game shares with the trip- wire diplomacy, and that accounts for its peculiar safety, is the absence of uncertainty. There is always some moment, or some final step, in which one side or the other has the last clear chance to turn the course of events away from war (or from disaster in our game of chess) or to turn it away from a political situation that would induce the other to take the final step to- ward war. The skillful chess player will keep the knight across the center line or near enough to cross before his opponent's queen can get across, with due allowance for the cost of having to devote resources to the purpose. Skillful diplomacy, in the absence of uncertainty, consists in arranging things so that it is one's opponent who is embarrassed by having the "last clear
chance" to avert disaster by turning aside or abstaining from what he wanted to do.
But off the chess board the last chance to avert disaster is not always clear. One does not always know what moves of his own would lead to disaster, one cannot always perceive the moves that the other side has already taken or has set afoot, or what interpretation will be put on one's own actions; one does not al- ways understand clearly what situations the other side would not, at some moment, accept in preference to war. When we
? would not lead to war. Imminent war -
- continually threatened, but the threats would work. They would work unless one side were pushed too far; but if the push-
would be ing side knows how far that is, it will not push that far.
The resulting world -
- discriminate in favor of passivity against initiative. It is easier to deter than to compel. Among a group of arthritics moving deli- cately and slowly at a cocktail party, no one can be dislodged from his position near the bar, or ousted from his favorite chair; bodily contact is equally painful to his assailant. By standing in the doorway, one can prevent the entrance or exit of another
the world without uncertainty
would
ailing guest who is unwilling to push his way painfully through. In fact, without uncertainty all the military threats and ma- neuvers would be like diplomacy with rigid rules and can be illustrated with amodified game of chess. A chess game can end in win, lose, or draw. Let's change the game by adding a fourth outcome called "disaster. " If "disaster" occurs, a heavy fine is levied on both players, so that each is worse off than if he had simply lost the game. And the rules specify what causes dis- aster: specifically,if either player has moved his knight across the
center line and the other player has moved his queen across the center line, the game terminates at once and both players are scored with a disaster. If a white knight is already on the black side of the board when the black queen moves across to the white side, the black queen's move terminates the game in dis- aster; if the queen was already across when White moved his knight across the center line, the knight's move terminates the game in disaster for both players. And the same applies for the
white queen and the black knight.
What does this new rule do to the way a game is played? If a
game is played well, and both players play for the best score they can get, we can state two observations. First, a game will
possible war
? ? 102 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 103
in Wlxte's favor; he created the pressure, but both are subject to the same risk. White's advantage is that he can back out more quickly, as we have set up the game in this example; even he cannot retreat, though, until Black has made his next move, and for the moment both have the same incentive to come to terms. (White'sabilitytoretreat,andBlack'sinability,mayseemmore of an advantage to White than it actually is; his ability to retreat is an ability to save both players, equally, from disaster. If no bargain is reached, the white knight has to return, because he is the only one who can. If Black can avoid entering any nego- tiation- can absent himself from the room or turn off his hear- ingaid- White's soleremainingobjectivewillbetogethisown knight back before he blows things up. ) If "disaster" is only somewhat worse, not drastically worse, than losing the chess game, the side that is losing may have more incentive to threaten disaster, or more immunity to the other's threat, and perhaps in consequence a stronger bargaining position. Note, in particular, that all of this has nothing to do with whether a knight is more or less potent than a queen in the chess game; queen and knight can be interchanged in the analysis of this paragraph. If the clash of a squad with a division can lead to unintended war, or of a protest marcher with an armed police-
man to an unwanted riot, their potencies are equal in respect of the threats that count.
In this way uncertainty imports tactics of intimidation into the game. One can incur a moderate probability of disaster, sharing it with his adversary, as a deterrent or compellent de- vice, where one could not take, or persuasively threaten to take, a deliberate last clear step into certain disaster. 2
2. To clarify the theoretical point it may be worth observing that the uncertainty and unpredictability need not arise from a genuine random mechanism like the dice. It is unpredictability, not "chance," that makes the difference; it could as well arise in the clumsiness of the players, some uncertainty about the rules of the game or the scoring system, bad visibility or moves made in secret, the need to commit certain moves invisibly in advance, meddling by a third party, or errors made by the referee. Dice are merely a convenient way to introduce unpredictability into an artificial example.
? add uncertainty to this artificial chess game we are not so sure that disaster will be avoided. More important, the risk of disas- ter becomes a manipulative element in the situation. It can be exploited to intimidate.
To see this, make one more change in the rules. Let us not have disaster occur automatically when queen and knight of op- posite color have crossed the center line. Instead, when that occurs, the referee rolls a die. If an ace comes up the game is over and both players are scored with disaster, but if any other number appears the play goes on. If after the next move the queen and knight are still across the center line the dice are rolled again, and so on.
This is a very different game. And not just because disaster may or may not occur when queen and knight get into those positions, instead of occurring with certainty. The difference is that now queen and knight may actually be moved into those positions. One can deliberately move his knight across the line in an attempt to make the queen retreat, if one thinks his ad- versary is less willing to incur a continuing risk of disaster, or thinks his adversary can be persuaded that oneself will not re- treat, and if the momentary risk of disaster is not prohibitive. In fact, getting one's knight across and blocking its return with one's own pieces, so that it clearly takes several moves to re- treat, may persuade the adversary that only he, by withdrawing his queen, can reduce the risk within a tolerable time.
? If the black queen cannot retreat- if her exit is blocked against timely retreat- the white knight's tactic to force her withdrawal is ineffectual and gratuitously risky. But it can pos- sibly serve another end (another risky one), namely, to enforce "negotiation. " By crossing over,once the queen has crossed and cannot readily return, the knight can threaten disaster; White can propose Black's surrender, or a stalemate, or the removal of a bishop or the sacrifice of a pawn. What he gets out of this is wide open; but what began as a chess game has been converted into a bargaining game. Both sides are under similar pressure to settle the game or at least to get the white knight out of mis- chief. The outcome, it should be noticed, will not necessarily be
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Violence, especially war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable, depending on decisions made by fallible human beings orga- nized into imperfect governments, depending on fallible com- munications and warning systems and on the untested perfor- mance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own.
This last is particularly true, because what one does today in a crisis affects what one can be expected to do tomorrow. A governmentneverknowsjusthowcommitteditistoactionuntil the occasion when its commitment is challenged. Nations, like people, are continually engaged in demonstrations of resolve, tests of nerve, and explorations for understandings and misun- derstandings.
One never quite knows in the course of a diplomatic confron- tation how opinion will converge on signs of weakness. One never quite knows what exits will begin to look cowardly to oneself or to the bystanders or to one's adversary. It would be possible to get into a situation in which either side felt that to yield now would create such an asymmetrical situation, would be such a gratuitous act of surrender, that whoever backed down could not persuade anybody that he wouldn't yield again tomorrow and the day after.
This is why there is a genuine risk of major war not from "accidents" in the military machine but through a diplomatic process of commitment that is itself unpredictable. The unpre- dictability is not due solely to what a destroyer commander might do at midnight when he comes across a Soviet (or Ameri- can) freighter at sea, but to the psychological process by which particular things become identified with courage or appease- ment or how particular things get included in or left out of a diplomatic package. Whether the removal of their missiles from
If all threats were fully believable (except for the ones that were completely unbelievable) we might live in a strange world
-
on enforceable law. Countries would hasten to set up their threats; and if the violence that would accompany infraction were confidently expected, and sufficiently dreadful to outweigh the fruits of transgression, the world might get frozen into a set of laws enforced by what we could figuratively call the Wrath of God. If we could threaten world inundation for any encroach- ment on the Berlin corridor, and everyone believed it and un- derstood precisely what crime would bring about the deluge, it might not matter whether the whole thing were arranged by human or supernatural powers. If there were no uncertainty about what would and would not set off the violence, and if everyone could avoid accidentally overstepping the bounds, and if we and the Soviets (and everybody else) could avoid
perhapsa safe one, with many of the marks of a world based
making simultaneous and incompatible threats, every nation would have to live within the rules set up by its adversary. And if all the threats depended on some kind of physical positioning of territorial claims, trip-wires, troop barriers, automatic alarm systems, and other such arrangements, and all were completely infallible and fully credible, we might have something like an
? old fashioned western land rush, at the end of which -
? as long as nobody tripped on his neighbor's electric fence and set the
? whole thing off -
the world would be carved up into a tightly bound status quo. The world would be full of literal and figura- tive frontiers and thresholds that nobody in his right mind
would cross.
? 92
c
? 94 ARMS AND 1NFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 95
not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully pre- dictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control. War has always involved uncertainty, especially as to its outcome; but with the technol- ogy and the geography and the politics of today, it is hard to see how a major war could get started except in the presence of un- certainty. Some kind of error or inadvertence, some miscalcula- tions of enemy reactions or misreading of enemy intent, some steps taken without knowledge of steps taken by the other side, some random event or false alarm, or some decisive action to
hedge against the unforeseeable would have to be involved in the process on one side or both. '
This does not mean that there is nothing the United States would fight a major war to defend, but that these are things that the Soviet Union would not fight a major war to obtain. And there are undoubtedly things the Soviet Union would fight a major war to defend, but these are not things the United States would fight a major war to obtain. Both sides may get into a position in which compromise is impossible, in which the only visible outcomes would entail a loss to one side or the other so great that both would choose to fight a major nuclear war. But neither side wants to get into such a position; and there is noth- ing presently at issue between East and West that would get both sides into that position deliberately.
The Cuban crisis illustrates the point. Nearly everybody ap- peared to feel that there was some danger of a general nuclear war. Whether the danger was large or small, hardly anyone seems to have considered it negligible. To my knowledge, though, no one has ever supposed that the United States or the
1. A superb example of this process, one involving local incidents, accidents of darkness and morning mist, overzealous commanders, troops in panic, erroneous assessment of damage, public opinion, and possibly a little "catalytic action" by warmongers, all conjoining to get governments more nearly committed to a war that might not have been inevitable, occurred within drum-call of my own home. See the detailed account in Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1963). It is chastening to consider that the "shot heard round the world" may have been fired in the mistaken belief that a column of smoke meant Concord was on fire.
? Cuba while leaving behind 15,000troops is a "defeat" for the Soviets or a "defeat" for the United States depends more on how it is construed than on the military significance of the troops, and the construction placed on the outcome is not easily foreseeable.
? The resulting international relations often have the character of a competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve. Particularly in the relations
? between major adversaries -
-
are decided not by who can bring the most force to bear in a locality, or on a particular issue, but by who is eventually will- ing to bring more force to bear or able to make it appear that
sincethecloseofWorldWarI1
more is forthcoming.
There are few clear choices -
-
between East and West
issues
? there have been but a few clear choices
between war and
peace. The actual decisions to engage in war -
whether the Korean War that did occur or a war at Berlin or Quemoy or
Lebanon that did not -
were decisions to engage in a war of un- certain size, uncertain as to adversary, as to the weapons in- volved, even as to the issues that might be brought into it and the possible outcomes that might result. They were decisions to embark on a risky engagement, one that could develop a momentum of its own and get out of hand. Whether it is bet- ter to be red than dead is hardly worth arguing about; it is not a choice that has arisen for us or has seemed about to arise in the
nuclear era. The questions that do arise involve degrees ofrisk- what risk is worth taking, and how to evaluate the risk in-volved in a course of action. The perils that countries face are not as straightforward as suicide, but more like Russian roulette. The
the sheer unpredictability of dangerous
? ? fact of uncertainty
events -
- notonlyblursthings,itchangestheircharacter. Itadds
? ? an entire dimension to military relations: the manipulation of risk.
There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and the Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a major nuclear war cannot occur. Itonlymeansthatifitoccursitwillresultfromaprocessthatis
? 96 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 97
advertent war appears to go up. This is why they are called "crises. " The essence of the crisis is its unpredictability. The "crisis" that is confidently believed to involve no danger of things getting out of hand is no crisis; no matter how energetic the activity, as long as things are believed safe there is no crisis. And a "crisis" that is known to entail disaster or large losses, or great changes of some sort that are completely foreseeable, is also no crisis; it is over as soon as it begins, there is no sus- pense. It is the essence of a crisis that the participants are not fully in control of events; they take steps and make decisions that raise or lower the danger, but in a realm of risk and uncer- tainty.
Deterrence has to be understood in relation to this uncer- tainty. We often talk as though a "deterrent threat" was a credible threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliber- ately in response to some enemy transgression. People who voice doubts, for example, about American willingness to launch war on the Soviet Union in case of Soviet aggression against some ally, and people who defend American resolve against those doubts, both often tend to argue in terms of a once- for-all decision. The picture is drawn of a Soviet attack, say, on Greece or Turkey or West Germany, and the question is raised, would the United States then launch a retaliatory blow against theSovietUnion? Someansweradisdainfulno,someanswera proud yes, but neither seems to be answering the pertinent question. The choice is unlikely to be one between everything and nothing. The question is really: is the United States likely to
do something that is fraught with the danger of war, something that could lead- through a compounding of actions and reac- tions, of calculations and miscalculations, of alarms and false alarms, of commitments and challenges- toa major war?
