Tom Schelling Meets Pro Wrestling

Is it kayfabe or was it a signal?

I know this is lucha libre, not pro wrestling, but I don’t have a subscription to a stock photo database.

As the people of Doha turn their eyes from missile interceptions in the skies to the news feeds on their phones, we’re all learning from sources that, as this CNN report says, it was all staged:

So was this a real attack, or was it just stagecraft?

Let’s remember that everyone involved could have a reason to say it was staged. On the U.S. and Qatari side, going along with the story that they knew all along that the evening skies of Qatar would be illuminated by wicked fireworks. On the Iranian side, it could be a way to excuse yet another underwhelming missile attack. For both, agreeing with the story could be a way to forestall any further explanation.

There’s a name for a scripted confrontation with a pre-arranged ending: kayfabe. It’s a wrestling term (well, pro wrestling), as explained by Benjamin S. Day and Alister Wedderburn in International Studies Quarterly (which is a very serious international relations journal):

an illusion maintained consciously and collaboratively between wrestlers and their audience: like any theatergoing crowd, wrestling fans are willing temporarily to suspend their disbelief in order to be entertained¹

Kayfabe is the essence of pro wrestling drama. Without the scripted bouts, the whole thing might be messy and real and authentic, which is not the product that WWE—soap opera for men—is selling.

We should take pro wrestling seriously. Donald Trump is a former WWE character and the former head of the enterprise is the current Secretary of Education. It has an audience of millions if not tens of millions of people. It’s a key part of U.S. cultural relations with Saudi Arabia! Don’t dismiss insights about how to arrange performances just because they don’t come from the opera.

More to the point, there’s something about kayfabe that I like better than the usual way we refer to this sort of thing—as “kabuki theater”. That’s a dumb term (all theater is kabuki, and isn’t all theater about acting things out?). Kayfabe, however, denotes that not only is what we’re watching fake—we all are aware that it’s fake.

It seems at least plausible that tonight’s events might have been scripted. Certainly, Doha and the group chats thereof were full of unusual levels of rising alerts, including a “shelter in place” order from the US embassy and then the closure of the airspace around the country. That suggests someone knew what was going on. Maybe the fix was in.

In that case, perhaps this was all a demonstration so that everyone could act as if Iran had retaliated for the severe attacks against its nuclear facilities. Maybe Iran needed a way to save face for the fact that the United States had—for the first time—launched an attack directly on its soil. And not just on its soil: against installations key to its ability to build nuclear weapons.

Of course, it could also be that U.S. (or Israeli! or Qatari!) intelligence learned what was going on. Perhaps the attack was meant to be a proportional response—maybe the Iranians, too, have advisers who want to “re-establish deterrence”, as the hackneyed saying goes. Maybe an attack on Al Udeid would have been enough if successful for the Iranian government and regime to claim a measure of vindication. This would have been a way of responding in the broad manner Tom Schelling, the economist who studied nuclear conflict, would have approved of: a demonstration of resolve that demonstrates Iran’s ability to hold at risk things that Washington cares about.

The too-neat models of conflict that some political scientists traffic in often smuggle in assumptions (yes, that’s the term of art to critique this fallacy!) that both sides understand what is being communicated. But the thing is: sometimes the medium is the message.

There’s a story that I’ll mangle in the re-telling. After listening to Tom Schelling, among others, in the early stages of the Vietnam War U.S. government officials launched rounds of bombing campaigns against enemy targets. The theory was that this would demonstrate U.S. resolve and lead Hanoi to back down. Yet Hanoi never did! One doctoral wag observed that “If only the Vietnamese peasants had taken Professor Schelling’s course! Then they would have understood that the bombs weren’t meant to destroy their villages—they were just communicating!”

A Doonesbury snippet from a different administration’s Southeast Asian imbroglio.

Having watched (some of) the missiles explode overhead, I can assure you that the gist of the anecdote is right. I wasn’t looking up and thinking “Ah, now this is clear communication!” I was thinking “Why are you people shooting at us?”

Missiles don’t speak for themselves. Signals are hard to read in the noise of explosions.

Here’s the thing: both worlds can’t easily co-exist. You can’t put Tom Schelling in the wrestling ring.

If the purpose was to show that Iran was serious about retaliation, then why leak that it was all a put-on? Kayfabe works as entertainment, but breaking the fourth wall also breaks the spell. Having watched the Iranian missiles be shot down, my lizard-brain reaction is not “I’m terrified of Iran’s power” but “these guys couldn’t hit the side of a barn.”

And what if one of those rocket pieces had fallen on a passing Land Cruiser or villa? Exactly how well calibrated can you make an attack to ensure that there won’t be any accidentally caused deaths?

At the very least, if everyone is going along with the message, then that in itself is face-saving. Maybe the powerful folks do want to de-escalate. But a response like this might also tempt future adventurism if not everyone understands what the kayfabe—the signal might get lost. Maybe we’re not out of the woods yet.

1. Benjamin S Day, Alister Wedderburn, Wrestlemania! Summit Diplomacy and Foreign Policy Performance after Trump, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 2, June 2022, sqac019, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac019