What is President Trump up to? This is arguably the most important question in the world right now — and perhaps the toughest to answer.
Mr. Trump’s words and actions seem to revolve around a central idea: The world is a zero-sum game. Whoever pays the most into the pot is the loser; whoever gets the most is the winner.
That may sound like a mere difference of perspective or negotiation style. But most of the postwar international order is based on the idea that the world is a positive-sum game: a collection of overlapping systems that benefit all who participate in them, even if the costs and benefits of participation aren’t distributed equally.
This positive-sum concept is a foundation of the international trade, international law, and international alliances that have been engines of prosperity and peace for decades — and indeed of democracy itself.
Since World War II, the United States has been a powerful anchor of that system. But Mr. Trump has signaled he is playing a very different game.
Since the 1980s, his words and actions have suggested that he places little value on positive-sum dynamics. Where others see positive-sum games generating gains for all, he seems to see only zero-sum winners and losers. And now, in his second term, that worldview appears to be a primary driver of his foreign policy.
That is already upending norms, alliances, markets and economies. It is threatening many of the United States’ longstanding relationships, transforming friends into adversaries and strengths into weaknesses.
Understanding this zero-sum thinking helps to explain the Trump administration’s approach toward global trade, its acquisitive and extractive foreign policy, its friendliness toward many autocratic regimes and its hostility toward liberal democracies.
Positive-sum games
The basic concept of a positive-sum game is that players do not win at each other’s expense, but instead all gain from participating. The interaction between the players creates aggregate benefits that exceed the aggregate costs.
In simple terms, cooperation makes the overall pie larger, so everyone’s piece gets bigger.
In a zero-sum game, by contrast, the total rewards are fixed, so every gain comes at someone’s expense — one person getting more pie means another gets less. My colleague Damien Cave recently wrote about some of the anthropological reasons why humans are prone to zero-sum thinking, including a psychological bias toward perceiving themselves as being in cutthroat battles, even when they are not.
But once they are established, positive-sum games can work on the basis of cooperation rather than coercion, as people become aware of the benefits they offer. That’s true even if the costs and benefits aren’t equitable: Some participants can gain more than others, but if everyone gains something, it’s still worthwhile to participate.
Positive-sum systems of international trade, security, and democracy reinforce one another: It is easier to invest in another country, or rely on goods imported from it, if you aren’t worried that war might sever your relations. But the opposite can also be true. Without trust and cooperation, the interlocking systems can collapse — one by one, and then all at once.
International Trade
The modern system of international trade is built on the assumption that trade not only makes individual buyers and sellers better off, but also that countries benefit from being able to specialize.
Exporters get the benefits of foreign markets, while importers get access to goods and services without having to produce them themselves, freeing up resources for other sectors that are more profitable. All participants get to focus on their areas of comparative advantage: the United States, for example, might have fewer clothing factories but more Silicon Valley tech giants, which leads to more growth for the U.S. economy as a whole.
Americans have enjoyed the benefits of that system for so long that they may not realize how much they depend on it, said Heather Hurlburt, a former Biden administration trade official.
“Americans are very used to being able to get the best of the best from other countries, whether that is fun consumer goods or whether it’s medications,” she said.
There are longstanding debates about trade policy, and whether protectionism can help develop key industries, or what policies benefit workers the most. But Mr. Trump appears to be hostile to the underlying concept that trade can be mutually beneficial at all.
In his worldview, any country that imports more than it exports is a loser, and any country with a trade surplus is a winner. He has initiated large tariffs against the three biggest U.S. trading partners: Mexico, China and Canada and threatened to soon do the same against the European Union. (In reality, there is little evidence that tariffs can reduce trade deficits.)
Although Mr. Trump gave Canada and Mexico a temporary reprieve from most of the new tariffs this week, his on-again, off-again tactics have only reinforced the message that the United States is no longer a reliable trading partner.
International Law
The post-World War II world is built on a rules-based system of international law. The idea is that the positive-sum benefits of the system create an incentive for countries to respect the U.N. Charter and comply with treaty obligations and the laws of war, even if there are no international cops to enforce them.
The strong post-World War II norm against territorial conquest, for example, is a collective sacrifice of the ability to invade and take over other countries. In exchange, nation states receive the greater collective benefit of avoiding costly wars and forgoing the need to constantly defend themselves against annexation.
Countries do still violate international law, of course. But even then, they tend to do so in ways that signal support for the system itself by denying that they violated the law, or claiming some kind of defense to accusations that they did. (Russia, for example, claimed that its invasion of Ukraine was necessary to defend Russian speakers there against genocide.)
Mr. Trump has made a point of undercutting this system. He has talked of annexing Greenland and Gaza and making Canada the 51st state. More acutely, he has undercut Ukraine’s right to maintain its territorial integrity by offering to let Russia keep the land it has invaded — and by threatening to cut Ukraine out of peace talks altogether.
NATO
Defensive alliances like NATO work on a similar principle: Jointly investing in deterrence produces greater value for the United States and its allies by preventing wars, even if all participants don’t contribute equally.
The United States has always paid an outsized share of defense costs for its allies because it saw those alliances as positive-sum.
Mr. Trump does not seem to place a value on the intangible benefits of the security arrangement. He has said he would “encourage” the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that do not spend enough on defense. By signaling that U.S. protection is uncertain, he has radically weakened NATO’s deterrent power.
“The invisible gains, or the gains that are hard to quantify, like NATO, like the fact that there’s been peace for a long time, is just very alien to him,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a professor of international relations at Columbia University. “He doesn’t count that in the sum.”
Democracy
Democracy is perhaps the ultimate positive-sum game.
Democracy can only survive as a system of government when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of the game.
In established democracies that usually isn’t difficult, because the benefits of having a system in which election results are respected are predictably big enough to outweigh the costs of accepting an individual loss. The positive-sum gains of democracy include the stability and safety that come from predictable, peaceful transfers of power.
But Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election, and his blanket pardons of Jan. 6 rioters, suggest that he cares little for the core organizing principle of democracy: Election losers are better off acknowledging their defeats in order to preserve the legitimacy of the system and their own opportunities to run again.
So it is perhaps not surprising that he does not appear to see liberal democracies as natural allies of the United States, taking a hostile stance toward Canada and the European Union, while praising the leaders of Russia and Hungary.
For eight decades, the United States and its allies have built a positive-sum world, confident in the rewards it would bring them and the wider world. The U.S. has offered other countries an implicit guarantee that they, too, play by the rules and will share in the system’s rewards.
But now, by signaling that the United States no longer believes in that system or intends to play by its rules, Mr. Trump is sending the opposite signal: The United States is now playing a zero-sum game. Any country that expects otherwise will face disappointment, or worse.
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