Some Notes on Exercising Power

You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar

Trespassers will be shot

The beatings will continue until morale improves

People have been happily using three basic strategies for exerting power unencumbered by the terms “persuasion,” “deterrence,” or “compellence.” But a more systematic examination of strategies may reveal some wrinkles that are not obvious and may lead to some suggestions for using strategies more effectively.

If you want to exercise power over someone [that is, get them to do something they would not do otherwise] you can promise them rewards if they do what you want (persuasion), threaten to punish them to stop them from doing something you don’t want (deterrence), or threaten to punish them until they do what you want (compellence.) 

It can help understand human behavior if we greatly simplify motives and see people as if they calculated the costs and benefits of different courses of action. Faced with a choice between doing A or B, we act as if we did some mental arithmetic and subtracted the costs of doing A from its benefits and compared that to the benefits and costs of B.

The simplest persuasion situation is when you want someone to do A but if they are left to their own devices, they’ll most likely do B because its benefits minus its costs are better than A’s. We can try to persuade some to do A by promising to increase the benefits of doing it so that it becomes a better deal than B. 

In the simplest deterrence situation, we do not want someone to do B, and may not care much about what they do instead. If we think they might be tempted to do B, we can threaten them with some painful consequence if they do it.

Compellence mixes the two other strategies in an interesting way. We want someone to do A; we think they’ll do B if we leave them alone so we threaten or even punish them until they do A. Instead of promising the increase the benefits of A, we threaten to increase the costs of doing B … the unpleasantness will stop when they do what we want.

Problems and Issues

There are five major problem areas that affect each of these strategies:

• Identification
• Calibration
• Credibility
• Affect
• The Future

Identification: Figuring out what someone will regard as a reward or punishment is not always obvious. The better you know someone, the easier it is to figure out which buttons to push. But when we’re trying to influence people we don’t know very well it is more difficult and when we’re thinking about people from another country or culture, it is even more complicated. 

For example, note President Trump’s repeated promises that North Korea could become fantastically rich with western capital investment, and a real tourist mecca with its outstanding beaches. Does that really sound so wonderful to the leadership of a country proudly based on Juche, a philosophy of self reliance leading to strength and authentic socialism, rooted the ideals of sustainability through agricultural independence and a lack of dependency? Somehow Trump International Hotel, Pyongyang or Trump International Golf Resort at Hungnam don’t seem like great inducements to the regime.

Calibration. How much is enough? Can you offer enough to persuade or threaten enough to compel someone to do what you want, can you threaten enough to deter them from doing what you don’t want? 

Credibility: Are your promises or threats believable? What matters is not how sincere you are when you promise or threaten but what the other party believes.As a wise philosopher once said, "A lie is as good as he truth if you can get someone to believe it."

Affect. It is almost impossible to separate emotional considerations from cold strategic calculations. It just feels wrong to threaten or punish your friends. Even stronger is the aversion to rewarding your foes, It’s nice to be nice to the nice and nice to be not nice to the not nice. It is far more difficult to be not nice to the nice or nice to the not nice.

The Future. International politics is not a one-night stand. The country you are dealing with today is the same country you will be dealing with in the future. It’s the difference between telling the moron who just cut you off in traffic (whom you will never see again) where to go and what to do when he gets there, and reacting to something your significant other does.  

Offering promises and rewards to persuade is likely to reinforce a positive relationship and make it easier to persuade in the future. 

 

Deterrence, which presupposes the other party could intend to cause you harm, is almost always used directly in an already conflicted or hostile situation. It will certainly not improve the relationship, but it probably will not make the relationship any worse.

Using compellence, especially on a country with whom you have a good relationship and with whom you may need to cooperate in the future, is likely to provoke feelings of resentment and make future cooperation more difficult.

Some Bottom Lines.

The basic goal is to get someone to do something they wouldn't do otherwise. That means changing their assessment of the benefits and costs of complying with you. 

 

1. Given the problems of identification and calibration, it is prudent to be prepared to use both promises and threats, trying to affect both the expected benefits and expected costs of going along with you or saying “no.” That is true even though it may not feel right.

2. Persuasion will usually have a positive effect on a relationship, deterrence will usually have little effect, compellence will usually have a negative effect on a friendly relationship and make future cooperation more difficult.

3. Beginning with promises to try to persuade someone to go along with you and then making an implicit or explicit threat is not the same as starting with threats to compel compliance and then adding some praises if that doesn’t work.

The Trump administration seems to rely on compellence far more often than persuasion. A brief analysis of four examples may help clarify the limitations of compellence.

NATO. A long term American goal has been to get the European members of NATO to spend 2% of their GDP on defense (the latest figure for the United States is 3.2%.) Persuasion has not worked in the past. President after President has urged our Eur open allies to spend more, they have promised to ramp up their defense budgets … and very little happened. (That’s not too surprising, since it is the various parliaments that must pass a budget and the majority of their constituents, across the continent, are not in favor of higher military spending.) Trump took a different approach, trying to compel budget increases by threatening to abandon NATO. Again, lots of promises to raise budgets, and a small increase here and there. But the United States has spent a great deal of time and energy trying to restore the damaged relationship as officials from the Secretaries of State and Defense, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and prominent Republican and Democratic Senators have tried to reassure Europe that the U.S. is as committed to NATO as ever.

NORTH KOREA. The Trump administration adopted a policy of maximum pressure, pushing harsher and harsher sanctions on North Korea and working hard to convince other states, including China, to enforce them. Trump himself added fiery rhetoric and Kim Jung Un responded in kind (experts disagree on whether “Little Rocket Man” or “dotard” is the best epithet.) Amid rumors of U.S. plans for a preemptive military attack, North Korea agreed to a summit meeting in Singapore at which Kim agreed to disable a nuclear site he no longer needed for producing weapons grade material, Trump agreed to hold off on new sanctions and they both agreed to “denuclearize” the Korean Peninsula without even trying to define what “denuclearize” might mean. The second summit in Saigon was a complete failure, either because the Koreans were completely unreasonable, or because Trump was unprepared for a negotiation where the other side started with a maximum position. The recent exchange of “beautiful” letters between Trump and Kim and Trump’s few steps into North Korea hardly represent a rousing success for U.S. strategy.

MEXICO. The Trump administration tried to compel Mexico to stem the flow of asylum seekers from Central America by threatening unilateral tariffs that would cripple the Mexican economic. (The fact that the threat was almost as scary for American businesses and Republican politicians is somewhat beside the point here.) Mexico did agree to do some things, but what Mexico has actually done that they were not already planning to do is not clear. What is clear is that getting the Mexican Congress to ratify the trade deal that is supposed to replace NAFTA will be more difficult.

IRAN. Another cases of maximum pressure on an adversary. The assumption was that pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“Iran deal” is a much more user-friendly term) and crippling Iran’s economy by zeroing out oil exports would being the Islamic Republic back to the bargaining table to make major concessions. The Iranian strategy of putting increasing pressure on the remaining parties to the agreement to circumvent U.S. sanctions. was not part of the plan. Now the United States is stuck, with few punishments to inflict short of a potentially disastrous military adventure and no rewards to promise. About all the hard liners in Washington can do is cross their fingers and hope the Iranian economy collapses completely and by some miracle the people revolt against the regime. And that the new regime is not even more hard line and radical than the old one.

Conclusion. There is no “best” strategy. What is most likely to work depends on your goals, the other party’s goals, and what you can promise or threaten. Compellence differs from persuasion and deterrence because it can undermine long term relationship goals if used on friends or allies. That is the real art of the deal.