Putin’s actions make no sense. That is his strength

 Tim Harford in The FT

Is Vladimir Putin mad? Russia’s president has launched a costly and unprovoked war, shocked his own citizens, galvanised Nato, triggered damaging but predictable economic reprisals and threatened a nuclear war that could end civilisation. One has to doubt his grasp on reason. 

Doubt is part of the point. In The Strategy of Conflict, written in 1960, the economist Thomas Schelling noted: “It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational in decisions and motivation.” 

A madman — or a toddler — can get away with certain actions because he cannot be deterred by threats or because his own threats seem more plausible. But Schelling’s point is more subtle than that: you don’t need to be mad to secure these advantages. You just need to persuade your adversaries that you might be. 

The idea is vividly illustrated in The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel and John Huston’s 1941 film. Our hero, Sam Spade, knows the whereabouts of the falcon, a priceless artefact. When the villainous Kasper Gutman tries to intimidate him into revealing the secret, Spade is not intimidated. If Gutman kills him then the precious falcon will be lost forever. 

“If I know you can’t afford to kill me, how are you gonna scare me into giving it to you?” Spade challenges Gutman. 

“That’s an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgement on both sides,” Gutman says. “Because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.” 

Spade doesn’t seem too worried by this, perhaps because Gutman appears calm. Gutman might have had more success if he seemed unhinged. Then again, Gutman’s henchmen are pointing pistols at Spade and twitching with rage, so even if Gutman keeps his cool, the threat that someone might get carried away seems plausible. 

Schelling was a wonderful writer and thinker, but it gives me little pleasure to be dusting off his books. When I first encountered his ideas on nuclear deterrence, it was the mid-1990s. The cold war was over, the threat of a nuclear exchange seemed largely past and Schelling’s ideas could be enjoyed in much the same way as Hammett’s: as witty, surprising and reassuringly unreal. When Schelling shared the Nobel memorial prize in economics in 2005, it was with a sense that his clear-eyed ideas about nuclear deterrence had helped human civilisation dodge a bullet. 

That nuclear bullet is now back in the gun and Putin is waving it around unnervingly. He wouldn’t . . . would he? I don’t know, which is just the way Putin likes it. 

There was always something surreal about maintaining nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Surely such weapons could never be used, because the consequences were too horrible? And if the weapons could never be used, what sort of deterrent did they provide? 

Yet the deterrent is real enough because even a small risk of escalation is a risk worth taking seriously. That risk can come from a number of sources. There’s malfunctioning equipment: in September 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov’s early warning radar told him that the US had just launched ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. He realised that was unlikely and ignored the warning. Petrov’s heroic inaction was made all the more remarkable because it came at a time of escalated tensions between the superpowers. 

Another risk is that a senior decision maker is insane, rather than merely feigning insanity. 

Then there is the risk of things getting out of control somewhere down the chain of command. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the US decided to stop and search ships sailing to Cuba — a potential flashpoint if the result was the sinking of a Soviet ship. President Kennedy and defence secretary Robert McNamara asked the US Navy to soften this “quarantine” in a couple of ways. 

In fact, as the classic book Thinking Strategically explains, the US Navy told McNamara to mind his own business, and the blockade was riskier than Kennedy had intended. Unthinkable threats become thinkable in such circumstances. 

Putin holds a weak hand, except for the one card that no rational person would ever choose to play. But the essence of brinkmanship is to introduce a risk that nobody can entirely control. If the risk becomes intolerable, you may win concessions. I am 99 per cent sure that Putin is bluffing, but a 1 per cent chance of the end of the world is and should be more than enough to worry about. 

Faced with Gutman’s warning that someone may get carried away, Spade coolly responds, “then the trick from my angle is to make my play strong enough to tie you up, but not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgement”. That is the trick the western world is now attempting to perform. By Putin’s design, it is not going to be easy.

Bluff, blackmail and brinkwomanship: the ‘madman theory’ of no-deal Brexit

Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian


Don’t panic! Don’t panic! You need not spoil your Christmas by worrying that Britain is walking the Brexit tightrope without a safety net because the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, has announced that the armed forces are on standby.

Standing by to do what exactly? That is not clear. Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, is redeploying civil servants with expertise in disaster management to no-deal emergency planning. And Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has declared himself the world’s biggest purchaser of fridges so that the NHS has somewhere to keep stockpiles of critical medicines. He recently told colleagues that, in the event of a bad Brexit, he could not guarantee that people would not lose their lives. Choose Brexit – and you may die. They certainly didn’t put that on the side of their campaign bus.


