Collaboration, Defection and the Hostage's Dilemma
Imagine a world - or a continent, or a country - divided between two ideologies. Catholics vs Protestants, Democracy vs Fascism, Christians vs Muslims, Capitalism vs Communism - the details don’t matter. The belief systems, and the countries that adhere to them, oppose each other and contend for influence in a full spectrum contest of values: economically, diplomatically, in the information arena and through proxy wars. Each is fully dedicated to the other’s defeat.
And yet: they find small areas in which they collaborate. Perhaps they both take part in the Olympics, or in other sporting competitions. Perhaps their is some, modest, collaboration in pure scientific research, or against drug smugglers, or in the arts. Perhaps they work together on disease prevention, or adhere to certain conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, or of pilgrims. In each case, such collaboration will likely be cautious, limited and circumscribed, with careful provisos to prevent it becoming another area of contestation (such as a prohibition on the display of political symbols in sporting events, or measures to prevent defection of travelling artists or scientists).
What happens if one side defects? And how should the other, rationally, respond?
Let’s put some flesh on the bones.
Imagine a world divided between a Capitalist and a Communist bloc1, where the two factions nevertheless decide to work together to eradicate polio. Polio being an infectious disease that pays no regard to borders, both sides need to work together to eradicate it and share common benefits from doing so. They establish a neutral medical agency to carry out this effort, which both sides commit to keeping free of ideology or propaganda.
For a while, this works well, and polio is rolled back across the globe. But after a few years, seeing the success of the effort, the Capitalist bloc decides to defect. For whatever reason, they have a majority of the leadership roles in the organisation2 and use this to leverage their influence to promote capitalism.
Soon, every polio shot is being accompanied by doctors giving out free copies of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and pamphlets about the benefits of free markets.3 In some cases, rather than distributing the vaccine through local health organisations, as has always been done before, the agency starts using ‘market-based mechanism's’ in distribution.4 A small amount of the funds - say 2-3% - are even being spent on things with only the most tangential relationship to polio prevention, such as research projects on ‘Exploring the use of price mechanisms in facilitating supply and demand in developing nation markets, in a way which could have applications in drug delivery’.
Polio eradication still goes on as before - maybe 5% less effectively than before, but still making great strides - but Capitalism is increasingly embedded within the agency.
The Communist bloc is, understandably, pretty miffed by this. On the one hand, they still think polio eradication is very important - more important than the amount of damage that the promotion of Capitalism by this agency is doing as, however annoying, it is small beer compared to the overall information ecosystems, economic infrastructure and ballistic missile submarines deployed by both blocs. But on the other, this is a direct violation of the terms under which the agency was set up, it is a struggle where every element counts - and, if they let the Capitalists get away with this, where will they defect next?
They have two choices: to put up with the defection, or to cancel the programme:
The sharp-eyed amongst you will see that this isn’t quite a Prisoner’s Dilemma. In a Prisoner’s Dilemma, defecting is always better for you whatever your opponent does (even though both collaborating is better than both defecting).
In this scenario, however, while mutual collaboration is still better than mutual defection, and defecting while your opponent collaborates is the best of all, if your opponent has defected, you still do better, on an absolute level, by cooperating (even though your opponent does better still).
In a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, if you know your opponent is going to defect, of course you should defect. In this scenario, you face a new dilemma: do you still collaborate, in order to maintain the better absolute outcome for yourself but allowing your opponent to gain an advantage, or do you defect, employing a scorched earth tactic that harms yourself, but brings your opponent back to your level?
In essence, the defector is holding the shared beneficial outcome - in this case the eradication of polio as a hostage, daring the opponent to respond to their defection, in the knowledge that to do so would put the ‘hostage’ at risk. For this reason, I’m going to call this The Hostage’s Dilemma.5
As with a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, the correct response to this may well vary depending on whether on not one is playing a single game6, or an iterated game - i.e. if each side’s behaviour can be taken into account by the other side when determining actions in future scenarios.
You can probably see where this is going…
A lot of people are looking at a lot of the things Trump is doing domestically - DOGE, pausing aid spending or research grants, the executive orders opposing trans ideology or the firing of DEI officials - and seeing this as a defection from the normal ways and customs of governing, even where it is not actually breaking the law7.
That assessment is probably correct and, like all defections, there is likely to be a price to pay (even if the actions achieve their objectives).
