My course on Nuclear Weapons and World Politics was scheduled to read Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling before the crisis came, but reading it while we are involved in perhaps the most intense brinksmanship since … the 1960s? … lends this 1966 book uncanny contemporary relevance. I will be sharing my notes and reflections on this book over the coming few days.
Before we begin, I have to admit something. About four and a half percent of my reaction right now is that of the scientist in Independence Day underground in Area 51 where he studies crashed alien technology: “Since these guys started showing up, all the gizmos inside turned on. The last twenty four hours have been really exciting!”
Four and a half percent. Which is really high.
The remaining 95.5 percent of my reaction, of course, is: How do we deal with this? What does this mean? How do we get through it?
I want you to understand not just the gravity of the situation for us personally, but for the future of politics in Western Asia, in the Middle East more broadly, and for the question of how countries will deal with — or relate to — other countries developing nuclear weapons. If the most recent numbers are right, more than a thousand civilians have died in Iran and elsewhere. Given my belief that this war was ill-conceived, that is simply tragic.
But then there is also the interest — the need, even — to understand what is going on. How did we get here? And how do we get through it?
A lot of how I and others understand the current conflict is shaped by the book and by the author we are reading now: Arms and Influence, by the American economist Thomas Schelling.
Schelling was born in and grew up in San Diego, California, as part of a Navy family. When war broke out between the US and Japan, Schelling didn’t go into the military. Instead, he drifted into working with the FBI in Chile, which had responsibility for counterintelligence in the Western Hemisphere. Let go because of ulcers, he enrolled in UC Berkeley and then joined the Bureau of the Budget for the Roosevelt (and then Truman) administration. I mention this because it’s interesting that Schelling, who would become so influential in military analysis, had no military experience.
After the war, he completed a doctorate in economics at Harvard — a fairly straightforward technical dissertation on labor policy and wages — and got a job as a staff economist with the Marshall Plan, participating in the rebuilding of Europe. After the Korean War, he left government and pursued a career in academia, landing at Yale.
Like many civilian intellectuals at this time, Schelling became increasingly interested in the Cold War and the logic of nuclear deterrence. This was the era, as Friedman and Michaels have documented, when a new class of defense intellectuals emerged. These were people who might have had some experience in uniform, but who were distinguished from generals and traditional military strategists by a conviction that the advent of nuclear weapons had changed the very nature of war. When one starts thinking about mutual nuclear annihilation, one starts to wonder whether one needs new ideas about how to wage — or avoid — wars. There was also a genuine belief among this community that war was too important to be left to the generals. When weapons no longer decide the fate of battles but the survival of civilization itself, people who view these contests through strictly military means may not be competent to make decisions about national — or civilizational — survival.
There’s a term that came later that describes Schelling’s role: policy entrepreneurs, or idea entrepreneurs — people who seek to spread ideas and who benefit from doing so through fame, prestige, and influence. Not only is the prospect of finding out new ideas attractive for scholars, developing ideas that apply to policy and meet the needs of policymakers is a route to influence for people whose business it is to understand and propagate ideas. Defense intellectuals like Schelling challenged the military’s monopoly on expertise. They challenged the legitimate monopoly of knowledge about how to use nuclear weapons. And they viewed their real clients not as the generals, but as the political overseers of the military — presidents, civilian defense officials, the people who control budgets and procurement. These were not academic debates. They had immediate policy relevance. Many of these thinkers talked to Senator John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy became president, he appointed many of them to senior policymaking roles.
Among this breed of thinkers — Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport — Schelling stands apart. I have read a great deal of the writings of the others. They’re fine. Competent. Kahn is funny; Rapoport is probably right (and is skeptical of many of the perspectives here). But from his very first articles in the 1950s, Schelling was concerned with factors and relationships that nobody else saw. Schelling is not divine but his emphasis on strategy, credibility, relationships, and communication—above all, on seeing bargaining and violence as linked—has been transformative.
Intentionally or not, Schelling rode this wave—and his connections with the Kennedy administration in particular would cement his role as a leading intellectual. Arms and Influence, along with The Strategy of Conflict, would become standard on the syllabi of courses like this one—it is, I think, a touchstone of American thinking about strategy. Even if someone like President Trump has not read it, you do not have to go too far down in the ranks of his advisers and implementers to find people who rely on at least a caricature of the book.
Schelling’s Big Idea
What underlines Schelling’s approach is one big idea:
Coercion is bargaining.
