Game Theory Take On - Washington’s Rogue Elephants
Opinion | Washington’s Rogue Elephants
AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTOp-Ed ContributorJuly 26, 2011SeattleDESPITE all the bluster about an impending default on the government’s debt, most observers in Washington and on Wall Street still believe the two parties will reach a crisis-averting agreement. That’s because the practice of American politics assumes that all players will negotiate according to predictable patterns — that they will realize they can get more from compromise than by demanding everything and winning nothing. Under that assumption, President Obama is right to keep pressing for a compromise, because eventually the Republicans will fall in line. But as two wildly different fields — game theory and the study of elephant mating patterns — show, there are limits to the usual assumptions: sometimes players simply refuse to play the game, and when that happens, the best advice for their opponents is to do the same. One of the classic games studied in game theory is chicken: two players rush toward each other, each wanting the other to swerve. The one who does, loses. The trick to winning is for one player to convince the other that under no circumstance will he or she veer off course. For instance, you could insist you’re not really concerned about a crash, or that you might even welcome a collision. Convinced the other driver really feels that way, any rational actor would have to swerve. President Richard M. Nixon attempted to use this tactic during the Vietnam War. Through various back channels and planted news leaks, he gave the impression that he was not only out of patience but also literally out of his mind, such that, even though it would be totally irrational, he just might use a nuclear weapon on Hanoi if Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, didn’t accede to his demands. (It didn’t work.)Another tactic, favored by the strategist Herman Kahn, is to “throw out the steering wheel,” to demonstrate that you are locked into a certain path and can’t swerve. Politicians sometimes adopt this approach, insisting that their constituents refuse to accept a compromise and have thus tied their hands.ImageCredit...Matt RotaStill, one reason such tactics never led to actual nuclear war was that each side could assume that a truly crazy leader could never have his finger on “the button,” and that enough checks existed if one ever did. The same goes for the “steering wheel” tactic: after all, no politician is ever truly locked into a decision. But what if a scenario arose in which those assumptions failed? Here’s where elephants come into play. To achieve their mating goals, male elephants will sometimes play games of chicken, with one individual essentially giving the impression that he is crazy and has become an irrational player in a game premised on shared rationality and predictability. It’s a tactic that works surprisingly well, because male elephants can in fact become temporarily “crazy.” One of the most terrifying sights in the animal world is an elephant in a state of must: Huge bulls, oozing a weird, foul-smelling, greenish glop from glands near their eyes, behave with violent abandon, taking risks and defying the basic rules of pachyderm propriety (and also giving rise to the term “rogue elephant”). Facing an elephant in must, other elephants — not to mention people — are well advised to get out of the way.A similar problem arose in nuclear strategy in the 1990s. For all the comparable craziness of mutually assured destruction during the cold war, planners could safely assume that American and Soviet leaders would act more or less rationally. But what if a rogue state or a terrorist cell got its hands on a nuclear weapon? The rules of classic game theory would no longer apply. In either case, whether you’re confronting a rogue elephant or a rogue nuclear state, the advice is the same: stop playing the game. Avoid the elephant or shoot it; politically isolate the rogue state or use military force to disarm it.What does all this mean for the debt-ceiling debate? So far, President Obama and the Democrats have insisted on negotiations, assuming that the looming threat of debt default would force the Republicans to cave in on their strident demands and accept a compromise.Instead, given the Republicans’ continued insistence on an unobtainable wish list of spending cuts and constitutional amendments, it’s fair to conclude that Mr. Obama is facing the political equivalent of an elephant in must — a player who simply won’t play the game.In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.” The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country. David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the co-author of “Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression and Seek Revenge.” A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Washington’s Rogue Elephants. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT