Reason Divorced from Reality: Thomas Schelling and Strategic Bargaining

Abstract

Thomas Schelling’s two influential books, The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence, remain foundational works for that thriving branch of realism that explores strategic bargaining. They illustrate the pitfalls of deduction in a political, cultural and ethical vacuum. In the real world, signals and reference points are only recognized and understood in context, and that context is a function of the history, culture and the prior experience of actors with one other. Schelling’s works on bargaining — and many of the studies in the research program to which he contributed — are unwitting prisoners of a particular language and context: microeconomics and a parochial American Cold War view of the world. They lead Schelling to misrepresent the actual dynamics of the bargaining encounters (Cuba and Vietnam) that he uses to illustrate and justify his approach. Schelling’s writing on bargaining is emblematic of a more general and still dominant American approach to the world that seeks, when possible, to substitute a combination of technical fixes and military muscle for political insight and diplomatic finesse.