PREFACE TO THE 1980 EDITION

When I learned that Harvard University Press was going to issue a

paperback edition of this book, I wondered what parts of it would be
so embarrassingly obsolete that I would need to delete or rewrite
them, or at least to apologize for them in a new preface. It's twenty
years since The Strategy of Conflict appeared. I don't often reread
it; parts of it I hadn't looked at in more than a decade. Some of the
things I said must have become trite, or irrelevant, or wrong.
Some have. But on the whole I can cheerfully report that, though
occasionally quaint in its examples, the book is mostly all right.
Comments in Chapter I about the low estate of military strategy in
universities and military services are now so obviously wrong that
they can safely be left for their historical value. A more serious
issue is whether students - and students may be the only ones nowa­
days who read the book for the first time - will recognize names
like Quemoy, Khrushchev, and Mossadeq or will know how Miss
Rheingold used to be chosen.
We can all be thankful that Appendix A is not out of date. It was
written on the premise that atomic weapons had not been used since
Nagasaki. May the book enjoy many new printings with that premise
intact.
Some of the ideas that I thought original in Chapter 10 have since
become fashionable. Some have even gone on to become unfashion­
able. There is now a vast literature on arms limitation, including
some things I've written, but Chapter 10 still says as much in relation to
the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and says it as clearly, as any
other twenty-five pages I have found. A reader who wants to
pursue my thoughts on strategy and arms control can see the book
by that name that I wrote with Morton H. Halperin, published by
the Twentieth Century Fund in 1961, or my Arms and Influence,
Yale University Press, 1966.
The theoretical contents, not the foreign policy, may be what most
people use this book for now. In putting these essays together to
make the book, I hoped to help establish an interdisciplinary field
vi PREFACE TO THE 1980 EDITION
that had then been variously described as "theory of bargaining,"
"theory of conflict," or "theory of strategy." I wanted to show that
some elementary theory, cutting across economics, sociology and
political science, even law and philosophy and perhaps anthropology,
could be useful not only to formal theorists but also to people
concerned with practical problems. I hoped too, and I now think
mistakenly, that the theory of games might be redirected toward
applications in these several fields. With notable exceptions like
Howard Raiffa, Martin Shubik, and Nigel Howard, game
theorists have tended to stay instead at the mathematical frontier.
The field that I hoped would become established has continued to
develop, but not explosively, and without acquiring a name of its
own.
A few journals, especially the Journal of Conflict Resolution, have
played an important role in developing this field, but except for bits
of jargon like "non-zero-sum game" and "payoffs," even the most
elementary theory gets little explicit use in journals oriented toward
policy makers and practitioners. (Only a few years ago, in writing
about alternative Soviet and American attitudes toward particular
weapons that might be subject to arms control, I used a few 2 X 2
matrices to help readers of the article see the differences. The editor
of the journal, which I shall not name, insisted on my deleting the
matrices to avoid intimidating an audience that, though less sure
of my meaning, would be more comfortable with only the slightly
tortured verbal description.)
The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me
by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that
warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey's.
John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an
outstanding Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had
been defense minister in Britain's Labor Government. Some of
us at Harvard's Center for International Affairs invited him to
visit because he was writing a book on disarmament and arms control.
When he called on me he exclaimed how much this book had done
for his thinking, and as he talked with enthusiasm I tried to guess
which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much
difference to him. It turned out it wasn't any particular idea in any
particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not
comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could
exist. He
 PREFACE TO THE 1980 EDITION VII

had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had
thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable,
not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with
monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance
politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking,
had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I
hadn't even known it wasn't obvious. With modesty and dignity he
confessed it to me. You never know what will come of writing a book.

THOMAS C. SCHELLING

Cambridge, Massachusetts
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lowed almost by default in subsequent negotiations. Sometimes.
to be sure, there is a reason for a measure of uniformity, and
sometimes there is enough similarity in the circumstances to ex­
plain similar outcomes; but more often it seems that there is
simply no heart left in the bargaining when it takes place under
the shadow of some dramatic and conspicuous precedent. 7 In
similar fashion, mediators often display a power to precipitate
agreement and a power to determine the terms of agreement:
their proposals often seem to be accepted less by reason of their
inherent fairness or reasonableness than by a kind of resignation
of both participants. "Fact-finding" reports may also tend to
draw expectations to a focus, by providing a suggestion to fill
the vacuum of indeterminacy that otherwise exists: it is not the
facts themselves, but the creation of a specific suggestion, that
seems to exercise the influence.
There is, in a similar vein, a strong attraction to the status
quo ante as well as to natural boundaries. Even parallels of lati­
tude have recently exhibited their longevity as focal points for
agreement. Certainly there are reasons of convenience in using
rivers as the agreed stopping place for troops or using old bound­
aries, whatever their current relevance; but often these features
of the landscape seem less important for their practical con­
venience than for their power to crystallize agreement.
These observations would be trivial if they meant only that
bargaining results were expressed in simple and qualitative terms
or that minor accommodations were made to round off the last
few cents or miles or people. But it often looks as though the
ultimate focus for agreement did not just reflect the balance of
bargaining powers but provided bargaining power to one side or
the other. It often seems that a cynic could have predicted the
outcome on the basis of some "obvious" focus for agreement.
some strong suggestion contained in the situation itself, without
much regard to the merits of the case, the arguments to be
made, or the pressures to be applied during the bargaining. The
"obvious" place to compromise frequently seems to win by some
1
This and the preceding paragraph are illustrated by the speed with which
a number of Middle Eastern oil-royalty arrangements converged on the 50-50
formula a few years after World War II.
16 ELEMENTS OF A THEORY OF STRATEGY
fining the limits to war and in making geographical limits pos.
sible. The area was surrounded by water, and the principal north.
em political boundary was marked dramatically and unmistak.
ably by a river. The thirty-eighth parallel seems to have been a
powerful focus for a stalemate; and the main alternative, the
"waist," was a strong candidate not just because it provided a
shorter defense line but because it would have been clear to both
sides that an advance to the waist did not necessarily signal a
determination to advance farther and that a retreat to the waist
did not telegraph any intention to retreat farther.
The Formosan Straits made it possible to stabilize a line be­
tween the Communist and National government forces of China,
not solely because water favored the defender and inhibited at­
tack, but because an island is an integral unit and water is a
conspicuous boundary. The sacrifice of any part of the island
would have made the resulting line unstable; the retention of
any part of the mainland would have been similarly unstable.
Except at the water's edge, all movement is a matter of degree;
an attack across water is a declaration that the "agreement" has
been terminated.
In Korea, weapons were limited by the qualitative distinction
between atomic and all other; it would surely have been much
more difficult to stabilize a tacit acceptance of any limit on size
of atomic weapons or selection of targets.9 No definition of size
or target is so obvious and natural that it goes without saying,
except for "no size, on any target." American assistance to the
French forces in Indochina was persuasively limited to material,
not people; and it was appreciated that an enlargement to in­
clude, say, air participation could be recognized as limited to
air, while it would not be possible to establish a limited amount
of air or ground participation. One's intentions to abstain from
ground intervention can be conveyed by the complete withholding
of ground forces; one cannot nearly so easily commit some forces
and communicate a persuasive limit to the amount that one in·
tends to commit.
The strategy of retaliation is affected by the need to communi·
cate or coordinate on limits. Local aggression defines a place;
'This point is developed at length in Appendix A.