This is why deterrent threats are often so credible. They do not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge. A response that carries some risk of war can be plausible, even reasonable, at a time when a final, ultimate decision to have a general war would be implaus- ible or unreasonable. A country can threaten to stumble into a
Soviet Union had any desire to engage in a major war, or that there was anything at issue that, on its merits, could not be set- tled without general war. If there was danger it seems to have been that each side might have taken a series of steps, actions and reactions and countermeasures, piling up its threats and its commitments, generating a sense of showdown, demonstrat- ing a willingness to carry the thing as far as necessary, until one
sideortheotherbegantobelievethatwarhadalreadystarted,or was so inevitable that it should be started quickly, or that so much was now at stake that general war was preferable to ac- commodation.
The process would have had to be unforeseeable and unpre- dictable. If there were some clearly recognizable final critical steps that converted the situation from one in which war was unnecessary to one in which war was inevitable, the step would not have been taken. Alternatives would have been found. Any transition from peace to war would have had to traverse a re-
-
or misinterpretations, or actions with unforeseen consequences,
gion of uncertainty
of misunderstandings or miscalculations
in which things got out of hand.
There was nothing about the blockade of Cuba by American
realizing that they
? naval vessels that could have led straightforwardly into general war. Any foreseeable course of events would have involved
steps that the Soviets or the Americans -
would lead straightforwardly to general war -
would not have taken. But the Soviets could be expected to take steps that, though not leading directly to war, could further compound risk; they might incur some risk of war rather than back down
completely. The Cuban crisis was a contest in risk taking, in- volving steps that would have made no sense if they led predict- ably and ineluctably to a major war, yet would also have made no sense if they were completely without danger. Neither side needed to believe the other side would deliberately and know- ingly take the step that would raise the possibility to a certainty.
What deters such crises and makes them infrequent is that they are genuinely dangerous. Whatever happens to the danger of deliberate premeditated war in such a crisis, the danger of in-
? ? ? 98 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
war even if it cannot credibly threaten to invite one. In fact, though a country may not be able with absolute credibility to threaten general war, it may be equally unable with absolute credibility to forestall a major war. The Russians would have been out of their minds at the time of the Cuban crisis to incur deliberately a major nuclear war with the United States; their missile threats were far from credible, there was nothing that the United States wanted out of the Cuban crisis that the Rus-
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 99
"superior" country has some advantage. But this is a far cry from the notion that the two sides just measure up to each other and one bows before the other's superiority and acknowledges that he was only bluffing. Any situation that scares one side will scare both sides with the danger of a war that neither wants, and both will have to pick their way carefully through the crisis, never quite sure that the other knows how to avoid stumbling over the brink.
Brinkmanship: The Manipulation of Risk If "brinkmanship" means anything, it means manipulating the
shaved risk ofwar. It means exploiting the danger that some- body may inadvertently go over the brink, dragging the other with him. If two climbers are tied together, and one wants to intimidate the other by seeming about to fall over the edge, there has to be some uncertainty or anticipated irrationality or it won't work. If the brink is clearly marked and provides a firm footing, no loose pebbles underfoot and no gusts of wind to catch one off guard, if each climber is in full control of himself and never gets dizzy, neither can pose any risk to the other by approaching the brink. There is no danger in approaching it; and while either can deliberately jump off, he cannot credibly pretend that he is about to. Any attempt to intimi- date or to deter the other climber depends on the threat of slipping or stumbling. With loose ground, gusty winds, and a propensity toward dizziness, there is some danger when a climber approaches the edge; one can credibly threaten to fall off accidentally by standing near the brink.
Without uncertainty, deterrent threats of war would take the form of trip-wires. To incur commitment is to lay a trip-wire, one that is plainly visible, that cannot be stumbled on, and that is manifestly connected up to the machinery of war. And if effective, it works much like a physical barrier. The tripwire will not be crossed as long as it has not been placed in an in- tolerable location, and it will not be placed in an intolerable lo- cation as long as there is no uncertainty about each other's
sians could have rationally denied at the cost of general war.
just might, in spite of all their care and all our care -
the brink and over it in a general war, had some substance. If we were anywhere near the brink of war on that occasion, it was a war that neither side wanted but that both sides might have been unable to forestall.