From this postulate, several corollaries emerge. First, if you are bargaining over something, you have shared interests with your adversary. That’s counterintuitive! Most of the time, we assume that if you are fighting someone, you share nothing with them. But Schelling observes that there’s often some range of alternatives that both adversaries will prefer to continuing the conflict—if there were none, then only brute force—only eradication—would be an outcome. Yet that is simply not war is about.
This points to a second corollary. Coercion isn’t force. Obviously, actual brute force will be involved, but the overt use of brute force is not what represents the most important part of coercion. Rather, it is the manipulation of the possibility and the expression of violence as part of a way to both drive an adversary to the negotiating table and to make sure that whatever emerges from the bargaining process is maximally favorable to one’s own side.
From this, we can derive a third corollary. The manipulation of actual and potential violence is a political process in which military tactics and capabilities play a secondary role. They are important—you can’t credibly threaten violence unless you have the capability to wield force—but war is essentially, as in its essence, political. Therefore, at higher levels of abstraction, the details of weapons systems and tactics—the stuff of sergeants, colonels, and even generals—become less important than the relationship of the power to hurt to the pursuit of political objectives. Wielding the potential to hurt becomes the basis for negotiation because the military art creates not victory but the real and future harms that drive people to reach alternatives to fighting.
Finally, all of this implies that violence is not just about smashing the other side, even if that is how it feels to those engaged in any particular engagement, but is rather about expressing intentions, credibility, goals, and acceptable outcomes. Violence is a form of communication within the bargaining process of conflict. Conflict, being interactive (as it requires more than one side to be in conflict, but two sides to bring it to a close), thus must involve not just studying violence but how the use of force changes relationships, expectations, and understandings—all within a framework that continually seeks to bring a termination to the conflict.
This means Schelling is not going to write in a manner that is immediately understandable if you think a military strategist is always concerned with how to use weapons to inflict harm. Even the term violence has a very precise meaning for Schelling. It is not brutality. It is the power to hurt. It is not just inflicting pain, but being able to credibly threaten that you will inflict pain. And it is this structural possibility — this latent capacity — that makes violence strategic and entwined with bargaining.
How to Read the First Page
Open Arms and Influence to the first page of Chapter One. Schelling writes: “The usual distinction between diplomacy and force is not merely in the instruments, words or bullets, but in the relation between adversaries.” There is an important trick to reading an academic work. Whenever an academic says that something is the usual fashion of approaching something, that scholar is about to say that it is wrong. And Schelling is similarly going to efface the distinction between the conventional views to show that diplomacy and force are not as distinct as they appear.
In the first two paragraphs, he lays out the conventional views: diplomacy as bargaining, force as something separate. Schelling here is setting up what he is about to dismantle.
“Diplomacy is bargaining. It seeks outcomes that, though not ideal for either party, are better for both than some of the alternatives.” Schelling agrees— that is what negotiation is. He contrasts this—again, citing the conventional view—with the ordinary view of force:“With enough military force, a country may not need to bargain.” This, too, is the conventional view — and Schelling is about to say it’s wrong.
Think about how we experienced recent events. A surface-level or experiential view would confirm the conventional view. Last week, the United States was negotiating with Iran. This week, the United States is bombing Iran. Negotiations before; violence afterward. We all experienced this as a sharp division between two phases. Schelling would say: yes, that is how most people think about it—but they are wrong
His entire chapter argues that bargaining, diplomacy, and violence are the same thing—that we should approach them not as distinctive phases but as parts of a continuum in which similar theoretical approaches continue.
The Power to Hurt
On the second page, Schelling lays out his views: “There is something else, though, that force can do. It is less military, less heroic, less impersonal, and less unilateral; it is uglier … military force can be used to hurt.” You might pause at this point and say that this is obvious. Of course force can be used to hurt. We can’t think of the events of this week and the coming weeks without thinking that many people, most of them probably noncombatants, will be hurt. So what does Schelling mean?
I think the list of adjectives gives away Schelling’s game. He is saying that the power to hurt is not about victory or anything honorable but simply about being able to squeeze an opponent to the point they would prefer submission, retreat, or an agreed outcome to some other course of action. There’s no valor here. When Schelling talks about violence or the “power to hurt,” he is not even limiting himself to military force or interactions between countries. He is talking about any way you can hurt the other party. A commercial transaction. A relationship between social equals. Famously, he has a discussion about how toddlers can bargain with their parents — not by hurting them physically, but because they can put themselves in danger or cause distress.