But it is worth noting that, in both the US and the UK, the left defected first, and more extensively, even if less noisily. E.g:
Organisations such as the civil service, schools and the police claimed that radical and contested issues such as critical race theory and trans ideology were somehow 'not political' and so they could adopt them, ignoring their statutory and customary requirements to be non-political and impartial.
International aid agencies, and the organisations that they fund such as Oxfam, Unicef, UNCRC and Save the Children, which had originally been addressing problems with very widespread support such as poverty, famine and infectious diseases, have subsequently also started campaigning on radical left positions, including 'decolonisation', trans ideology (again!), equity and against the family/parental rights.
Judges, using 'living instrument' doctrines, reinterpreted laws and doctrines in highly expansionary ways, e.g. expanding the interpretation of cruel and unusual punishment to include forbidding the deportation of violent criminals to countries without a publicly funded health service, or greatly expanding the reasons why people could claim asylum.
'Cities/universities/etc of Sanctuary' have been established where people openly say they will not cooperate with the law and the authorities.
Many of these have involved wilful reinterpretation of the law as written, which weakens confidence in the ability to overcome it by the standard means of passing new laws. Attempts to push back have met with repeated evasion, delay and obfuscation by the permanent bureaucracies.
This is an example of the Hostage’s Dilemma, as set out above. And, to date, the right largely accepted these defections. They've said, 'oh, we still support famine relief, so we'll keep supporting Oxfam even if they're also campaigning against our most fundamental beliefs.' 'Universities are still doing great engineering and vaccine research, so we'll overlook the fact that they're actively promoting censorship, anti-western hatred and post-truth ideologies.' 'We still like the anti-torture part of this international Convention, so I guess we can't leave even if other parts have been judicially extended.' And yet, as one might expect, this has only encouraged further defection by the left.
All of which doesn't necessarily justify Trump's own excesses. But it does explain it. It was only a matter of time before people would not take it any longer.
But why not just have a review?
One of the many, seemingly reasonable, responses to this is that if Trump doesn’t approve of the ways USAid, or research grants, or something else, is being spent, he should just have a review to identify which grants are good, or bad, and then only cancel the bad ones.
This, however, is to concede too much to the Hostage Takers (i.e. the progressives), who defected first. It is to accept the implicit claim that the Hostage - the international aid, or the science grants - are so valuable that the left’s defection must be tolerated and allowed to persist, until the review is complete. But this is a sword that cuts both ways: if it is genuinely easy to identify which programmes should continue, then it should be just as possible to stand them up again relatively rapidly after a shut down, as it would have been to preserve them from a shut down in advance.
Furthermore, it misunderstands the nature and level of the defection. Ordering reviews has been the right’s habitual ways to respond and it has not, historically, achieved much (just ask the Tories how well this went for them). So embedded is identity politics (or ‘wokery’) within these organisations that it is unclear to what extent such reviews would genuinely be carried out - already, we have had multiple occasions of organisations or individuals respond to prohibitions on DEI8 activities (often at state level) by simply renaming them and continuing much as before.
For both these reasons, if one accepts the objectives, a ‘zero-based’ approach seems more reasonable, in which the system is shut down and then one requires that each programme can demonstrate it is DEI-free, or otherwise unobjectionable, before being allowed to be refunded.
A further argument often made is that not much of this activity is, actually, ‘woke’. In the area of research grants, Scott Alexander examines a list of £2bn worth of grants identified by Ted Cruz as ‘woke’, and concludes that only about 40% actually meet that definition, with another 40% being not woke and the final 20% borderline.
In the ‘woke’ category, he agrees there are some that are indeed the sort of thing that Republicans would object to:
And in the non-woke category, he also identifies some genuine false positives, such as this entirely unobjectionable research on beetles, which appears to have been flagged for containing words such as ‘cis’ and ‘diversity’:
Many of those he categorises as non-woke are normal and unobjectionable research programmes, but that contain some sentences saying they will do outreach work, for example, “The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program” or “And will connect undergraduate students from under-representative minorities to polar science through participation in the university’s STEM pathways.”
Scott thinks these are unobjectionable. But here he shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what those who are objecting to ‘DEI’, ‘identity politics’ or ‘wokeness’ are concerned about.
