The Prisoner's Dilemma and Trump's Foreign Policy

The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Trump’s Foreign Policy

In an op-ed piece in the NY Times on 2 June 2017, David Brooks wrote about the emerging foreign policy approach of the Trump administration, quoting advisors McMaster and Cohn:

This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.

The essay explains why the Trump people are suspicious of any cooperative global arrangement, like NATO and the various trade agreements. It helps explain why Trump pulled out of the Paris global-warming accord. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance.

Rather than to argue on an emotional level, we can try to search for models that might illuminate our thinking.    Motivated by McMaster and Cohn’s commentary, a primary question is whether the approach of this administration is indeed “clear-eyed” or not. 

One of the more interesting models was suggested by John Nash (captured in the movie A Beautiful Mind), called The Prisoner’s Dilemma.    Nash showed that under certain conditions, the pay-off for cooperation among actors can create a net benefit rather than a pure-winner/loser scenario.  

The Prisoner’s Dilemma in its simplest incarnation is the following:

Imagine two confederates participate in a crime, and are then captured by the police.  The two prisoners are taken to separate interrogation chambers.   The police then try to get each prisoner to rat out the other.   In the simple version of the game, each prisoner has the choice of either remaining silent or confessing and implicating his/her partner.   The prisoners cannot communicate with each other, and have to evaluate the possible outcomes of their actions.   A confession and implication of their partner will result in a reduced sentence if their partner remains silent.   If the partner also confesses and implicates the prisoner, they both receive a stiffer sentence.   If the prisoner remains silent and the partner also remains silent, then both go free.   If the prisoner remains silent and the partner confesses and implicates the prisoner, the prisoner gets a stiffer sentence. 

The behavior of the prisoner depends on his/her belief on what the partner might do.  

The strategy of confess/implicate is called “defect,” and the strategy of remaining silent is called “cooperate.”   

If both cooperate, they receive an optimal result.   If they both defect, they receive the worst result.   If, on the other hand, one defects, and the other cooperates, the defector wins, while the cooperator loses the most.  

There is no obvious strategy – the strategy depends entirely on the belief in what the partner might do.  Is the partner a ‘cooperator’ or a ‘defector’?  

An extension of the Prisoner’s Dilemma can be made with a large population of players who play repeated versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.   With repeated versions of the game, the players can retain some knowledge of what their playing partner did in the last round:  defect or cooperate.  The player can then respond based on whether the partner defected or cooperated in previous rounds.  

There are some possible strategies in this case:

1.)   Tit-for-tat – if a partner cooperated in the previous round, then cooperate in the next round.  If a partner defected in the previous round, then defect.

2.)   Always defect: simple enough.

3.)   Always cooperate: also simple.

These are the simplest possibilities.   Clearly there can be other cases based on some long term observations when the game is played multiple times.  In The Evolution of Cooperation, author David Axelrod wrote about some early computer simulations of repeated instances of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.   

Although there has been considerable work on the Prisoner’s Dilemma since the publication of Axelrod’s book, the simple cases he outlines are illuminating.  

In an environment dominated by an ‘always defect’ crowd, a small population of ‘tit-for-tat’ can eventually take over.   On the other hand, the introduction of a small population of ‘always cooperate’ players are doomed.  

In an environment dominated by a ‘tit-for-tat’ crowd, the introduction of a small population of ‘always cooperate’ players will eventually win out.  

In an environment dominated by ‘always cooperate’ players, the introduction of a small population of ‘always defect’ players are doomed. 

With other strategies possible, further optimization is possible.

What does this have to do with Trump and foreign policy?   In an admittedly simplistic model, the ‘clear-eyed’ world-view of McMaster and Cohn smells a lot like either an ‘always defect’ strategy, or perhaps at best, a ‘tit-for-tat’ model.  

If we were to take this analogy into the real world, we could ask where the global community stands.   Is it really dominated by ‘always defect’ actors?   Are we evolving from a ‘tit-for-tat’ world into an ‘always cooperate’ world?  Are the Saudi’s, Putin, and Trump part of a dwindling population of defecting actors, or will they take over in an environment that they see as naïve ‘always cooperate’ actors?  

Seen from the admittedly simple-minded analogy of the Prisoner’s dilemma, it’s far from ‘clear eyed’ what an optimal strategy would look like for the United States in the current global environment.  From the mirror of game theory, certainly the shift from Obama to Trump smells like a shift from an ‘always cooperate’ mode to a ‘tit-for-tat’ mode at most, and perhaps to an ‘always defect’.