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The “win-win” confidence in eventually reaching mutual understanding is great for personal relationships and neighborly bridge building. On the global scale it absolutely does not work and Trump is correct to bully and corner both decent nations, like Canada and Germany, and indecent states (China, Iran). The globalized, cosmopolitan view of the world is shared by very few ( they are, of course, overrepresented in academia and political diplomacy) and it’s consequences are alienating for citizens of nations, who naturally place their own kin and their own way of life and their own connection to their ancestors far above any vapid dreams about global convergence on a common language and common philanthropic aims.

Furthermore, win-win has pushed immigration on the west so fast that it has fundamentally failed to assimilate new immigrants, and because of that, the win-win mindset is not just diplomats taking tax dollars to have nice dinners in gold plated Arab meeting rooms that amount to nothing because both parties have been overeducated out of saying what they really mean or want. The win-win mindset is responsible for an ever-present alienation that many citizens feel, as they realize that an entire layer of cultural familiarity, language and trust is no longer there, and that policy makers, educators, and philanthropic elites are spending all of their money on those who have not yet acclimated to the West instead of the native inheritors of Western traditions.

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"On the global scale it absolutely does not work".

Arguably the win-winners came to prominence in international relations in the nuclear era of mutually assured destruction (although momentum had been gathering since at least the Treaty of Westphalia). Globalization was a continuation of the theme. We haven't had a nuclear or world war since 1945 and more people have been lifted out of absolute poverty in the last 50 years than in the entire history of the planet.

However, there have been losers. Rawls (and other win-winners) assume that no one will be made worse off (or if they are then they will be compensated). That clearly did not happen in the rust belt. Others, like NATO, clearly abused the US's largesse. Does that mean we should totally abandon all hope for international cooperation? In a prisoner's dilemma sense, you seem to be advocating for a lose-lose scenario. Sure, defecting gives you a temporary win but others will retaliate. Are there ways to generate an evolution of cooperation rather than spiral in the opposite direction (while also trimming the abuse you correctly identify)?

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Yes I think that it's the denial of costs inherent in many complex OVERALL win-win solutions that pushed the growing popular rejection of such policies rather than a shifting of the mindset itself

This denial can take two forms: straightforward (cost X will not happen: immigration won't lower wages for basic work ) which is bad but defensible (oops we got it wrong ) and symbolically more important, denial of the validity of the concern/cost, up to the point of framing it as morally wrong (it's not legitimate to worry about cost X: people who don't want a drastic ethnic and cultural restructuring of their communities are racist), which seems doubly insurmountable because having your concerns invalidated feels degrading and dehumanising, but from the other side, concessions to "morally problematic" or otherwise invalid concerns are harder to make.

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This article was far more balanced than the usual 'kumbaya' version of global relations represented by people like Fukyama. As you say, win-win only works when parties are negotiating in good faith, such as close relationships where similar values are shared. Like communism, it works splendidly in one's own family and kin group, but terribly at scale. It's an odd moment where people are fed up with 'business as usual' where we pay leaders a lot of money to achieve little. Any change feels good right now.

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Hi Yascha. I always love reading or listening to your pieces and appreciate you making the comments section available. From time to time, I'm curious if you have lived in the U.S. (not in the Northeast or states like California). The reason is I find a lot of European journalists are still grappling with what Trump truly represents. I find most European journalists are leftist ideologues just like most Europeans (i have lived in the EU on and off for 20+ years in 5+ countries). Reading this piece, I'm reminded of two things Former Secretary of Defense Robert said in an interview. 1. Biden has been wrong about every foreign policy issue for 40 years. 2. While Obama was an intelligent President and logical President he has worked for, he also assumed that other Head of State were the same. You can substitute Europe for Biden in the first case. You can also substitute Europeans' mentality of Win Winners for the second case. Europeans assume if they are kind and compassionate, that their enemies will become their friends. Russia has already dispelled this notion and China will as well. The moral purity Europeans seek has to be backed by something and Europeans are simply not willing to exert any strength/authority/power to get anything that benefits Europeans. When wolves were culled in Yellowstone, the effects were devastating to the environment. Think of Trump as the reintroduction of the into a decrepit environment to help improve things. Last point, Angela Merkel will be known as the smartest Chancellor of Germany but in 20 years, she will also be known as its worse.

