Deterrence: A Comment at the Berkeley Tom Schelling Symposium

In the 1580s, Sir Francis Walsingham argued in Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council that England should have no hesitation in aiding the fundamentalist Protestant insurgents in the Low Countries. If the global superpower Spain against which the insurgents were fighting were to take offense and respond by sending a Spanish Armada into the English Channel, Jesus Christ and the Archangel Michael themselves would come down from heaven and fight on the side of the English. And Queen Elizabeth enthusiasically engaged in brinkmanship in the Low Countries in the 1580s.

If I were an Israeli or Iranian or Indian or Pakistani politician today, I would think of myself as primarily playing a cooperative, positive-sum game with my fellow politicians, a game in which the object is to minimize the risks that our own colonels will think like Sir Francis Walsingham, and believe that God will protect them whatever they do.

Comments

[Cal]

And when the Armada was defeated, I assume that the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the day claimed that God favored England over the evil Spaniards.

[Cal]

. . . oh, and the equivalents in Spain, blamed homosexuality, sleeper cells of Moors secretly operating in Spain, and going soft by failing to maintain the standards of the Inquisition were blamed for the defeat.

[Roger Albin]

Geoffrey Parker, in his very good book The Grand Strategy of Philip II, looked specifically at this issue from the vantage point of Philip II during the planning for the Armada. Several individuals, apparently including the Duke of Medina Sidonia, whom Philip selected to lead the Armada, pointed out the uncertainties of naval warfare and the difficulties of amphibious invasion. The pious Philip really believed that God would provide a way if he did his part of the job by getting the large Armada into the Channel. An early version of faith-based policy initiatives.

Its difficult to recapture the way people in the pre-Enlightenment era thought but the attitudes of Walsingham and Philip are typical and as can be seen from the words of people like Pat Robertson, far from extinct.

[Seth Edenbaum]

"If I were an Israeli or Iranian or Indian or Pakistani politician today, I would think of myself as primarily playing a cooperative, positive-sum game with my fellow politicians, a game in which the object is to minimize the risks that our own colonels will think like Sir Francis Walsingham, and believe that God will protect them whatever they do."

I would hope that you would say the same for American politicians. Unfortunately for us they operate on faith. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
I would also like to note that no soi-disant "reality based" commentator has covered this, although the middle east academic specialists have been discussing it for months.

"After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever."

There's plenty of data on the violent but nonetheless positive-sum game as being played by Hamas over the past few years. But if that data is not reported, those attempts are meaningless. http://justworldnews.org/
Claims to liberalism as to anything are meaningless outside of conduct.

[andres]

A brief comment--somehow I doubt that Walsingham was this naive. You don't get to be Queen Elizabeth's spymaster by being a pious fool. My guess is that Walsingham had good reason to know that Spain's fleet was not as strong as was generally supposed, and that the combination of better ship design, standardized cannon, and better gun carriages would carry the day in favor of England if it came to a Spanish invasion. So he may well have said the pious platitude about the archangel as a way of concealing his knowledge from all but the Queen herself.

The real problem is that Israel's Walsinghams don't seem to be aware that they are not fighting a conventional fleet war, but a shadow war against small bands of terrorists who stay invisible until they are ready to strike. Gathering good intelligence about the weaponry and capabilities of such small bands is an achievement that probably does require divine intervention, and I would not base Israel's foreign policy on the secure belief that such bands cannot get their hands on fissile or biolethal material.

[anne]

Good grief, Seth; I am forever feeling like a fool. Let's fire a few missiles at Somalia.

[anne]

Which reminds me, Colombian rebels aided by dread Venezuelans are busily preparing dirty bombs are opposed to the clean ones we prefer.

[Seth Edenbaum]

Andres you miss the point. You argue strategy based on assumption and you do it more than the Israelis:

"Well, they started squeezing Hamas almost immediately. Originally, in the weeks right after the late-January election, Hamas wanted to form a relatively moderate government that would include a large number of political "independents" under the leadership of Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh as Prime Minister. But as I know-- because I was the conduit of one of these threats-- threats of lethal violence were sent by the Israelis to any Palestinian "independents" who might be even considering joining a Haniyeh-led government. As a result, none of them did; and the government that Haniyeh ended up forming was 100% Hamas."
http://justworldnews.org/archives/002819.html

[Bruce Wilder]

Having great and seemingly overwhelming resources tends to be as much a soporific on strategic thinking as religious faith. If the means are large enough, even very smart people tend to shirk, when it comes to thinking clearly and cleverly about how to achieve their objectives. Even a Napoleon can be seduced by success to build a Grand Army.

Walsingham's faith does not seem to have clouded his judgment about the need to keep his powder dry, while Philip appears to have lost all perspective on the need for an economy of means.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

"If I were an Israeli or Iranian or Indian or Pakistani politician today, I would think of myself as primarily playing a cooperative, positive-sum game with my fellow politicians"

It's a good thing that you are not a politician. Your faith in game theory as a guide in such matters is as silly as Sir Francis Walsingham's in God's protection.

[Josh G.]

Brad DeLong: "If I were an Israeli or Iranian or Indian or Pakistani politician today, I would think of myself as primarily playing a cooperative, positive-sum game with my fellow politicians, a game in which the object is to minimize the risks that our own colonels will think like Sir Francis Walsingham, and believe that God will protect them whatever they do."

This is why I don't trust economists. They are all Straussians at heart, horrified by the idea that the masses might actually have a say in the making of policy.

[Seth Edenbaum]

Religion isn't the problem, it's faith. But faith is inescapable: we're pattern-makers.

[Wilson46201]

Just who do you think sent the great storms that wrecked the Spanish Armada and saved England?

[this is a rhetorical question. I'm a stone atheist personally.]

[andres]

Wilson46201: the storms only added insult to injury. The Armada was already defeated and had already decided to sail back to Spain by the time it was hit by storms. The real cause of the Armada's defeat was superior English naval gunnery and lack of good communications and logistics that prevented the Armada from immediately loading up the invasion army in Calais. God's work? Perhaps, but certainly not in a deus ex machina manner.

God, but I do love to argue about historical trivia. It takes my mind off the nuts-and-bolts macroeconomics that I have to write about.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

"...faith is inescapable: we're pattern-makers."

We make multiple patterns. And often some patterns take over, push other helpful patterns into the background and make us behave in hateful, fanatical, blind, and foolish ways.

We all become slaves to some of these patterns from time to time. And then we unthinkingly coast on the grooves these mastern patterns leave in our minds. *** WARNING ECONOBASHING COMING UP *** Yet economists pretend Homo Sapiens are rational beings. The ironic fruit of yet another master pattern ruling over irrational creatures.

[Adam]

Hi Brad, heard your comments today.

I think the solution is playing multiple games. While Iranian generals do want to make sure that their lower ranks are not behaving in ways that would undermine their objectives, they also must know that the uncertainty they create is moving their objectives foward. In essence, they are playing a domestic principal-agent game and an international game of posturing and bluffing. (This does not suppose that game theory is the only or preferred way of formalizing our answers, but it does help guide thinking.)

That one can employ uncertainty to one's advantage (with the resulting implication that it makes accidental or purposeful war more likely) is one of Tom Schelling's main contributions.

[derrida derider]

"If I were an Israeli or Iranian or Indian or Pakistani politician today, I would think of myself as primarily playing a ... game ... in which the object is to minimize the risks that our own colonels will ... believe that God will protect them whatever they do."

To anyone outside the US, the obvious danger is not US colonels but the US populace (and hence politicians) thinking like that. It's much easier to control a few colonels than millions of people.

[James Wimberley]

Walsingham, Burghley and Elizabeth were surely also thinking about the longer-term risks if Spain defeated the Protestant insurgents in the Netherlands. Philip II could then assemble an invasion fleet at leisure in the safety of the Scheldt. Challenging him earlier by supporting the Sea Beggars was very risky, and the survival of Protestant England would still require a good deal of luck (aka the Archangel Michael), but it was the better call than passivity. The Unigenitus bull had made the conflict inevitable at some time.

[Thomas T. Schweitzer]

In ideological or religious wars always both sides are convinced that that God (or dialectical materialism, or whatever) is on their own side. Only those who are not infected by metaphysical delusions can hope to see things in their proper balance. Quoting from Garrett Mattingly's "The Defeat of the Spanish Armada":...[the special emissary of Pope Sixtus V reports from Lisbon] he was talking to one of the highest and most experienced officers of the Spanish fleet (can it have been Juan Martinez de Recalde?] [who himself died during the expedition of the Armada] and found the courage to ask him bluntly:'And do you expect to win the battle?' 'of course,' replied the Spaniard. 'How can you be sure?' "It's very simple. It is well known that we fight in God'd cause. So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits. If we come to close quarters, Spanish valour and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we shall have on board) will make our victory certain. But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So, 'concluded the captain, and one fancies a grim smile, 'we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.'

[seth edenbaum]

"In ideological or religious wars always both sides are convinced that that God (or dialectical materialism, [or reason]...) on their side. Only those who are not infected by metaphysical delusions can hope to see things in their proper balance."
Metaphysical delusions are endemic to humanity, or indeed probably to animal life. Labels, proclamations and decrees mean nothing. Assumption is the sin of pride.