Schelling

Todd Gitlin has a relates a remarkably unfair appraisal of Tom Schelling’s work:

We played our three rounds in half an hour or so, at which point I was up something over the minimum $5, as was my opponent as well. Real gain in 1961 dollars, with no pain. So while we were both ahead, I proposed to him that we quit then and there. He agreed. One of Schelling’s lieutenants came by, saw what we were doing, looked startled, and declared to a passerby, “They’re dividing up the world!”

We were, of course, refusing to play the game. I took this to be a parable for the possibility of easing out of the Cold War. Evidently Schelling concluded from most of his subjects that a harder-assed zero-sum strategic obsession bore more fruit (wasting more time, exerting more pain). And so on to Operation Rolling Thunder and millions of deaths in Southeast Asia.

Yeah. All of the above is correct, except for the parts about Schelling and about the Vietnam War. In the process of misinterpreting Schelling’s work and exaggerating his contribution to the Vietnam War, Gitlin links to this much more interesting piece by Fred Kaplan.

Schelling’s work is interesting to me because of the way he talks about linkages between the political and the military. It’s a little bit of a stretch to say he’s the most important thinker on the relationship between the military and the political since Clausewitz, but not too far. Schelling, like Clausewitz, understood that political and military concerns were deeply intertwined, and that trying to separate them was pointless and counter-productive. His central insight was the bargaining and diplomacy didn’t end when military conflict began; rather, the use of military force was a bargaining tactic. Much of his work on war (especially Arms and Influence) is about the best way to use military force in the service of diplomatic ends.

Unfortunately, his approach led to a set of conclusions that were dead wrong. Much like a reputation theorist, Schelling believed that the “messages” sent by force could be understood in a relatively unambiguous manner by both parties. If we destroy 1/4 of Hanoi but leave the other 3/4 untouched, then the North Vietnamese will understand that we have the necessary will and power to destroy their cities, but have no interest in doing so out of malice. They will appreciate that continuing to irritate us will lead to further destruction. Simple bargaining.

Problem is, neither the message nor the recipient are unambiguous. Nation-states, even autocratic ones, don’t make choices as if they’re rational unitary actors. A bombing campaign speaks to multiple actors with a whole set of different interests. It can strengthen some within the target country and weaken others, with the political impact depending on the structure of the state and the balance of forces within it. Witness the experience of Israel; attacks designed to cause pain to Palestinian targets often have the perverse effect of strengthening the hand of hard-liners. More importantly, the messages themselves are ambiguous. Messages sent through military force have a way of getting distorted, and what we mean to say to the enemy may not be what he or she hears.

So, targeted bombing campaigns designed to send a “message” to the enemy usually don’t work. Coercion cannot, contra Schelling, be dialed up or dialed down based on political preference and bargaining strategy. This just means that Schelling is wrong about a particular application of his theoretical edifice; it doesn’t mean that his worldview is distorted by some Hobbesian understanding of the international system. Moreover, given that he did very little work on national security after the 1960s, it seems likely that Schelling realized the insufficiency of his work on this topic.