The best analogy to describe Number 10’s Brexit strategy since the beginning of the Boris Johnson premiership is nuclear confrontation.
That might sound dire, but it’s not fear-mongering – it’s game theory. Technically the study of how “interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes”, the discipline found its most prominent real-world application during the Cold War, as an analysis device of the US-USSR nuclear stand-off. Brexit might be next.
According to Antonio Cabrales, a professor of advanced game theory and the head of the economics department at the University College London, one way of looking at Johnson’s actions is resorting to the concept of “madman theory”. First coined to refer to US president Richard Nixon, the strategy essentially boils down to conveying an impression of volatility and borderline irrationality in order to scare one’s opponent into making concessions.
In the realm of nuclear weapons, that’s how it played out: Nixon’s aides would warn heads of state in Russia or Vietnam that the president was both unstable and itchy-fingered, so much so that he might consider nuking them, even if that entailed retaliation and global catastrophe. That usually mellowed even the most obstreperous adversaries.
We know that Johnson sort of endorsed the 'madman' strategy as a way-out of the Brexit stalemate, last year, when he proposed that US president Donald Trump – one of Nixon’s most notable epigones – handle Brexit.
“There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere,” Johnson said in a recording published by Buzzfeed in June 2018. We also know that Johnson’s main aide, Dominic Cummings, is a game theory buff, and venerates John Von Neumann, considered the founder of the field. Both the main players in Downing Street have form.
When it comes to Brexit negotiation, the stakes are lower than in nuclear standoff, but the ruse is pretty similar: Johnson needs the EU to remove the Irish backstop, and he’s trying to convince them that he would go for a no-deal Brexit if his demand is not met. While no-deal is projected to be very damaging for the UK economy, it is also a bundle of complications that the EU would prefer to avoid, especially at a time when signs of a looming recession are mounting up.
“Johnson is essentially saying ‘Well, I may kill myself, and that's not very good to me. But you're also going to be dripping all over with blood, and you’ll have to clean your your shirt’,” Cabrales says.
The problem with exaggerated threats is that they only work if they are credible. Former prime minister Theresa May also tried to play the 'madman' card – remember the “No deal is better than a bad deal,” mantra? – but the EU never took her threats too seriously. In the 'madman' department, Johnson has an obvious a head-start. “During his career, Boris Johnson has cultivated an image of someone that is a bit gung-ho, prepared to go to extremes,” Cabrales says. “In a situation like this, that can become very useful.”
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That is not enough, though. To be really credible, a good 'madman' has to fire all the ambassadors and barricade himself in a bunker clutching his nuclear button with an ominous look on his face. In other words, it has to rule out every solution that is not his way or the post-atomic highway. That, in game theory, is called a commitment device.
“Here’s what a commitment device is: imagine you have ten options, and you burnt eight of your options, so there are only two left,” says professor Hamid Sabourian, chair of the faculty of economics at the University of Cambridge. “And then you say to the other side: 'Well, it's either no-deal, or you give in on the backstop'.”
One of Johnson’s commitment devices has been to repeatedly insist on the October 31 deadline as unmovable – in his words, Brexit would have to absolutely happen by that date, “do or die”, “no ifs no buts”, with an extension being labelled worse than being “dead in a ditch”.
Another, more substantial commitment device was to try and remove the only thing that stood between him and no-deal: that is, parliament. From this perspective, prorogation – ostensibly intended to allow for a Queen’s Speech to be delivered – was Johnson’s signal to Brussels that he would not be stymied by parliament the way May had been.
“Closing parliament was like making sure that the nuclear device was firmly in place, by getting rid of the one body that could deactivate it,” Cabrales says. “Johnson was making it a bit more credible that he was willing to detonate his nuke.” We still don’t know how parliament’s passing of anti-no-deal legislation will change Johnson’s strategy. He might refuse to comply with the law, or try – as he is trying now, so far in vain – to hold a snap election in order to claw back his commitment device and buffalo Brussels into taking him seriously.
Of course, this reading of the situation entails taking Johnson’s narrative more or less at face value. The prime minister has repeatedly asserted that he does want a deal, but that in order to attain it Britain needs show to be prepared for a no-deal exit; he recently said that ruling no-deal out “would destroy any chance of negotiation,” with Brussels. The alternative explanation is that Johnson is actually aiming for no-deal and all he is doing is intended to achieve that.
The other question is whether this strategy can work. “In principle, the EU can just say, ‘I don't believe you’,” Cabrales says. “My impression is that that's what they are actually doing. They are saying: ‘I don't believe you're a madman’” while refusing to accede to Johnson’s demands. As of this week, the EU was saying that it was still waiting for the UK’s proposed alternatives to the backstop, but that none had been floated yet.
In these circumstances, inflexibility is risky – but it is also something that has worked pretty well for the UK in the past. When it was still a fully paid-up EU member, Britain’s red lines – its rebate, its exemption from the Schengen area – were matter of grumbling for the EU at large, but they were eventually accepted in order to keep the UK onboard as a member state. Back in 2016, the LSE economist Bob Hancké described that as a “battle of the sexes” scenario – in which actors are ready to accept less-than-ideal scenario for the sake of long-term cooperation. The catch? It only works if you want to cooperate.
“While it works well as long as the UK wants to remain an EU member, [these] tactics backfire when you are negotiating leaving the EU,” Hancké wrote. “Drawing red lines when you don’t want to cooperate anymore is massively counterproductive.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