The idea, expressed by some writers, that such deterrence depends on a "credible first strike capability," and that a coun- try cannot plausibly threaten to engage in a general war over anything but a mortal assault on itself unless it has an appre- ciable capacity to blunt the other side's attack, seems to depend
on the clean-cut notion that war results
- lead up to
? Yet their implicit threat to behave in a way that might
that
? result -
or is expected to
-
only from adeliberate yes- no decision. But if war tends
to result from aprocess, a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved, more and more expectant, more and more concerned not to be a slow second in case the war starts, it is not a "credible first strike" that one threatens, but just plain war. The Soviet Union can indeed threaten us with war: they can even threaten us with a war that we eventu- ally start, by threatening to get involved with us in a process that blows up into war. And some of the arguments about "superiority" and "inferiority" seem to imply that one of the two sides, being weaker, must absolutely fear war and concede while the other, being stronger, may confidently expect the other
to yield. There is undoubtedly a good deal to the notion that the country with the less impressive military capability may be less feared, and the other may run the riskier course in a crisis; other things being equal, one anticipates that the strategically
? ? ? 100 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT
motives and nothing at issue that is worth a war to both sides. Either side can stick its neck out, confident that the other will not chop it off. As long as the process is a series of discrete steps, taken deliberately, without any uncertainty as to the con- sequences, this process of military commitment and maneuver
101
never end in disaster. It could only terminate in disaster if one of the players made a deIiberate move that he knew would cause disaster, and he would not. Second, the possibility of dis- aster will be reflected in the players' tactics. White can effec- tively keep Black's queen on her own side of the board by gettingaknightacrossfirst;orhecankeepbothBlack'sknights on their own side by getting his queen across first. This ability to block or to deter certain moves of the adversary will be an im- portant part of the game; the threat of disaster will be effective, so effective that the disaster never occurs.
In fact, the result is no different from a rule that says no queen can cross a center line if an opponent's knight has al- ready crossed it, and no knight can cross the center line if an opponent's queen has already crossed it. Prohibitive penalties imposed on deliberate actions are equivalent to ordinary rules.
The characteristic that this chess game shares with the trip- wire diplomacy, and that accounts for its peculiar safety, is the absence of uncertainty. There is always some moment, or some final step, in which one side or the other has the last clear chance to turn the course of events away from war (or from disaster in our game of chess) or to turn it away from a political situation that would induce the other to take the final step to- ward war. The skillful chess player will keep the knight across the center line or near enough to cross before his opponent's queen can get across, with due allowance for the cost of having to devote resources to the purpose. Skillful diplomacy, in the absence of uncertainty, consists in arranging things so that it is one's opponent who is embarrassed by having the "last clear
chance" to avert disaster by turning aside or abstaining from what he wanted to do.
But off the chess board the last chance to avert disaster is not always clear. One does not always know what moves of his own would lead to disaster, one cannot always perceive the moves that the other side has already taken or has set afoot, or what interpretation will be put on one's own actions; one does not al- ways understand clearly what situations the other side would not, at some moment, accept in preference to war. When we
? would not lead to war. Imminent war -
- continually threatened, but the threats would work. They would work unless one side were pushed too far; but if the push-
would be ing side knows how far that is, it will not push that far.
The resulting world -
- discriminate in favor of passivity against initiative. It is easier to deter than to compel. Among a group of arthritics moving deli- cately and slowly at a cocktail party, no one can be dislodged from his position near the bar, or ousted from his favorite chair; bodily contact is equally painful to his assailant. By standing in the doorway, one can prevent the entrance or exit of another
the world without uncertainty
would
ailing guest who is unwilling to push his way painfully through. In fact, without uncertainty all the military threats and ma- neuvers would be like diplomacy with rigid rules and can be illustrated with amodified game of chess. A chess game can end in win, lose, or draw. Let's change the game by adding a fourth outcome called "disaster. " If "disaster" occurs, a heavy fine is levied on both players, so that each is worse off than if he had simply lost the game. And the rules specify what causes dis- aster: specifically,if either player has moved his knight across the
center line and the other player has moved his queen across the center line, the game terminates at once and both players are scored with a disaster. If a white knight is already on the black side of the board when the black queen moves across to the white side, the black queen's move terminates the game in dis- aster; if the queen was already across when White moved his knight across the center line, the knight's move terminates the game in disaster for both players. And the same applies for the
white queen and the black knight.
What does this new rule do to the way a game is played? If a
game is played well, and both players play for the best score they can get, we can state two observations. First, a game will
possible war
? ? 102 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 103
in Wlxte's favor; he created the pressure, but both are subject to the same risk. White's advantage is that he can back out more quickly, as we have set up the game in this example; even he cannot retreat, though, until Black has made his next move, and for the moment both have the same incentive to come to terms. (White'sabilitytoretreat,andBlack'sinability,mayseemmore of an advantage to White than it actually is; his ability to retreat is an ability to save both players, equally, from disaster. If no bargain is reached, the white knight has to return, because he is the only one who can. If Black can avoid entering any nego- tiation- can absent himself from the room or turn off his hear- ingaid- White's soleremainingobjectivewillbetogethisown knight back before he blows things up. ) If "disaster" is only somewhat worse, not drastically worse, than losing the chess game, the side that is losing may have more incentive to threaten disaster, or more immunity to the other's threat, and perhaps in consequence a stronger bargaining position. Note, in particular, that all of this has nothing to do with whether a knight is more or less potent than a queen in the chess game; queen and knight can be interchanged in the analysis of this paragraph. If the clash of a squad with a division can lead to unintended war, or of a protest marcher with an armed police-
man to an unwanted riot, their potencies are equal in respect of the threats that count.
In this way uncertainty imports tactics of intimidation into the game. One can incur a moderate probability of disaster, sharing it with his adversary, as a deterrent or compellent de- vice, where one could not take, or persuasively threaten to take, a deliberate last clear step into certain disaster. 2
2. To clarify the theoretical point it may be worth observing that the uncertainty and unpredictability need not arise from a genuine random mechanism like the dice. It is unpredictability, not "chance," that makes the difference; it could as well arise in the clumsiness of the players, some uncertainty about the rules of the game or the scoring system, bad visibility or moves made in secret, the need to commit certain moves invisibly in advance, meddling by a third party, or errors made by the referee. Dice are merely a convenient way to introduce unpredictability into an artificial example.
? add uncertainty to this artificial chess game we are not so sure that disaster will be avoided. More important, the risk of disas- ter becomes a manipulative element in the situation. It can be exploited to intimidate.
To see this, make one more change in the rules. Let us not have disaster occur automatically when queen and knight of op- posite color have crossed the center line. Instead, when that occurs, the referee rolls a die. If an ace comes up the game is over and both players are scored with disaster, but if any other number appears the play goes on. If after the next move the queen and knight are still across the center line the dice are rolled again, and so on.
This is a very different game. And not just because disaster may or may not occur when queen and knight get into those positions, instead of occurring with certainty. The difference is that now queen and knight may actually be moved into those positions. One can deliberately move his knight across the line in an attempt to make the queen retreat, if one thinks his ad- versary is less willing to incur a continuing risk of disaster, or thinks his adversary can be persuaded that oneself will not re- treat, and if the momentary risk of disaster is not prohibitive. In fact, getting one's knight across and blocking its return with one's own pieces, so that it clearly takes several moves to re- treat, may persuade the adversary that only he, by withdrawing his queen, can reduce the risk within a tolerable time.
? If the black queen cannot retreat- if her exit is blocked against timely retreat- the white knight's tactic to force her withdrawal is ineffectual and gratuitously risky. But it can pos- sibly serve another end (another risky one), namely, to enforce "negotiation. " By crossing over,once the queen has crossed and cannot readily return, the knight can threaten disaster; White can propose Black's surrender, or a stalemate, or the removal of a bishop or the sacrifice of a pawn. What he gets out of this is wide open; but what began as a chess game has been converted into a bargaining game. Both sides are under similar pressure to settle the game or at least to get the white knight out of mis- chief. The outcome, it should be noticed, will not necessarily be
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 104 ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 105
The route by which major war might actually be reached would have the same kind of unpredictability. Either side can
engaging in a limited war would usually be such a
gains to the other side. The white knight is as potent as the black queen in creating a shared risk of d i ~ a s t e r . ~
Limited War as a Generator of Risk
Limited war, as a deterrent to continued aggression or as a compellent means of intimidation, often seems to require inter- pretation along these lines, as an action that enhances the risk of a greater war. The danger of major war is almost certainly increased by the occurrence of a limited war; it is almost cer- tainly increased by any enlargement in the scope or violence of a limited war that has already taken place. This being so, the threat to engage in limited war has two parts. One is the threat to inflict costs directly on the other side, in casualties, expendi- tures, loss of territory, loss of face, or anything else.
