Posts Tagged ‘strategy’
“Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward anyone, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves…”*
The United States’ strategy towards China is premised on an unending rivalry. Yet history tells us that strategic competitions do end– and America needs, Mike Mazarr argues, to imagine how its conflict with China might one day do so…
The American rivalry with China continues to deepen, characterised on both sides by zero-sum expectations and paranoia. Tensions are rising over Taiwan and the South China Sea. There is an increasingly bitter contest for the commanding heights of science and technology, disputes over economic and cyber strategies, and much else. More concerning may be that neither side appears to have any vision of a world beyond their rivalry. America’s strategy seems predicated on relentless, unending competition; its definition of success is getting and staying ahead of China in a dozen areas. There is no concept, in other words, of how this rivalry might end.
Yet most rivalries do end. In 1805 the leaders of Britain and France could hardly have imagined that within a few decades they would transcend their age-old hostility to become geopolitical partners. Not every rivalry produces such comprehensive reversals, but even the most intractable stand-offs can evolve into something less volatile. In How Rivalries End, Karen Rasler, William Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly explain that, of all great power rivalries since 1816, only three endured for a century. On average, they lasted about 60 years. If we take the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 as the starting point, the current US-China contest has already lasted longer than that. Even using the more recent intensification of the rivalry of around 2010 as a starting point, we’re almost a quarter of the way through the average length.
It is a mistake, therefore, to approach this rivalry without any theory of how it might conclude. The case for competing vigorously to deny certain Chinese ambitions is self-evident, and the US-China relationship has distinct features – such as stark cultural differences – that will complicate any effort to transcend the rivalry. Adding a conception of an endgame would strengthen the US hand in the ongoing competition and help steer the contest in ways that prevent disaster.
American strategy today focuses on progressively outperforming China in a series of ongoing competitions: military, economic, technological and diplomatic. Endgames are left mostly unstated, out of a belief that too much focus on outcomes is pointless and may even be counterproductive.
Current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell laid out a version of this approach in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs. ‘Rather than relying on assumptions about China’s trajectory’, they wrote, ‘American strategy should be durable whatever the future brings for the Chinese system. It should seek to achieve not a definitive end state akin to the Cold War’s ultimate conclusion but a steady state of clear-eyed coexistence on terms favorable to US interests and values.’
A steady state of clear-eyed coexistence – this is the long-term vision, an endless struggle for predominance with elements of self-interested cooperation mixed in. Coexistence, they concluded, ‘means accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved’.
The same concept has cropped up in multiple administration statements and speeches and arguments by outside analysts. Rush Doshi, until recently the senior China official at the National Security Council, explained that current policy embodies a rejection of the idea that ‘the contest with China can end as decisively and neatly as the Cold War did’. Rather than seeking to transform China, ‘the United States can compete intensely by blunting Chinese activities that undermine US interests and building a coalition of forces that will help the United States secure its priorities – all while managing the risks of escalation’. Analysts David Santoro and Brad Glosserman have argued that ‘for now, pursuing a specific endgame with China is pointless and problematic’. American strategy should aim to ‘keep the United States in and ahead of the game, i.e., in a competitive and dominant position vis-à-vis its strategic rival’.
Much of this view is clearly correct. There is no way to know how the rivalry will end or how China’s ideology or character will evolve. American actions can’t force ideological or behavioural change onto China, and talking up a future that assumes such change can imply existential threats to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It might take decades for all this to play out; discussions about endgames today are mostly theoretical. It makes sense to focus on competing as a persistent challenge, adjust as the situation changes, and let the endgame define itself.
Yet a strategy of open-ended competition without a clear endgame has many downsides. For one thing, it magnifies the risk of getting caught in an endless cycle of competing for competition’s sake on almost every issue. The lack of a clear picture of a world beyond the rivalry leaves American officials at a loss to prioritise: because they can’t be sure what factors are likely to determine the favoured outcome, every square mile of the competitive landscape has to be contested…
… The problem with American strategy today is not that the United States should not compete. It is that persistent contestation alone is an incomplete recipe for success. Unmoored from any concept of an endgame, American competitive instincts can run out of control and guide US grand strategy rather than serving it…
[Mazarr considers options and suggest a framework for thinking about an endgame…]
… The United States can’t know precisely when or why the rivalry will mellow, but it can have a strong sense of how it will happen: a mutual decision that both countries’ interests are best served by winding down the confrontation. Such a development isn’t likely soon – but history suggests that it is inevitable at some point. Managing the trajectory to that point is the great challenge for America’s China strategy – and embracing the idea of an endgame would inject new energy into the American approach to its most potent competitor…
On the importance of ends, not just means: “Imagining the endgame of the US-China rivalry,” from @MMazarr in @EngelsbergIdeas.