Those who willed this nightmare on our country did not reveal that it would require such costly and alarming measures

The obvious thing to say, but worth emphasising nevertheless, is that those who willed this Brexit nightmare on our country did not reveal that it would require such costly and alarming measures. They sold it as liberation day, not doomsday. Do you recall Boris Johnson and his gang telling us that leaving the EU could mean putting troops on the street, establishing a “war room” in the NHS, emergency airlifts of medicines, leafleting every household with advice on how to cope with food shortages and deploying those with experience of dealing with the aftermath of tornadoes, epidemics and tsunamis? No, me neither. It was supposed to be a piece of cherry-topped cake, not a humiliating national calamity.

A few of the Brexiters are still trying to claim that it might somehow turn out all right on the night, so it is important to be clear about the consequences of a no-deal outcome. It will mean a stark rupture to our relationship not just with the EU but with much of the rest of the world. The overnight termination of almost every legal and trading agreement between Europe and Britain would cause disruption without precedent in peacetime. There will be no transition arrangements. There will be no mutually recognised rights for EU citizens living in the UK and Brits living in the rest of the EU. There will be a hard border in Ireland. Instead of a glide path into a new relationship with our continent, Britain will be in free fall.

Large businesses have taken some precautions against a botched Brexit. That was only sensible after the abject combination of tragedy and farce that has played out over the past 30 months. But hardly anyone is ready for the crash version. Neither is the government. It can’t even tell companies what tariffs they might be expected to pay on imports from the EU. Britain’s five most important business organisations – the CBI, the Institute of Directors, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the manufacturers’ body, EEF – all agree. An unprepared Britain would be plunged into severe turbulence.


There is no such thing as a pain-free no deal

Earlier this year, the British Chambers of Commerce outlined 24 critical risk questions that businesses needed answering in order to cope with any Brexit scenario. The BCC reports today that, with under 100 days left, the government has produced a satisfactory response to just two of the 24, while 15 “are still flashing red”.

A few of the Brexiters in the cabinet are touting the idea of a “managed no deal”. This is oxymoronic. There is no such thing as a pain-free no deal. It is notable that this latest iteration of fantasy Brexit is most often promulgated by ministers, such as Andrea Leadsom, who have no responsibility for delivering essential services. Even these Brexiters don’t deny that a no-deal outcome would present a big challenge to government on multiple fronts. In the light of their recent performance, how confident are you that our masters of disaster could cope? A couple of drones have just incapacitated Gatwick airport, an example of the degree to which the complex systems of advanced societies can be acutely vulnerable to disruption.

In a no-deal Brexit, a key role will be played by Chris Grayling, the rogue drone who goes by the title of transport secretary. This is the one-man disrupter who proved incapable of introducing new rail timetables without throwing the network into chaos. I don’t know about you, but I am not sleeping better at night for knowing that Failing Grayling will be in charge of trying to manage ports gridlocked by a crash-out Brexit.

I can’t forecast exactly would happen. No one can. One of the alarming things about this scenario is its very unpredictability. I observe that civil servants, those who lead government agencies and the majority of the cabinet, the people who would be expected to handle the consequences, are very scared of no deal. They differ only in thinking that it will be absolutely catastrophic or merely disastrous. Ministers fear that the disruption to normal life will be deeply serious and there will be an extremely nasty hit to the economy, a combination that would inflict once-in-a-generation damage on the Tory party’s reputation.

A calamity Brexit would do to the Conservatives what the Winter of Discontent did to Labour. The mass strikes that overwhelmed the Callaghan government in 1978-79 seared into the national collective consciousness images of picket lines, paralysed services, rubbish piling up in the streets, the sick going untreated and the dead left unburied. That haunted Labour, and cost it public trust, for years after the event. Empty supermarket shelves, shortages of critical medicines, stranded travellers, motorways to ports turned into giant lorry parks and all the other consequences of a bad Brexit would not be quickly forgotten nor forgiven. This spectre chills the blood of some of the most hardcore Brexiters in the cabinet. The case of Michael Gove is instructive. Ardent Brexiter that he is, his departmental responsibilities for farmers and the food supply have opened his eyes to how bad no deal could be for both the country and his party. In a piquant twist, he is now one of those ministers who believe that any deal is better than no deal.


This is a highly perilous game of chicken in which people’s livelihoods, and quite possibly people’s lives, are at stake

David Gauke, the justice secretary, is not a man given to the hyperbolic statement. His usual role in government is to be deployed as a fire blanket for the smothering of any controversy that is getting fiery. So it is noteworthy when such an unflamboyant figure publicly declares that a no-deal Brexit would be so grotesquely irresponsible that he would quit the government rather than sit in a cabinet that allowed it to happen.