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I saw essentially NO consideration in this article of what it is that makes Trump popular. It is that he despises the bloated bureaucracy in DC that has been building for over two centuries. Face it, we have all been led to believe that we can have excellent, effective government, and that we need only pick which of the two parties will do that for us. That's what you've been taught your entire life, right? It's what I was taught. But then I woke up and smelled the coffee. The problem is not this party or that party, it is BOTH parties.

I personally recognized this back in the last century, and I've seen the situation continue to degenerate since then. To suggest that our problems started with Trump, that he is the cause of these problems, is absurd.

Trump is only the messenger. He is the first significant public messenger in over a century to point this out. He is the person in the fable, pointing out that the emperor is naked, even as the entire crowd marvels at his opulent wardrobe. It's mass delusion. If you just look, you see that DC is worse than useless. Has the federal government made healthcare better or cheaper? No. Has it made education better and cheaper? HELL no. Are we more secure? No. Can a higher proportion of citizens afford homes than before? No, far fewer can.

Go ahead, name all the things that the federal government has made better and not worse. Good luck with that. Politicians for all of time have known that they can get away with incompetence and failure, even thrive on it. All they have to do is blame their failures on a scapegoat. Get people incensed. Get them fighting with each other. It's Machiavelli all over again. And the useful idiots fall for it every time. Trump is not the problem. He is only the messenger. If your first instinct is to shoot him (or wish that someone else would), YOU are the problem.

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EPA has cleaned up the environment, the DOJ/FBI has persecuted and imprisoned those that have violated our laws, NNSA/DOE has successfully prevented catastrophe. Government has worked in some ways, and in others it has failed miserably - the incentives you illustrated are pernicious.

Does this mean government is perfect? Obviously not, there are a multitude of issues. However, you cannot just articulate that the government hasn't done anything good and only concentrate on the negative, or shortcomings of government. Change progresses slowly in America - it's built into the system.

However, I am beyond skeptical, that the new system, one driven by Trump's regime will improve any of these shortcomings and inefficiencies.

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well said 🎯

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Enjoyed this, but think you tiptoed a bit around the main point, or weren't entirely prepared to condede it. I'll try to make it plain, in my own fashion.

You are effectively highlighting the difference between positional bargaining (win/lose) and integrative bargaining (win/win). Getting to Yes is an important book because it highlights that negotiations can be truly win/win if only the parties will acknowledge that many negotiations have multiple dimensions (say, you want more money, I want speed of execution, we can each get what we want).

My guess is many of your commenters here on the left view Trump as a mouth-breather of little intelligence, and I'm not speaking to them because they are fundamentally unserious. But for those interested in good faith analysis, know this: Trump's genius in the first few weeks of his second term is in reminding the U.S. and the western world more generally that positional bargaining is, in many cases, still necessary, particularly in international relations. Win/win outcomes aren't always possible, especially with fanatics (cf. the Obama and Biden administrations with Iran).

The risk in The Art of the Deal approach is misapprehending the substance of any given conflict and applying a blunt win/lose mindset to a win/win situation. This is what I think your piece gets right - particularly as it relates to bullying allies, with whom we typically have multidimensional relationships and mutual interests.

TL;DR: don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

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And don’t bring a gun to nuclear warhead. Whoops! There went the whole banana. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but the risk of positional bargaining since August 1945 ain’t what it used to be. One wrong bluff and….

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trump's "zero-sum" approach comes nowhere near the ferocious zero-sum thinking of the Islamists (ie people working for a global Caliphate) who have managed to seduce and subdue all the extremely positive-sum types as you describe. we were long in need of a yang after all that yin (esp with our yin becoming increasingly authoritarian). this could create opportunities for positive-sum outcomes (to which trump may not be adverse).

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tRuanmp's entire life has revolved around the core belief that if HE doesn't respect something or someone, it does not deserve respect. Thus, if he disagrees with a truth, it is not a truth. If the Law says his actions or intentions are unlawful, the law is irrelevant and does not apply to him. tRump acts to force the square peg of of his demented reality into the round holes of accepted societal norms and accepted law. His warped sense of his own place in the world is now being overlayed on our nation and those gears greased by an ignorant electorate and fawning fools who believe his threats. tRump is a cancer that must be destroyed at all costs or our nation will die.

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There's a big difference between a desire to look for win-win situations, versus a fundamental belief that everything is a win-win situation.