Very few people9 think that the primary objection to identity politics becoming endemic throughout the public sector, academia, or large corporations is that scientists and marketing executives are spending most of their time entire time sitting around chanting land acknowledgements, attending struggle sessions or attending anti-whiteness courses rather than doing science or creating and selling products. Rather, their concerns include that, even though science and business is still being done, that:
Internships, outreach schemes or other programmes are increasingly offered only on explicitly ethnic or racial grounds.
Recruitment and promotion criteria explicitly or implicitly discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities and/or women.
Pressure to sign up to belief systems they don’t agree with, for example by being forced or pressured to state pronouns or recite land acknowledgements, is a form of discrimination against those on the political right.
Requiring ‘diversity statements’ functions as a modern day Test Act that allow organisations that should be impartial to select on political ideology.
Curricula in schools and universities are being ‘decolonised’ or ‘diversified’ to suit an explicitly political ideology and the expense of objectivity, truth, rigour or national heritage.
Notably, none of these concerns requires the organisation to be spending most of their time doing this stuff - but it still has a major impact. And the fact that, to get a grand funded, or to obtain a leadership role10 in a university, or to get an aid programme approved, you had to include these sort of statements and aims, is at the core of the opposition to identity politics.
To say that the science is fine, but it just has these statements about DEI activity in as well is to entirely miss the point. The meritocracy vs DEI issue is probably one of three main locuses in the contemporary ‘culture wars’.11
Certainly, for my own part, I am furious that prestigious positions are regularly advertised in the UK from which my own children will be barred from applying solely due to the colour of their skin12. And that in many other positions throughout their careers, they will face ongoing, systematic and state-backed discrimination based on their race and - in the case of my son - his sex. On a purely emotional level, there is no limit to the number of aid grants in faraway countries being given to people of whom we know nothing that I would not sacrifice to end such practices - and to ensure that the divisive and discriminatory ideologies that have given rise to them are scoured out, root and branch, from our society13.
None of which is to say that the current defection against norms of governance by the Trump administration will not have a price. It surely will - that is the nature of the Hostage’s Dilemma. It will have a price in terms of scientific research, international aid and innocent people who have been fired, as well as in terms of further degrading the consensus around governmental norms. And what is more, it may not work.14 Sulla's attempt to restore the Republic by force was a disaster, that ended up destroying what he claimed he sought to save.
But that does not necessarily mean that it is the wrong thing to do. In iterated games, defection is usually necessary to punish defectors. ‘Tit-for-tat’ is frequently a winning strategy - and certainly a better one than ‘cooperate always’.
There is a well-known experiment in which one individual is given a certain amount of money - say $10 - and asked to propose a split with the other participant. The other participant can either accept the proposal, in which case the money is split as the first participant proposed, or reject it, in which case both participants get nothing. On a simplistic level, it would be ‘rational’ for the second participant to accept any split, even a split which leaves them $0.01. But in reality, participants tend to reject any grossly unfair splits, suggesting that the need to punish defectors - even at a cost to ourselves - is hard-wired in at a deep level, and likely carries some evolutionary advantage.
‘This is so unimportant, why can’t we just do it my way?’
There is a small number of people who believe it is genuinely critical to the core mission of infectious disease control that the scientists working at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention declare their pronouns to each other. If you’re one of these people, then by all means keep advocating for it.
There is much larger number of people on the left and centre15 who don’t think whether or not scientists declare their pronouns, or whether PhD-ships are offered only to ethnic minority applicants, is that important, and are - understandably - deeply upset by the potential impact on scientific research, disease control and overseas aid. To quote Scott Alexander again,
“Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal!”
This is a pretty common refrain. It bears a remarkable similarity16 the way the right is sometimes told it is fighting a ‘culture war’, or obsessing about unimportant issues, when it challenges progressives on issues of race or gender. But it needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, and, in the 21st century, it was not the right that began calling for pronoun declarations or land acknowledgements, pulling down statues, renaming buildings, putting trigger warnings before Disney films or creating targets, internships and assessment criteria that explicitly disciminated upon racial grounds. It seems that some on the left would have the right gather herbs only, while they gather armies.
Tell me, have you ever had one of those conversations with your spouse - or partner, sibling, housemate or friend - where you’ve ended up yelling, ‘Come on, it’s not important, just let’s do it, even though it is ‘my way’!’?
How did that go for you?
If your opponent thinks something IS important, you can succesfully argue either one of two things - but not both:
That it is not important, and so we will do it your opponent’s way.
