In her recent memoir, Freedom, the former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, talks about her disappointing first meeting with the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, in 2017. She felt that Trump “looked at everything like the real estate developer he was before he entered politics” — as a zero-sum game. He believed that all countries were rivals and that one nation’s prosperity meant another’s failure and not that cooperation could boost everyone’s prosperity.
Game theory has it that if one person wins and the other loses, there is no net gain — it is a ‘zero-sum game’. Trump views life as a series of deals. “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” Trump wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big and Kick Ass. “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself,” he added.
Trump imposed import tariffs while in office the first time in order to close a trade deficit that, in his view, amounted to foreign nations benefiting at the expense of Americans. Alliances like NATO, which he has criticised as a waste of money to support Europe’s defence, infuriate him. Overall, he has attempted to apply the zero-sum bargaining strategies he developed in the New York real estate industry to the North American Free Trade Agreement, NATO and, more generally, the US’s ties with other nations. Not understanding the true nature of the climate change was another reason for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. For him, one country must win — or lose — at the price of another in this situation.
However, because the economic pie — that is, wealth or income — is expanding, it is widely believed that the economy is not a zero-sum game. William C. Freund, a former chief economist for the New York Stock Exchange, called out Trump’s mistaken views. He said, “By adhering to the false notion of trade as a zero-sum deal, Mr. Trump becomes a job killer rather than a job creator.”
To be fair, Trump neither started the zero-sum worldview nor will he see it through. The journalist, Gideon Rachman, argued in Politics, Power and Prosperity After the Crash that the logic of international relations has been drastically altered by the 2008 financial crisis. Rachman identified three sources of increased zero-sum thinking: slower economic growth; growing rivalry between the US and rising powers, particularly China; and the clash of national interests in the search for solutions to global challenges like climate change, nuclear proliferation, and failed states. This is because the zero-sum logic has prevented the world from coming to an agreement to combat climate change and threatens to create a global economic stalemate.
The World Economic Forum’s 2015 report, “Is the world zero-sum or win-win?”, was published before Trump was elected president for the first time. It outlined how, following a year of geopolitical difficulties, relations between major powers, including the conflict between Russia and NATO over Ukraine, were increasingly framed in the harsh “if they win, we lose” framework. As a result, many theorists and leaders continued to adopt the zero-sum mentality. And that could be the source of today’s polarisation — a fundamentally incompatible worldview.
Furthermore, in an article in The Washington Post, Eduardo Porter argued that the zero-sum mentality is not unique to any one political party. Trump’s protectionist policies were intensified by President Joe Biden. Zero-sum thinking seems like the default for American politics at a time when the majority of ageing White voters who have long been accustomed to having uncontested power feel undercut by globalisation, demographic change, and complex issues like climate change.
Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard’s Social Economics Lab demonstrated in an article that younger generations in the US or Continental Europe have a more zero-sum approach than older generations. As a result, rudimentary zero-sum games are replacing the potential win-win approach of social and international cooperation. It is true worldwide. Trump may have just given it an impetus.
Atanu Biswas is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta
