Iran, nuclear brinksmanship, and modern media fragmentation
This very nice Nate Silver piece about Trump's nuclear brinksmanship is a must-read.1
The failure to factor long-shot massive negative-EV outcomes into calculations is a serious problem in the technical assessment of risk and an even bigger problem in the public assessment of strategic interactions such as we've seen this week between Trump and Iran.
However little probability you assign to Trump's ultimatum actually triggering total regional non-nuclear war, regional nuclear war, or global war, the downside risk is so massive that it can easily outweigh the bargaining value, despite being successful 99%+ of the time.
I would like to make a modestly-related point, one that I've been worrying about for a while now but that came into sharp focus this week: the consequence of the fragmentation of media on the distribution of public information about the war. And I don't mean the well-known and well-documented effects of fragmentation on the understanding of the war, in which partisan and fragmented news reduces common facts and creates multiple perception realities. I mean the inability of the 21st century media environment to effectively convey the existence of a geopolitical crisis.
Now, I do not think what happened yesterday is actually comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in risk level, danger, or potential consequence. But I also don't think it was much more than an order of magnitude smaller. Maybe there was, as Silver's article suggests, something like a 1-3% chance of nuclear attack and/or a massive regional war, with whatever corresponding downstream chance of World War III beginning. That's not a huge chance, but it's likely among the top handful of chances since the Cold War ended.
And I'm pretty confident a non-trivial percentage of American adults had no idea it was even happening. And this wasn't some secret standoff between leaders that you don't find out about until after it's over; the principal actors were operating in real-time over public channels of news communication. And yet, it was entirely possible to go about your day and be totally unaware---even right now---that anything had actually happened.
I don't think that was possible in October, 1962. The role of limited-channel television and nationalized wire-service print media allowed for the centralized distribution of information alerting the public to the existence of the crisis in a way that made it difficult to not know about it. It has memorably been said by many people that almost no one is as famous now as many people were in the 1980s; the medium of 20th century fame has just disappeared.2 Maybe so for crises as well.
All of this reminds me something David Potter wrote in the 1970's, about the secession crisis of 1861:
The old Union in 1860-1861 lacked the national press services, the network of electronic media, the large corps of public information specialists, and the array of news magazines which today would saturate public attention with an issue as urgent as secession. But in 1860, Congress was the only agency that held national affairs in any kind of national focus. It was out of session in November 1860, when the secession crisis began, and the country was ill-prepared to understand the situation, even for many weeks after Congress convened in December.3
The problem today is not the problem of 1861. It's closer to the opposite; the proliferation of electronic media is so vast that those who wish to avoid political news---even news of a political crisis, or of leaders declaring a political crisis---can easily do it, and even those who seek it out may not be able to discern the existence of a crisis situation.
The consolidated national media of the 20th century had many problems, but the ability to focus attention on a crisis was not one of them. This week has made me concerned we've lost a fair amount of that ability.
One response might be this wasn't a national crisis; if it was, it would have come into focus! This has some merit---certainly there are events that would trigger everyone to turn on their TVs and become hyper-aware---but I don't think it's correct on the margin. The existence of a crisis is in some sense a political judgement call; that ultimately requires the existence of public information, getting to the public. Even if it starts as an elite-driven belief there is a crisis, information still has to be relayed and tested against public sentiment.
A second response might be who cares? What does it matter if there's a sharp focus on a national crisis that alerts citizens who otherwise might miss it. In my view, that's a dangerous spot for a democracy. For one, it gives an advantage to certain kinds of threats. As the secession crisis example illuminates, the lack of crisis alert prevented the speedy organization of pro-union sentiment into political action. No such delayed applied to the Confederates, who got a multi-month lead in putting together their proto-nation while the North and pro-Union southerners slept. Second, as a separation of powers matter, public opinion is one of the serious checks on the presidency and presidential war power, and the ability to quickly mobilize popular opinion in a crisis is one of the key ways to constrain presidential action. Opposition leaders who can't muster public opinion will find it harder to counter administration crisis policy.
You can read all sorts of more general news and commentary about the ceasefire elsewhere, I thought this Gabe Fleisher piece was particularly informative.↩
Chuck Klosterman gives the memorable example in The Nineties that totally forgettable, middle-of-the-ratings sitcoms like Major Dad drew higher television viewership than modern supposed-cultural-events like Game of Thrones.↩
The quote is from The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861.↩