The second type leads to thinking along the lines of "it sounds good to me, and it sounds like it would benefit at least one other person I know, therefore it MUST be good for everyone." Which seriously underestimates things like opportunity costs or efficiency costs or public bragging rights or social priority signals.

Which is how you get boondoggle vanity projects being sponsored by people who honestly can't imagine that boondoggle vanity projects are even real things. All forms of spending good money on good projects must be good, right?

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Exactly. Win/win is great *when possible.* There is no win/win way to play poker.

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Well, there is, but it's super-rare. Like celebrity charity poker games, or games played without real money for training/learning purposes, or games where everybody somehow nets zero money won/loss, but makes lots of friends along the way.

But yeah, if you're the sort of person who thinks those super-rare-edge-cases for making everyone a winner in poker is 'just how life works'.... Someone's going to get hurt. Those are the sorts of people who start complaining that grading students or giving students standardized tests is fundamentally wrong, because then someone might lose! And why would the public ever have a valid interest in knowing who the winner and losers in education were?

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Very insightful article, thank you!

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Yascha,

Great piece - and allow me to add a couple of concepts into your binary mindset thesis here which I consider important as they highlight why the win-win is not as clear a winner as we philosophically liberals might want to believe:

(1) Holiday From History

I think it is pretty clear that our shared Western failure to build a stable world after 1989-91 -equally true for our native Germany as it is for all other liberal democracies- is closely linked to our stubborn persistence on win-win thinking. "Holiday from history" friends of mine - and I have countless such friends! - still fail to see that we are at an EPOCHENBRUCH. A ZEITENWENDE. Whether it is our response to Islamist expansionism (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran), or our response to Russian imperialism (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldovia), or our domestic response to structural dangers (US saw highest net 4-year migration during the Biden years since 1880) - my line to friends always is that "center-left parties appear to have no answers to any of the structural problems of our time". This is tragic for me as a child of the center-left - but it is nonetheless true.

(2) Krastev's "end of an era"

Ivan Krastev has explained beautifully, including on your podcast, that the key characteristic of this brand-new era is our "re-discovery of the value of borders." We have come to understand again that we have something to defend, Krastev explains - in contrast to the "no border" years after 1989-91 when we thought that global trade and supranational institutions could usher in a new era of "win-win" peace and prosperity. No, Krastev says (correctly) - this belief was naive. It made us forget or ignore the many losers of that win-win approach, be those workers in Appalachia or any other non-symbolic capitalist in Musa Al-Gharbi's language.

This new belief of "borders are good", be those literal border walls or simply the idea to slow down migration so that a society can manage to integrate those who come, will prevail. We all know it, right? It is not just Trump and not just populism - Germany will prevent the AfD only if the CDU/CSU manages to own what is true and good about AfD positions while rejecting all that is vile and false.

All of this is to say: I am not so sure that our tears - the tears of symbolic capitalists, of philosophically liberals who were winners of the last 35 years- are shed because we are losing something that was truly valuable and workable or rather shed because we are losing an ideology that worked for us.

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One of many problems with "borders is good" is to say that it is good with global apartheid behaviors and dividing humanity through nationalism and distrust. Also, I think that Krastev is wrong on citizenship and nations because they can be changed fastly, at least if you have enough money. Check out this book https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25014

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I don't think Krastev proclaimed "borders is good" as his personal opinion. Rather, as a political scientist he was trying to describe a pervasive mood which is gaining strength in all liberal democracies.

I assume most of us here, by virtue of reading Yascha's substack, are philosophical liberals. Same is true for Krastev. But his border analogy describes -better than any other narrative I have seen- what we philosophical liberals got wrong over the last 35 years.

We believed in the EU and other supra-national organizations. We believed in the idea that a stronger UN could somehow advance freedom and democracy across the globe. We believed that increased trade with China would liberalize the country and the CCP. We believed that the 10 years bought with the Iran nuclear deal would be enough to get Iran to be a decent regional player.

All of these beliefs turned out to be wrong - yet relevant to Krastev, all of these beliefs stemmed from a belief in a post-border, post-national world. Obama was the poster child for this attitude.

And yet: if we are honest, we have to admit that we were wrong. We were blinded by "holiday from history" thinking. Putin and Ji and Oct 7 reminded us that our time is not much better than almost all other times in modern history, and the last 35 years were the glaring exception.

