Commentary: The end of the ‘win-win’ era

Commentary: The end of the ‘win-win’ era In these zero-sum times, the sunny optimism of the post-cold war phrase seems a quaint and distant memory, says Leo Lewis for the Financial Times. TOKYO: Published shortly before the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Deterrence, Arms Control, And Disarmament: Toward A Synthesis In National Security Policy was not an uplifting work. “I am afraid, and I am pessimistic,” concluded its author, J David Singer, parsing the “insane and degrading” nuclear calculus on which human survival teetered. Despite Singer’s well-founded bleakness, the book lives on as an unintentional beacon: the most plausible origin story of a term that has come to define optimism, aspiration and the addictive sugar rush of positive spin. Because, in a footnote on page 109, stands what is reckoned to be the earliest reference in print to the term “win-win”. Who (outside sport) doesn’t love a win-win? Few, in theory, but these are notably far from theoretical times. So far, in fact, that after win-win’s long, hard-working and prolific career as the claimed outcome of summit meetings, free trade agreements, joint ventures, M&A deals, party manifestos and press releases on every conceivable subject, the backdrop has changed. This may be the moment to admit that win-win needs a reset for more aggressively zero-sum times. A TERM SUITED TO ITS ERA The phrase is already doing immeasurably more than originally intended. Singer was deploying win-win in coldly mechanical terms: a reference to one of the four possible (but, given human nature, less likely) results of the classic “prisoners’ dilemma” thought experiment. But over the years the term blossomed – as a handy verbal bellwether of the post-cold war order, of globalisation, market liberalisation and other trust-the-other-side-to-act-rationally megatrends – becoming endlessly seductive to businesses and governments everywhere. Retired diplomats recall baffled Chinese officials wrestling to even conceptualise and translate win-win in 1999 when China was first negotiating entry to the World Trade Organization. By the middle of the following decade, it was ubiquitous in China’s Communist Party messaging. And so in 2006, when win-win finally made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (inducted in the same batch as nanobot, anoraky and yada yada), that felt perfectly of its time: an era that seemed to be structurally lowering the obstacles to win-win thinking, pre-social media, pre-global financial crisis, pre-Donald Trump, pre-AI. STARTING TO RING HOLLOW To the credit of human resilience and optimism, win-win has persisted as an ambition and a salve even as its practice and application have demanded ever greater suspension of disbelief. Middle powers such as Japan, which have thrived under the postwar world order and have most to lose from that party stopping, remain remarkably heavy drinkers from the win-win punchbowl. It looks like outright inebriation when Washington exacts a US$550 billion investment pledge from Tokyo to “buy down” US tariffs and Tokyo accepts that as win-win. Last weekend, the hollow ring was overwhelming. Jared Kushner, discussing US negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, said that the US approach was to seek a “win-win outcome”. There is no evidence to support the idea Vladimir Putin wants that; Kushner was representing a president who describes the world, regularly and revealingly, in terms of winners, losers, unfairness and imbalance. Win-win, in the prisoners’ dilemma, depends on both sides believing the other will always act rationally: Trump’s strategic insistence on unpredictability means no counterpart can ever act on the assumption of US rationality. THE TRAP OF TREATING ZERO-SUM AS THE RULE Of course, the term win-win has always had its flaws. Its absolutism means it can too often be used to present as fully balanced something that may be very good for one but only okay for the other. In the wrong hands, it conceals coercion or failure. More fundamentally, the win-win beloved of communiques and trade deals evolved during the relatively more straightforward days of a single superpower era: China’s rise changes that on a global scale. But the past few years have freighted the concept with greater difficulties. Monopolies are not built to seek or secure win-win solutions, and the sheer financial scale and reach that have been granted to the top end of the tech industry clearly establish monopolism over win-win as the more successful strategic goal. The great trap being laid here is to abandon all hope for win-win (while perhaps still paying it cynical lip service) and treat zero-sum as the rule as the old order shifts to new. To do so will prolong the phase in which win-win is genuinely unattainable. Win-lose may be truly horrible, but, as Singer’s book makes chillingly clear, lose-lose is infinitely worse.