If all the sentient members of the cabinet think a no-deal Brexit will be a calamity, and as good as admit this in public, why is the government nevertheless acting as if it might allow that to come to pass? Bluff, blackmail and brinkwomanship feature in the explanation. Though Theresa May will say that this is not a scenario she wants or expects to happen, some of her strategists think that amping up the prospect of a disaster Brexit suits her. The prime minister is still hoping that she can extract some last-gasp concessions from the EU that will help her get her unloved deal through parliament. European leaders are sounding unwilling to do very much to assist her. The EU has worked on the assumption that Britain is not so crazy as to crash out in a way that would hurt it, but us much more. So part of Number 10’s calculation is that the EU needs to start worrying that it really is possible that this could transpire.

To make sense of this, it is useful to have some familiarity with “madman theory”. This was an idea about how to conduct international relations that was formulated during the Cold War, when Richard Nixon was in the White House. It was thought to be useful for America to have a leader who seemed to be a bit unhinged, because this would throw the other side off balance and force the Soviet Union to make concessions for fear that the US president might be crazy enough to start a nuclear war. The Brexit variant is to induce the EU to believe that Britain might be unbalanced enough to crash out. The EU will then, so goes the theory, give Mrs May what she needs. She is also gambling that fear of a disaster Brexit will drive many Conservative MPs who don’t like her agreement into supporting it.

This is a highly perilous game of chicken in which many people’s livelihoods, and quite possibly people’s lives, are at stake. The risk is that it could accidentally lead to the very catastrophe that it is supposed to prevent. It was called “madman theory” for a reason.
A merry Christmas, everyone. I will not tempt fate by wishing you a peaceful and prosperous new year.

The importance of failure

Success can dazzle, even blind. It's in failure that those like Jonathan Trott can address their weaknesses

Rob Steen in Cricinfo

March 19, 2014

 

Jonathan Trott: mired in a personal trough © AFP

What happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Am I ever going to be good again?

Find me a public performer who hasn't echoed Bill Murray's self-pitying, crestfallen lament in Wes Anderson'sThe Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Jonathan Trott might have served his cause better had he plumped for such candour and simplicity - it might even have spared him Michael Vaughan's intemperate outburst - but no matter. Depression, stress, burnout, anxiety, panic - variations on the theme of mental unfitness are endless.

"I remember day two or three, it was a bit of a blur, I was getting headaches and all sorts of things and I wasn't eating properly towards the end and that's when the sleep started getting disruptive and emotionally that was when I was worst and it just boiled over. I had nothing left in the tank - mentally and emotionally pretty drained." The number of appearances of the word "and" in the first of those sentences tells us a lot.

As Trott recounted his feelings during last November's Brisbane Ashes Test to Sky Sports viewers, the memories jostled for breathing space; a disorderly queue of negative emotions was being flushed out. Eye contact was strong and certain, but that doesn't mean the scars don't hurt. Amid more measured comments, yes, those references to "crazy" and "nutcase" were supremely insensitive - one of the few things Vaughan was right about in his own insensitive, somewhat hypocritical tirade (well, he did resign the captaincy of his country mid-series). But perhaps Trott felt that distancing himself from a graver clinical condition was a necessary part of his recovery. The message was plain: "I can be good again… I will be good again."

A few years back, "burnout" was a genuine and growing concern: even before the IPL was a glint in the BCCI's eye, multiplying formats and a concertina-like international programme were placing an ever-increasing strain on the leading performers. Then came the domestic T20 eruption; now all bets were off. Now "burnout" was the fear that dare not speak its name. If the players chose to spread themselves even thinner, well, that was their funeral. Frankly, my dear, who gave a damn? Trott's travails should compel us to think anew, with greater compassion. The employers who arranged 61 Tests for their charges over the past five years have far more to answer for on that score than they do over the way they handled his sudden fall from grace.

Older readers might find themselves harking back 40 years to a similar episode involving Geoff Boycott, whose intensity Trott has always seemed bent on emulating, as Mark Ramprakash did before him. The superficial cause was Boycott's repeated humiliations by bowlers of trifling gifts, primarily Eknath Solkar (such is the contempt in which the Yorkshireman holds the late Indian left-arm swinger, the latter is not even accorded the respect of a forename in Boycott's first autobiography, published in 1987).

"Batting to me is more than a mechanical use of techniques," Boycott explained. "I have to feel in a good frame of mind if I am to do well." There was a lot preying on it: difficulties over his benefit season, a rotten start to the summer by Yorkshire, and the usual internecine squabbles at Headingley, let alone the selectors' galling - as he saw it - preference for Mike Denness as England captain over his own claims.

	When nothing is working as it should, as had been the case for Trott since August 2013, convincing oneself that class truly is permanent and that form can only ever be temporary can tax the hardiest of hearts

The tipping point was another cheap dismissal in the first Test at Old Trafford. Nor did it help that it was "glaringly obvious that Denness wanted about as much to do with me as the Black Death". In taking stock, attested Boycott, "I realised, to my horror, that the desire and drive to play for England had gone. There was no satisfaction in it, very little involvement, even less pleasure… I couldn't take it any longer."