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Excellent points, Helge, especially your feedback about center-left parties lacking answers to the structural problems of our time. Trump's victory represents voters realizing this shift. I'm a registered democrats whose party does not know what center left is.

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Thanks, Pas.

You are exactly right - how many of us voted for Harris/Walz as the lesser of two evils! I felt strongly that I had to do my part to fight against an authoritarian Trump (see last 3 weeks), and yet I abhorred the idea of another 4 years of our academies run amok and "woke" (Musa would argue fake woke) idiocy continue.

Have you read any of Ruy's pieces? He has been prescient on this topic - another great one this week: https://open.substack.com/pub/theliberalpatriot/p/how-democrats-can-survive-the-next?r=cxkjw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Final point, going back to some of what Yascha wrote: Obama. Obama as the personified guru of the win-win movement. Heck, I was canvassing like crazy for Obama in 2007/8, and again in 2012! But Obama's "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice"? Such a great line! So poetic - and yet so fundamentally wrong. Obama's response to Romney re: Russia "The 1980's are calling and want their policies back?" Such a great line! I laughed heartily, that arrogant symbolic capitalist laugh that most of us are familiar with. Well...turns out that this Obama sentence was fundamentally wrong. Strategically wrong. Romney was right, and we win-win types were the real idiots...

In Germany, they say about Merkel -Yascha wrote about this, I think- that "in all strategic policy decisions, she was wrong". "Her triad of cheap security from America, cheap energy from Russia, and cheap trade with China was strategically wrong in all three arenas - and now Germany has to pay for this."

My point here is that maybe Obama - despite his soaring rhetoric and his charisma- was not that different. He was the American Merkel, in many ways...

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Yes, I have read a few things by Ruy. I confess I haven't read much recently, but I'll check out the link. My favorite pieces were these two:

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-democrats-hispanic-voter-problem-dfc

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-democrats-common-sense-problem

The second title resonated with me as a Democrat. The first piece was due to finding Thomas Sowell and trying to get a different perspective on some common beliefs I need to grow out of. However, Ruy did telegraph the results we saw in Nov2024.

Regarding Merkel and Obama, I always assumed their shared outlook on the role of government and politics must have been an intellectual aphrodisiac—especially in contrast to her relationships with Putin and Xi. Merkel and Obama understood each other in ways that Putin and Xi never could. Similarly, I suspect that Putin, Xi, and Trump might share a certain understanding that Trump would struggle to find with European heads of state.

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Zero sum is one description of the Presidents mindset. I think Mr. Mounks opinion that Trumps mindset and not some political or moral theory drives his behavior is correct. I think Mr. Mounks description of the Liberal mentality is another portion of human behavior (Cipolla would call Intelligent people) but the entirety is extremely simplistic.

We do not live in the black and white world of either, though both black and white mindsets are certainly a portion of human behavior.

I strongly believe Carlo M. Cipollas analysis of human behavior is much more accurate as it divides human behavior into 4 categories, not 2. His analysis appears to be humorously titled, but if you read and comprehend the content, and are honest with yourself, you will realize that with an economists eye, he is describing the 4 basic models of human exchange. Zero sum is but one and in Cipollas model is called Bandit behavior. I win, you lose.

The other three are helpless people, intelligent people and stupid people.

Intelligent people seek a win-win solution. (Mr. Mounks other half)

Helpless people act to harm themselves in order to benefit others.

Stupid people harm both themselves and others...all the while oblivious to how they are harmful.

The Mounk analysis leaves out the behavior of 2 of the 4 groups. Unfortunately the single largest group in any population is the single most common. The Stupid person. Far more common than we normally imagine.

Cipollas 1st law of stupidity is: "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."

Cipollas 2nd law of stupidity is: "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."

Cipollas 3rd law of stupidity is: "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."

Cipollas 4th law of stupidity is: "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

Cipollas 5th law of stupidity is: "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."

I am including just one of many links describing Cipollas work.

https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity

I seriously suggest you read this brief analysis. While ALL of the non-stupid groups are VERY fluid, Mr. Trump seems to reside largely in the Bandit model.