This is a non-military view of military force. And it is radical. Schelling says the power to hurt in military contexts is not, at its root, different from the power to hurt in a labor dispute between a union and an employer. Not different from the power to hurt in a civil war. Not different from the power to hurt in the campaigns of Genghis Khan.
Consider the protection racket. When a mafioso walks into your shop and says, “Nice place. Shame if something happened to it,” he is not saying he’s going to burn the shop down today. He wants money from the shop. You want the shop to keep running. You have a shared interest. So you pay protection money. Schelling places nuclear war on a spectrum that runs from corporate negotiations to the mafia shaking down merchants on a street. In all of these cases, the power to hurt matters not because hurting is the point, but because exploiting that power becomes the basis for social relations.
For Schelling to draw on these kinds of examples is to challenge, directly, the idea that the military should have pride of place—to challenge, directly, that there is something honorable or professional about this. He wants to break down our existing ideas about grand strategy and nuclear politics and all the rest. He want us to be prepared to view forms in their fundamentals to be unromantic about what is really happening when one side or another threatens to use nuclear weapons. There is nothing glorious happening here; it is just a stick-em-’up on a grand scale.
“Pain and shock, loss and grief, privation and horror are always in some degree, sometimes in terrible degree, among the results of warfare; but in traditional military science they are incidental, they are not the object,” Schelling writes. Exploiting the power to hurt, however, consists of putting this power at the center of conflict analysis and showing how dangling that prospect can change victims’ motivations to avoid it. In that regard, as Schelling writes, what matters is the prospect of anticipated pain in the future. Not the actual pain inflicted, but the possibility that you will inflict (or suffer) pain—and an understanding of the actions that will lead to avoiding that pain. That is how the exchange of force and the prospect of violence generates bargaining power.
Reading Schelling While the Bombs Fall
Reading this chapter in the Global South — reading it in the Middle East — hits different than when I first encountered it in an apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia, two blocks from Boeing’s military and space headquarters.
Right now, the United States is engaged in a campaign in which violence is being used to hurt Iran. That hurt is being used to say to the Islamic Republic: If you don’t come to terms on nuclear weapons and the rest, we will keep hurting you. The Iranians are not trying to defeat the United States militarily. They can’t. What they are trying to do is, first, show they can endure this suffering indefinitely. And second, inflict pain — hurt and threaten additional hurt — to Israel, to the United States by inflicting casualties, and most of all to the Gulf states. (Subsequently, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, they are seeking to widen the circle of hurt to bring an end to U.S. military campaigning.) They are demonstrating that they are not bound by niceties like the idea that diplomatic facilities should be beyond targeting. They are implicitly threatening oil infrastructure, natural gas infrastructure, the shipping lanes through which the lifeblood of the regional and global economy flows.
The violence on our screens is part of this story, but so are the economic costs. When natural gas prices spike 40, 50, 60 percent in Europe in a matter of hours, that is the power to hurt. When the Korean stock market tanks 13 percent in a day because of energy costs, that is the power to hurt. When China calls on all sides to stop fighting — the war that the Americans and Israelis started — it is because China’s energy costs are being driven up. It doesn’t matter if a single tanker is sunk, so long as actors believe there is a chance tankers will be sunk, because then the energy will not flow.
President Trump tried to address this by announcing the US government will insure tankers for any damage and possibly have the Navy escort them through the straits — a very risky move, putting naval vessels directly at risk in confined waters, raising the chance of severe military casualties. But why? Because he is trying to mitigate costs on others, to remove Iran’s power to hurt.
All of this is classic Schelling.
Iran has to demonstrate its capability to hold out until the United States is too weak — or too unwilling — to continue inflicting damage. Why is Trump saying he might put boots on the ground, that the war might last four or five weeks, however long it takes? Why is he bragging about American munitions stockpiles? To convey to the Iranians that they will continue to be hurt for a long, long time.
What we are witnessing is a military campaign, but it is also a diplomatic campaign in which the counterproposals and acceptances are framed not in terms of emails or position papers or draft treaties, but exchanged by Shahed drones and ICBMs and missile defenses. That is the diplomacy of violence. Grasp this, and you understand not just the book — you understand what is happening over our heads right now.
In the future, we'll continue our reading of Schelling — covering more than a page or two! — and thinking about what all of this means for analyzing a crisis that isn't nuclear but which is about nuclear weapons. It is also a crisis that, for its stakes for the Gulf and the world economy, is about raising the prospect of calamity at a global scale — or an existential one for small states. That sort of apocalyptic power to hurt is what preoccupies Schelling, and absorbs our attention now as well.