The End of Zero-Sum Thinking?

It isn’t often that a single newspaper article makes me stop dead in my intellectual tracks.

That’s what happened when I read an article by Damien Cave, who had just opened the New York Times’ first bureau in Vietnam after having done the same thing in Australia.

“Welcome to the Zero-Sum Era. How Do We Get Out?” clicked in part because it arrived at a telling moment for the real world. I skimmed it just before news of the debacle in the Oval Office involving President Trump, Vice President Vance, and President Zelenskyy broke which was a cartoon character example of zero-sum thinking at its worst. Then I went back and read the whole thing carefully. Five times.

It clicked in part, too, because it arrived at a telling moment for my own work. I have to get Peacebuilding Starts at Home to my publisher by the end of April, and I’m currently finishing the next to last chapter—on power and how we can get beyond zero-sum thinking and more.

After reading the article, I realized that Mr. Cave had written a book, Parenting Like an Australian whose title might seem a million miles away from realpolitik. Yet, as I read the Amazon blurb, I realized that he was taking on a lot more than parenting. National culture. Risk taking, Personal mindsets and paradigms.

All stuff at or near the heart of what I’m writing about and what peacebuilders do in general.

So, I spent the weekend reading his book—when I was supposed to be writing my own of course.

I found myself reacting to his work on two levels that corresponded with the article and the book respectively but also kept bouncing back and forth between the two of them.

Let me see if I can make sense of that dreadful sentence in a way that convinces you to try reading either of them—or both.

Back (?) to Zero Sum

The main point Cave makes is central to our time, whether you focus on international issues as he does in the article or on domestic ones as I am in my book.

Sitting in Vietnam half a century after one of the most catastrophic wars in the sorry history of zero-sum conflicts came to an end, it would have been surprising if he hadn’t thought about the renewed use of gotcha politics in the first days of the Trump administration. Gaza. Greenland. Ukraine. Panama (though see the news from Tuesday). Tariffs. That’s before you get to domestic politics.

I put the question mark in my section title because I’m not convinced that the shift backward is all that dramatic because I’m not sure that we ever moved that far away from the kind of zero-sum politics that has been at the heart of international relations theory going back to the Treaty of Westphalia if not the Peloponnesian War.

But that’s really a quibble.

He’s right.

On things like trade policy or even the end of the Cold War, we’ve developed all sorts of end runs around naked power politics all of which seem to be getting blown out of the clichéd water.

And it’s by no means just the Trump administration.

How Do We Get Out?

Because he is a journalist, it is also not surprising that Cave does a better job diagnosing the problem than coming up with “the cure.”

As a peacebuilder, that’s my job anyway.

He does hint at a way out in the cute story about his grandfather and his cousin and their annual zero-sum Easter egg hunt which he uses to begin and end the column. He and Billy-O competed with each other seeking an egg with a special prize that only one of them could when whereas the “rules” could easily have been (re)designed in ways that encouraged them to cooperate, look for the special egg together, and split the $100 their grandfather had hidden in it.

Of course, my old international relations professors or Donald Trump would have said something like, “You cant’ do that. That’s not the way the world works. It’s tough out there. Someone has to lose. It might as well be you. Not me.” Etc.

But as Cave and so many others have shown, we don’t live in a dog-eat-dog world most of the time. What’s more, we always have tons of choices when we have to determine how to respond to an act of aggression or conflict of any kind. Just look at Gaza. Or Ukraine. Or climate change.

What’s cool about Cave’s book more than the article is that he explores a lot of the findings from positive psychology and related fields which focus on how we can learn to act more cooperatively and with more compassion even under dire circumstances.

He works though that material around issues that he (and to a lesser degree, his wife) encountered while raising their then elementary school aged kids in Sydney. Including getting involved in Nippers—a surf and safety program. More importantly, the book is actually about how Cave himself grows more self-aware parent and person, better able to take calculated risks, and more as he becomes a what we would call a surf lifeguard/rescue volunteer in the US along with side trips to his time serving as a war correspondent in Iraq or covering the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. Along the way, Cave became one hell of a peacebuilder in his personal and professional life—though, of course, he didn’t use that term.

Along the way, he demonstrates that we don’t have to default to the worst sides of our nature—whether that is in dealing with your cousin during an ill-designed Easter egg hunt or in dealing with your own inner demons while learning be a cooperative, volunteer, surf-rescue patrol member on the Pacific coast in Australia.

We can think and act without focusing obsessively on our own narrow self-interest. As he discovers parenting like an Australian, we have a lot to learn about cooperative problem solving even from people in a culture that has its own pronounced macho side.

Make Community (and Peace) a Verb

The last major chunk of his book starts with something he learned in Australia which, if you know anything about the country and its stereotypes, might surprise you.

It taught him how to treat community as a verb because Australians do just that.

Of course, community is a noun and can only be a noun. I can’t community, and you can’t community.

Or, can we?

After all, the Australians taught him how to do community.

He—and you—would have no way of knowing that the first working title of my book was Peace is a Verb which I gave up so that my book could best support AfP’s Peacebuilding Starts at Home campaign as directly and as explicitly as possible.

But I still love the phrase and have worked it into the manuscript a few times, including as a chapter title.

Of course, peace is a noun and can only be a noun. I can’t peace, and you can’t peace.

Or, can we?

After all, the Americans I’ve met while writing my book have taught me how to do peace.

Parting Thoughts

Cave left me with as many questions as answers.

In particular, how do we get from finding the peace insider yourself and extend it to the larger problems vexing our country (toxic polarization, growing inequality, and more) and internationally?

When my book is done in a few weeks, I’ll be leaving my readers with the same questions, because I don’t have the answer to them. Nor, more importantly, do we as a civilization—and least not yet.

Cave provides us with some arrows that point us in promising directions. With any luck, I’ll do the same (though not nearly half as well or with as much “local color”).

It will be to you—our readers—to take our ideas and run with them.

Or, in his case, take my readers swimming and surfing.

Maybe the best way to end this post is with a lengthy quote from his epilogue when riffing on the impact of his work as lifesaver:

It also felt and still feels small, too small to do any good.

And yet it’s more than I did before. It’s something visible that my children and their friends can see. It’s helped me stay calm during emergencies—when I sliced off the tip of my thumb while cooking diner, when Bas (his son) broke his arm. And there is continued room for growth. My role in society has evolved to be just a little bit braver, along with more collaborative and compassionate. (p. 260)

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.