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...very good. 🎯

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Dear Yascha,

About a decade ago, in a 'management' training, the trainer split the group into three, told one group that it was wanting to buy oranges only for their pips, one wanting oranges only for their juice and the third wanting oranges only for their skins. There was a limited amount of oranges available, so we had to get discussing our 'acquisition strategy'. After a bit he told us that one strategy would be to discover exactly which part of the 'scarce' resource our competitors wanted. We then, of course, discovered that there was no strictly neccessary competition.

By the way, Yascha, vis-a-vis the U.S.A., Russia and the war in Ukraine; you did not mention that the U.S.A. promised in about 1990 not to enlarge N.A.T.O. towards the east, i.e. towards Russia. The hatred that many in the élite in the U.S.A. seem to have towards Russia waited until 1994(?) before enlarging N.A.T.O. and now it's on the borders of Russia. The thought of N.A.T.O. being in Ukraine was, obviously, just the last straw for President Putin.

(I am not saying or implying that President Putin is a 'nice guy' or that the war in Ukraine is a 'good thing', or anything like that.)

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How much of the attraction of the voting public to Trump can be attributed to the human inclination toward spite behavior? If a significant proportion of the voting public wants to punish a specific group, for example the coastal elites, then those voters may be willing to accept the pain of another Trump presidency to make it happen. Also, if the public sees tariffs as a way to punish countries seen as unfair trading partners, then those voters may be willing to accept higher prices for things that they want. Accepting that spite behavior is at play means that there are actually three categories; win:win, win:lose, and lose:lose of "favorable" outcome.

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I once came to the conclusion independently that the main difference between Karl Marx and Adam Smith was the conflict between zero sum and positive sum thinking. It is ironic that this is where MAGA lands, with the former. I do think that zero sum thinking is pervasive on the modern conservative agenda, affecting issues like immigration and politics of police brutality.

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Since Trump only sees dominance and submission ("winners" and "losers"), it follows "logically" that anyone who doesn't submit to his dominance can only be trying to dominate him. That automatically makes the other guy the aggressor, and anything he does to them van be justified as self-defense. ANYTHING. In a weird way, maybe he's done us a service by making the abuser mentality so easy to understand.

As for Obama, most of the people who are most passionate about politics do see it as win-lose. Maybe that explains the weird way that most rank and file Democrats see him as a popular and effective President, while so many activists despise him and all his works. (Wokeness was largely a rejection of Obama-era liberalism, much the way the Sixties New Left was a rejection of New Frontier/Great Society liberalism. And this time there wasn't even an obvious Vietnam-sized reason for it.) If he could deliver the biggest expansion of health care in fifty years, the biggest expansion of regulating Wall Street in eighty years, and the (at the time) biggest expansion of renewable energy ever, only to have many of the people who agreed with those goals act like he was accomplishing nothing, something is very wrong with this picture.

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It's a good point about zero sum thinking, but I want to point out that the cause is a change in the media ecosystem. Positive sum games require a fairly stable power structure, because if the elites are toppled easily then personal advantage is gained more efficiently by taking down elites than positive sum bargaining. The previous set of elites under traditional media used a collaborative network between state agencies and media companies to manufacture consent. Social media disrupted this arrangement due to its speed and openness. Now we see social media algorithms generating real street power (Arab spring, BLM, Jan 6) and voting power with the X buyout, podcast, and truth social successfully challenging traditional media.

Now is a dangerous time because if we are not able to form a new stable political system, then we may see continued zero sum thinking succeed for some time.

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Yascha, your micro-economical analysis here is a valuable and insightful contribution to the debate (whatever that debate is). However, you can take the analysis further. The category that is very important for understanding Trump and his success is the "lose-lose" category, otherwise known as "spite". It means you are willing to lose, if your opponent loses even more. This is, I believe, what is going on here, both in Trump himself and his voters. Trump will have to accept loss of popularity (important to him) if his -- so far only economic -- bullying of other countries leads to economic hardship in the US, but his reward is revenge on entities that he believes are in fact enemies. His voters will have to accept higher egg-prices, but their reward is "liberal tears".

Of course, spite is motivating people from both political tribes. Some people from the Left still wear masks outside to "own the conservatives". Behavioral economists found that most people would be happy to pay substantial amounts of money to see their opponents suffer. It seems counter-intuitive, but scientific studies have explored "spite" and made a good argument for how it evolves and spreads. See for instance https://www.networkscienceinstitute.org/publications/spite-is-contagious-in-dynamic-networks

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