* Herman Melville
###
As we take the long(er) view, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the IRA) called an end to its thirty-year-long armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
“I sensed myself in the presence of something I didn’t really know how to handle, didn’t understand.”*…
Bill Janeway, with sage advice– for businesses, but easily extensible to our personal lives– on how to live, and succeed, in an environment of radical uncertainty…
… From John Maynard Keynes at the University of Cambridge 90 years ago through Robert Lucas at the University of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century, economists have placed expectations at the core of market dynamics. But they differ on how expectations are formed. Are the data we observe the outcome of processes that are as “stationary” as physical laws, like those determining the properties of light and gravity? Or do the social processes that animate markets render future outcomes radically uncertain?
For a long generation starting in the 1970s, Lucas and his colleagues dominated economic theory, giving rise to different strands of Chicago School economics. While the Efficient Market Hypothesis asserted that prices in financial markets incorporate all relevant information, the Real Business Cycle Theory of New Classical Economics held that the macroeconomy is a self-equilibrating system whose markets are both efficient and complete. The system may be subject to external shocks, but it is not amenable to fiscal or monetary management.
This assumption of complete markets implies that we can overcome our ignorance of the future. It suggests that we could, at any moment, write contracts to insure ourselves against all the infinite possible future states of the world. But since perfect, complete markets obviously do not exist, the Chicago School’s Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) proposes that market participants will guide their forward-looking decisions by reference to a (generally implicit) model of how, on average, the world works and will continue to work. As a result, expectations will be tamed and aligned with efficient market equilibria.
For their part, Kay and King look further back to the pre-REH period, when Frank Knight and then Keynes correctly showed that our ignorance of future outcomes is inescapable. As Keynes famously put it in 1937:
By ‘uncertain knowledge’ … I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known from what is merely probable. … The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.
The shockingly unanticipated Global Financial Crisis of 2008 brought this insight back to the fore.
…
The central question remains: Where can we find guidelines for mitigating the consequences of radical uncertainty? What basis is there for purposive action in the face of “We simply do not know”?
I see three paths forward. The first two are defensive, and the third is proactive. All three reject an exclusive focus on efficiency in the allocation of resources. Thus, they stand outside what remains the dominant paradigm of mainstream economics.
…
Success in the real world demands a recognition that the future is unknowable. Three strategies: “What to Do About Radical Uncertainty,” from @billjaneway in @ProSyn. Eminently worth reading in full.
* James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
###
As we contemplate complex contingency, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that George Herriman‘s signature characters, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse, made their first appearance in the bottom of the frames in Herriman’s The Dingbat Family daily comic strip. They got their own strip three years later, scored a Sunday panel in 1916– and delighted readers with the surreal philosophical questions they raised until 1944.
“Oops, I did it again”*…
(Roughly) Daily has contemplated game theory a number of times (e.g., here). The Generalist Academy offers a particularly poignant example…
Football [or, as it’s called in the U.S., soccer] has a lot of strange rules – like Ted Lasso, I still don’t understand exactly how the offside rule works. But the basic game is pretty simple: get the ball into your opponent’s goal, and prevent them from getting the ball into your goal. Scoring a goal against your own side is a rare and accidental embarrassment. Usually.
The qualification round for the 1994 Caribbean Cup had some unusual rules. No match could end in a draw; if the teams were tied at the end of regular time, they would go into sudden death extra time. But! Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals. This was presumably done because this tournament, like many, used goal difference to break ties in the qualifying groups. (Goal difference = total number of goals they’ve scored minus the number of goals they’ve conceded.) So that extra time “golden goal” would give a team an edge in the overall competition. Little did the organisers know that it would also lead to one of the strangest football games ever seen…
A truly remarkable match: “Own-Goal Football,” from @GeneralistAcad.
* Britney Spears (Songwriters: Martin Max / Rami Yacoub)
###
As we work backwards, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel; he was born on this date in 1871. A mathematician (and politician, who served as French Minister of the Navy), he is remembered for his foundational work in measure theory and probability. He published a number of research papers on game theory and was the first to define games of strategy.
But Borel may be best remembered for a thought experiment he introduced in one of his books, proposing that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard will – with absolute certainty – eventually type every book in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This is now popularly known as the infinite monkey theorem.
“Advantage! What is advantage?”*…
Pradeep Mutalik unpacks the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first…
Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play. This results in a built-in asymmetry, and the question arises: Should you go first or second?
Most people instinctively want to go first, and this intuition is usually borne out. In common two-player games, such as chess or tennis, it is a real, if modest, advantage to “win the toss” and go first. But sometimes it’s to your advantage to let your opponent make the first play.
In our February Insights puzzle, we presented four disparate situations in which, counterintuitively, the obligation to move is a serious and often decisive disadvantage. In chess, this is known as zugzwang — a German word meaning “move compulsion.”…
Four fascinating examples: “The Secrets of Zugzwang in Chess, Math and Pizzas,” from @PradeepMutalik.
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
###
As we play to win, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that scientists involved in the OPERA experiment (a collaboration between CERN and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso) mistakenly observed neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light. OPERA scientists announced the results with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast; accounting for these two sources of error eliminated the faster-than-light results. But even before the sources of the error were discovered, the result was considered anomalous because speeds higher than that of light in a vacuum are generally thought to violate special relativity, a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics for over a century.
“Disruptive movement must come from within”*…
Disruption can be the engine of deep and rapid change to industries, political systems, or indeed societies. As COVID reminds us, some of those disruptions are involunatry. But many aren’t. Indeed, on the back of champions like Clayton Christensen and his promotion of “disruptive innovation,” disruption has become a go-to strategy– if not the go-to strategy– for entrepreneurs (and some intrapreneurs) around the world. And it has begun to define the strategies of social and political actors/movements as well.
Disruption can be a powerful approach to solving problems that have been allowed to fester (e.g., in-grown, oligarchical markets; climate change.) But Santiago Zabala warns us that as disruption has become more dominant, it risks losing any purpose beyond simply “winning” the game (the market, the election) in question…
… “disruption,” according to its Latin origin, signifies “rupture,” tearing apart, and violently dissolving continuity. As a metonym for progress, since the nineties it has spread the illusion that innovation is always an improvement regardless of its social consequences. Its association with Silicon Valley and business culture in general has led us to disregard the reckless adverse effects of progress without responsibility. In fact, this indifference is vital to understanding the meaning of disruption and our fascination with a notion that is constantly deployed to exploit our hope that innovation will save us. “Disruption,” as Bernard Stiegler noted, “radicalizes the reversal of all values,” whether technological, political, or religious.
Like other concepts whose meanings are eroded by overuse, such as nihilism, postmodernism, and populism, disruption requires a philosophical elucidation. In recent decades, technological disruptions were heralded as collective life-shaping events, but is necessary to question this disruption is seen as a value worth pursuing even though its worship is tearing apart the possibilities for a sustainable future…
Disruptive innovation, as [historian Jill] Lepore illustrates, holds out the hope of salvation from the very damnation it encourages because the idea of progress has been stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. The West in the eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; in the nineteenth, evolution; and in the twentieth, growth and innovation. And the problem today is that the idea of disruption dominates the rhetoric of not only Silicon Valley but also other industries and contemporary societies all over the world. Disruption has taken over as a common language in which to project not just success but also a future of unforeclosed possibilities. This success is premised on technology’s capacity to continuously offer cheaper alternatives to established products—and on the promise that innovation is always an improvement, regardless of its consequences.
Disruptive innovation in journalism, education, and medicine has emerged as an all-purpose replacement of traditional methods with new ways that value novelty and speed. This valuation of progress without quality has allowed these pillars of democratic nations to be further subverted by capital, prey to market drives that ignore the value of the product for the value to shareholders. The belief that companies and industries that failed were somehow destined to fail is at the heart not only of Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation but also of a neoliberal age that holds that government should play no role in restraining corporate behavior. Giving corporate behavior a free pass has facilitated the application of disruption’s indifference to arenas that affect society, politics, and culture. Numerous conferences, centers, summits, and labs established even in just the most recent decade demonstrate that “disruptive” has become an admiring adjective, a positive valence, even a brand.
In order to resist disruption it is not enough to demonstrate that its benefits are based on shaky evidence. This has been the approach taken by Lepore (“Christensen’s sources are often dubious and his logic questionable”), Michael Porter (“disruptive technologies that are successful in displacing established leaders are extremely rare”) and Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh (“only seven of the 77 business case studies covered by Christensen’s fit his own criteria of what constitutes disruptive innovation”), among other scholars. While these analyses are useful to debunk the illusion that innovation is always an improvement, they do not modify the widespread enthusiasm for it. “Exaggerated claims for disruption,” as Mark C. Taylor points out, “usually result from a failure of memory, which is symptomatic of a preoccupation with the present in a culture addicted to speed.”
This addiction can be overcome by thinking through longer stretches of time…
… and the social and cultural hopes and values that should guide us. Disruption can be a force for altogether positive and overdue kinds of change… but only if its aims are higher than simply the bottom line.
A critical look at what we talk about when we talk about “disruption”: “Disruption: Neither Innovative nor Valuable,” in @LAReviewofBooks.
See also: “‘Disruption’ Is a Two-Way Street.”
* Leo Tolstoy
###
As we contemplate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1920 that a disruptive force was named and energized: Adolf Hitler delivered “the Hofbrauhaus speech,” in which he gave a crowd of nearly 2,000 members of the German Workers’ Party a twenty-five point platform and a new name– the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or Nazi, Party.
Hitler was, at the time, the head of publicity and propaganda; the next year, he became the Party’s head. The event was sufficiently momentous that the Nazi Party celebrated it founding at the Hofbrauhaus each year thereafter.
You must be logged in to post a comment.