That we will do it your way, because it is, actually, important.
Many on the right do, sincerely, believe that the embedding of identity politics and DEI within our formerly trusted and impartial public institutions; the use of affirmative or ‘positive’ action, diversity statements and targets or quotas; and the promotion of trans ideology by public bodies are, actually, important. And, in the US, they have decided that they will not tolerate these progressive defection against institutional norms any further.
For moderate progressives who wish to preserve these institutions, the response cannot be to continue to rely on the importance of the hostages - the programmes - to maintain the defection - that bluff has been called. It must be to work to restore impartiality and neutrality to those organisations and institutions whose importance is such that their work should continue whoever is in power. To ensure that modern forms of DEI and identity politics are recognised as the contested political views they are - and are treated accordingly by leaders and institutions who are meant to remain impartial, as well as by those who should be permitting a plurality of views within their organisation.17
Defecting in a Hostage’s Dilemma is never easy, always painful and often messy. But it can sometimes be the correct thing to do - and right now in the US may well be one of those times.
It isn’t hard to doooo!
Maybe they paid better salaries, while the Communist bloc paid higher salaries for the military.
This is exactly how Capitalists spread the benefits of capitalism; trust me on this one.
I appreciate some readers may think this is a good idea for effectiveness reasons; however, assume for this purpose this would be a major point of contention.
If, as I suspect, this has some more official name, feel free to inform me in the comments.
As in The Last Command, an excellent short story by Arthur C. Clarke.
To forestall a (valid) objection from when I posted a much shorter version of this on Facebook, I agree that Jan 6th (and the pardoning of those involved) stand alone, and are of a different order. This also isn’t intended to be a post about Trump’s foreign policy decisions or broader record or character - but rather focusing on domestic, and in particular DOGE and similar related issues.
Or EDI, for those of us on this side of the Pond.
Though I’m sure we can find someone.
Or perhaps any kind of role.
With the other two probably being the trans debate, and the discussions around history and heritage.
I am aware that, legally speaking, these are permitted under the ‘positive action’ provisions in the Equality Act 2010, including due to the fact that explicit and exclusive restriction of opportunities in roles classed as development or training to those with certain protected characteristics. This is no defence: is is hardly the first time a country’s legal system has permitted or mandated discrimination.
On an intellectual level, I am sure you could get me to concede that there is some number of kids whose lives are saved from malaria are worth the state maintaining racist and discriminatory systems targeted against my own sex and ethnicity. But that’s not going to make the blindest bit of difference in the voting booth, or when deciding who to campaign for.
Though, equally, it might.
And probably some on the right, too.
OK, not that remarkable.
Just as we all recognise the difference between an organisation in which a Christian, or Muslim, can work without discrimination and an organisation that actively promotes and champions Christianity or Islam, it should not be beyond the capabilities for organisations to figure out the difference between an organisation in which a trans individual can work without discrimination and an organisation that actively promotes and champions trans ideology.
I'm going to come back to this detailed article to give it greater thought, but I have two points (they are not necessarily consistent!)
First, the character of a country and it's shared values is so important, when it comes to honouring servicemen and women who risked their lives and lost their lives, for fellow citizens. I am from a military family. I was at Arlington Cemetery last September and I approved the continuing American dedication to honouring their military dead.
When I learned that, because of DOGE and executive orders, the service stories of female and non-white servicemen had been removed from the Arlington website, I was furious. How could that possibly be important to them? Is it just racism and sexism? So for me, that has discredited the Republican claim to be "course correcting". Any sane Conservative would have immediately apologised, and made it right. These are not honourable people.
Secondly, your point about how even the smallest amount of DEI ideology can poison the well (I paraphrase). I have stopped looking for volunteering opportunities because I don't accept gender ideology - and it is everywhere, even at the community garden, the RSPCA charity shop etc. I was at a volunteering fair last year and I asked the Girl Guides if they were letting boys join. I was told firmly that they didn't admit boys. After taking a breath I rephrased as "boys, who identify as girls?" to which the answer was a smirking "yes". So a policy I don't support, and they were gaslighting me too. I am probably just one of many who is no longer playing along.
You don't mention it, but Scott's article on how the USAID cut was abhorent because PEPFAR is great did leave me thinking "so you're saying he should reinstate PEPFAR, but cut everything else?"