Games of Chicken: We're All in One Car or Another

Games of chicken: They’re everywhere. Notably, the Republican Party and the Biden Administration are currently "playing chicken" over raising the debt ceiling, a very serious “game” that will play out with growing intensity as the annual fiscal deadline approaches. The MAGA crowd demands reductions in federal spending, claiming that they’re willing to subject the U.S. to catastrophic financial default rather than acquiesce. The Biden Administration maintains that the country is ethically and constitutionally mandated to meet its financial obligations; hence, there is nothing to negotiate.

We seem to be stuck with such “games,” with no easy way out and certainly, no reliable strategy for how to win them. Although most people intuitively comprehend the dynamic, very few understand its details. Here is a quick primer.

Games of chicken aren’t games in the playful, recreational, or athletic sense, although they are deeply competitive and often equally consequential. Rather, they fit into the mathematical and logical discipline known as Game Theory.

Start with the classic image first developed by Bertrand Russell: The two sides hurtle toward each other, like drivers (both, not surprisingly, teenage males) speeding toward a possible head-on collision, each straddling the same white line and expecting, insisting, hoping that the other will swerve. That’s playing chicken with a vengeance.

Actually, the first pop culture representation of chicken is just a bit less dire, coming from the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood, in which the Dean and Mineo characters compete by driving their cars, not toward each other, but toward a cliff, with the loser (the chicken) being the one who bails out first. Nonetheless, in this slightly less souped-up version of Russell’s thought experiment, the Mineo character loses his life because of a wardrobe malfunction that traps him in his vehicle.

Games of chicken have long been subject to analysis within the community of defense intellectuals, with special attention devoted to possible winning strategies when two opponents—e.g., the U.S. and the USSR—are competing, each trying to get the other to back down. In a nuclear-armed confrontation, a head-on collision means fried chicken, and yet, each side typically wants to “win” by inducing the other to swerve, and therein lies the dilemma.

One route to potential victory lies in committing yourself to victory at all costs. If the goal is not to swerve while getting the other guy to do so, thereby labelling them a chicken and getting the prize, you might make it clear that you really, really love Natalie Wood and are willing to die for her … so your rival had better swerve, because you certainly won’t. This plays out internationally when one side’s interests are more deeply engaged than the other’s. The U.S. didn’t seriously play chicken against the USSR when it came to the brief Hungarian revolution of 1956 because we knew that the Soviets had a deeper stake in the outcome than we did.

Similarly, when the two superpowers were almost literally playing nuclear chicken at sea during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets swerved, in large part because Khrushchev knew that JFK had a deeper stake in keeping nukes out of Cuba than the Kremlin had in installing them. As then U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, "We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."

Who has a deeper stake in winning the unfolding debt crisis, the MAGA Republicans or the Biden administration? Who is likely to blink, or swerve, first? And what options exist for inducing the other side to do so?

One potential chicken-winning strategy is to be, or pretend to be, crazy, thus unlikely to swerve—so the other side had better. President Nixon attempted this against Ho Chi Minh, letting it be known that even though using nuclear weapons would be altogether unavailing in itself, he was just irrational enough that he might do so anyhow—so the North Vietnamese had better agree to U.S. terms. It didn’t work.

Alternatively, you might expect to win a head-to-head game of chicken if you’re driving the equivalent of an armored dump truck while your opponent is in a sports car. This could be another reason why Khrushchev swerved during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets were outmatched when it came to strategic nuclear weapons as well as conventional military force in the Caribbean. Or you could show up for a contest wearing a crash helmet and super seatbelts, thereby proclaiming that you’re willing to go straight ahead because you’re likely to survive a crash. During the height of the Cold War, Reagan Administration officials emphasized the need for fallout shelters and other tactics that proclaimed willingness to endure and survive nuclear war.

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Herman Kahn suggested that yet another way to prevail would be to take the insanity ploy a step further, and make it literally impossible for you to swerve, once again making it mandatory that your opponent do so. Point your vehicle at the other guy, gun the engine and then unscrew your steering wheel and throw it out the window! (But make sure that your fellow “player” sees you do it.) An unavoidable problem here is that just as driving a heavier vehicle, or wearing a crash suit will stimulate unending competition for them, the steering wheel tactic can result in competition to be the first to toss it out, because whoever does so first, wins!

Trying to gain an advantage in such circumstances by taking human decision-making “out of the loop” has generated pressure to rely on automated systems including so-called launch-on-warning, which itself carries no small amount of risk. Tactics abound, but safe and reliable ones are hard to come by.

It appears that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has swerved, at least for now, in a game of chicken over his attempts to subvert Israeli democracy. Putin and the West are playing chicken over escalation in Ukraine. These games are all desperately serious, for which the only good advice came from a NORAD super-computer in the 1983 movie WarGames. After running through various scenarios regarding World War III, it concludes, “The only winning move is not to play.”

David P. Barash is the author of the forthcoming book OOPS! The Worst Blunders of All Time, from Pandora’s Box to Putin’s War.