He duly informed Alec Bedser, the chairman of selectors, that he was "in no mental or emotional condition to play well for England". Yet when he put the phone down he felt no relief, and certainly no better. By the time he reached Bath, for Yorkshire's match against Somerset, he was "low, confused and physically ill… it might have been stress-related, I really don't know, but it was real and painful enough".

That September, by when his reign as Yorkshire captain was under threat, he did the unthinkable: he turned his country down. "Had anyone mentioned the mere possibility of it to the kid who played in the South Yorkshire back-streets or the young man who battled his way into the Yorkshire and England sides, he would have been invited to go forth and multiply. I would have considered him certifiable. But the culmination of events, circumstances and attitudes was too much to resist. I knew I could not go to Australia and do a good job for England." Not for another three years would he do international battle, yet recover he did, and prosper. Trott can draw hope from that.

In an interview published in the Times last Saturday, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard professor billed by Rick Broadbent as an "expert on losing streaks", spelled out the commonalities linking sport and the world beyond. "In a losing streak everything deteriorates. There is often infighting and a lack of desire to show up for work because the situation is so unappealing. You see it in inner-city communities too, where neighbourhoods form gangs and fight against each other rather than working together." In an unusually perceptive moment, the all-too aptly named footballer Robbie Savage recalled the "soul-destroying" nature of a horrendous streak for Derby County not only robbing him of enthusiasm but reducing him to hatred for the game he once adored.

Trott, though, was mired in a personal trough. He'd gone 18 Test innings without a century before (and not that long ago). He'd also gone four ODIs without reaching 30 before, twice. This time, both happened concurrently, gnawing at his marrow.

One of the chief advantages of playing a uniquely multi-format sport is that success in one discipline can refuel another, or even persuade you to focus exclusively on a single discipline, the better to spare yourself all that angst and pain. But when nothing is working as it should, as had been the case for Trott since August 2013, convincing oneself that class truly is permanent and that form can only ever be temporary can tax the hardiest of hearts (unless, of course, your scorebook entry reads DG Bradman or SF Barnes).

****

	Has a sporting figure ever treated success and failure with such startling equanimity as Rafael Nadal? Stephen Dunn / © Getty Images  Enlarge

Repeated exposure to failure can be our undoing, but it can also reinvigorate. As that hoary old saying goes, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. For professional sportsfolk, unlike most mortals, failure, however relative, is transparent and statistical, sometimes tweetworthy, always inescapable. For all of us, what counts is how we cope with it, and the way we heed its lessons.

The challenge to those recuperating from a setback is whether to risk the self-diminishing agonies of failure again. All the more reason, then, to salute those who take that risk for our amusement, and when there is little or no apparent need. Witness Rafa Nadal, whose improbable comeback from a career-threatening injury has been immeasurably more successful than the tennis writers and even his doctors predicted.

Had that regal racqueteer's stomach churned at the prospect of failure, he would have taken one of two courses: he would never have dared return to the court (it's not as if he needed the pesetas or kudos) or, in so doing, that renowned courtly behaviour would have lapsed. Neither happened, almost certainly because Nadal possesses the quintessential prerequisite of all champions: those competitive fires still burned. Has a sporting figure ever treated those twin imposters with quite such startling equanimity?

We make much of self-assurance as the most priceless of assets. Not only does it embolden, it also enhances the power of bluff. Confidence, achievement and reputation form a virtuous circle; how often do off-form achievers prevail purely by dint of repute? Ian Botham managed just 40 wickets in his last 23 Tests, and most of those owed more to name than skill. That confidence may or may not be innate; for those whose work exposes them to daily ordeals by competitive fire, in public view, it can certainly be mercurial. One numbing or humbling failure at an inopportune time can do more to deflate it than a hundred triumphs can buoy it. It depends on how deep it runs.

Yet strength can only be enhanced by reducing or eradicating vulnerability; by logical extension, therefore, failure can be more important than success. Failure means those glances in the mirror are likelier to be stares - broodier, more searching, less self-deluding. Weaknesses are likelier to be addressed, lessons learned. Success, conversely, can dazzle, even blind. It can also deter acknowledgement of the influence exerted by sheer blind luck, an ingredient never more potent than in the competitive arts. Perhaps only the tiny ranks of the doubt-free actively desire failure - as motivation, as a counter to complacency - but maybe that's what keeps us all going. Should we fear it? No, but a spot of constructive loathing can come in handy.

Bill Murray/Steve Zissou relocated his mojo - or at least a semblance of it - with a gun, saving his crew from a band of murderous pirates. A less violent loosening-up might do Trott a power of good.