Decoding the Zero-Sum Game in International Relations

There is one dairy milk on the table.

You and your friend would both like to eat this M&M. Each of you wants to eat the entire chocolate and, even if you could practically split it into half, you have no interest in doing so. You stare at each other over this chocolate.

One of you will get it. One of you will lose it.

You have entered a zero-sum game.

Zero-sum is a situation in game theory. It is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. If the total gains of the participants are added up and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

Poker and gambling are popular examples of zero-sum games since the sum of the amounts won by some players equals the combined losses of the others. Games like chess and tennis, where there are one winner and one loser, are also zero-sum games.

The zero-sum game finds most of its application in economics and political theory. Politics is often conceived as a type of game. To win, a person or group must amass more power than the other players in order to advance their own goals. Victory can be achieved through cooperation with the other players, domination over them or some combination of the two. Whereas talking about the case of economics in a nutshell, we can give examples of trade and tariffs.

Recently, we have been hearing a lot about this zero-sum game as this forms the basis of the Trump tariffs.

Former President Donald Trump has often represented foreign trade as a zero-sum game, one in which each nation gains and loses in equal measure. Each dollar that America spends buying goods from overseas is a dollar that the country loses. Under this theory, trade deficits are unambiguously bad.

From his point of view, everything’s a zero-sum game: Freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or other characteristics doesn’t unleash greater human potential to the benefit of all. Instead, it’s a step backwards for everyone else, part of the never-ending war of all against all. Your gain is necessarily my loss.

There is an age-old disagreement as to whether the world is zero-sum or not but it defines virtually every aspect of our politics today: Trade and immigration, for example, on the one hand, benefits society as a whole, but on the other produces losers who then see the entire issue in zero-sum terms. This zero-sum perspective is closely aligned with Trump’s personal sense of a constant war of all-against-all, and a politics in which those who are different must be separated, each with their own “lebensraum,” to end (or, at least, partition) the zero-sum nature of the world.

Trump insisted on playing this kind of game, in which he thought he has to win, demolish the opposition and this can be backed by thinking about his approach to Iran and North Korea. He completely ignored the fact that most games in life are not zero-sum. There’s room for negotiation. There’s room for cooperation. He usually didn’t see that very well, or he made concessions, perhaps unnecessarily, to some of the dictators of the world.

Wars, for Americans, are events which are won or lost, in the same way, that a game is won or lost. The US-China trade war can also be seen as a Zero-sum game. Following the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017, U.S.-China trade relations worsened. Trump made use of the widening U.S. trade deficit with China as part of his campaign rhetoric for trade reform. He promoted a stronger pro-American trade policy by making claims that China is “an economic enemy” in violation of intellectual property (IP) rights, an allusion to Chinese legislation forcing foreign multinationals to engage in joint ventures with Chinese firms which can replicate patented technology. The U.S. government launched a trade war against China starting in 2018. It levied more tariffs on steel and aluminium from all nations, including China, to which China responded the following month by placing tariffs on aluminium, meat, fruit, and wine from the U.S. As a result of this tit-for-tat strategy, the risks and costs to each nation increased.

For the U.S., the trade war impacted domestic industries such as automobile, technology, telecommunications, and agriculture. China, on the other hand, had been wrought by similar damage as it continued to face a series of economic setbacks.

Well as we explored the concept of this game in politics and economics, it will be interesting to see if the Zero-sum game remains relevant to the US government in their foreign policies or not.