#winbigly

Terror is what the bad guys want. If we label the outcome as terror, we give them their win, and we remind the public to stay scared.

Calling a terrorist a coward might sound like a powerful insult, but it isn’t persuasive. No terrorist views sacrificing his life for his cause as cowardly. The word bounces right off. To make an impact, you have to use a word that has at least a grain of truth from your subject’s perspective. If your words can’t get a foothold, they are not persuasive.

President Trump -- who is better at persuasion than almost anyone -- labels these attackers “losers.” That’s a step in the right direction. And it also features Trump’s famous engineering for future confirmation bias. Every time ISIS loses territory they are reminded they are losers. That sinks in over time. People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state. President Trump correctly persuades to the trend, so events support the label of loser. Neither “terrorist” nor “coward” persuades to the trend.

I think we can do better. 

When a would-be terrorist considers his plans, he is probably 100% convinced that paradise awaits him, virgins and all. Our best counter-persuasion would involve injecting some doubt in that belief. Eternity is a long time to spend in Hell, so you might not want to take a five-percent chance of ending up there. A rational loser might risk a five-percent chance of prison, or even a five-percent chance of dying.  But a five-percent chance of burning in Hell for eternity is a scarier proposition.

It helps (a lot) to be visual in your persuasion because we are visual creatures. If the only visuals from an attack are the aftermath and the grieving, that is probably inspiring to terrorists. So consider this visual instead.

Instead of featuring a Christian leader calling the perpetrator a terrorist (which sounds like a form of success) and a coward (which bounces right off them as untrue), why not have one of the first voices after an attack of this sort a moderate cleric or Islamic scholar who brands the loser as both gullible and doomed to Hell. Add some scary images, and now you’ve injected some doubt. Remember, you don’t need much doubt. Five percent doubt might be enough when you’re talking about eternity in Hell.

With any sort of persuasion you need to test multiple approaches. I won’t claim the approach I described is the best. I only claim it makes sense from a persuasion perspective whereas our current approach is shooting blanks.

I also note that the perpetrator in the NYC attack had a paint gun instead of a real gun, in a country where obtaining real guns is easy. We are not talking about a competent player here. It might help to describe him as incompetent as well as gullible. This framing also highlights the trend from spectacular attacks beginning with 9/11 to the smaller (yet tragic) attacks we are more likely to see now. That framing reinforces the trend of their losing ways. The persuasion mistake would be to harp on how this sort of attack just migrated from Europe to the United States, suggesting progress for the bad guys.

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During the 2016 campaign, my haters mocked me mercilessly on Twitter for predicting that a candidate with insanely low approval ratings could ever get elected president of the United States. I said it wouldn’t be the problem people thought it would be. And it wasn’t. Part of the reason is that Hillary Clinton also had low ratings. But I also suspected there were so-called shy Trump supporters who held private opinions that were different from what the pollsters could suss out.

Now we see a similar situation shaping up. I don’t know whether or not President Trump will seek a second term. But if he ran for reelection today, I expect he would win by a larger margin than the first time, no matter who ran against him. To put it another way, approval ratings aren’t as predictive as you would expect. But consumer confidence is probably close to 100% predictive. Ask Bill Clinton. He’ll tell you It’s the economy, stupid.

Prior to President Trump’s inauguration day I predicted we’d see this story arc play out in the media:

Spring 2017: “Trump is Hitler!”

Summer 2017: “Okay, Trump isn’t Hitler. But he’s incompetent!”

End of year 2017: “Crap. He’s effective. But we don’t like it.”

Consumer confidence is peaking while the president’s approval rating is in the cellar. That means people expect him to be effective on the big stuff. But they don’t like him because of the other stuff.

Right on schedule.

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The problem, as I see it, is psychology more than weaponry. As long as North Korea sees the United States as a military threat, expect North Korea to keep upgrading their nuclear arsenal.

So what would it take to “reframe” the situation from two mortal enemies on the brink of war to something less dangerous? 

Perhaps we should look at the same reframing strategy President Trump is using to apparent success with ISIS. The president reframed our involvement from temporary to permanent. Then he added a momentum change courtesy of General Mattis. Under President Obama, ISIS probably saw the U.S. military involvement as a temporary problem because that’s exactly how it was framed. Now they see it as permanent . . . and they observe themselves losing. The “permanent loser” frame is a different framing than before, and it might be the reason we see more surrenders. (Or we might be seeing more alleged surrenders because exaggerated reports of that type would be good persuasion too.)

At the moment, North Korea sees the economic sanctions as temporary. They also see our threats as temporary until they have full nuclear deterrent. The temporary frame is a losing frame for the United States.

On top of the temporary frame, things look personal between the U.S. and North Korea. Dignity is in the game. Ego is in the game. Those things need to be reframed out of the situation to get any kind of solution.

So consider the following reframe. Imagine depersonalizing the North Korean situation by pushing for a United Nations rule that any not-yet-fully-nuclear country building nukes and ICBMS is permanently barred from any form of global commerce. Ever. Period. And it’s not personal to North Korea. It’s just the new rule.

It’s the “ever” part, along with depersonalizing things to a generic rule that creates the new frame. In this frame, there is no winning to be had for North Korea. They can build their nukes, but only at the expense of permanent and total economic collapse, courtesy of the the rest of the world as expressed by the United Nations. 

I don’t think total economic ruin of North Korea was ever a realistic strategy option until recently. But China seems to be onboard. And President Trump is unlikely to take his boot off Little Rocket Man’s tiny wallet anytime soon. I can’t imagine President Trump backing off until he gets what he wants. But we haven’t framed it as permanent. And we could, with the help of the United Nations.

Let’s call this the “I’ll just take my ball and go home” strategy. And it works best if we reduce military presence to something more obviously defensive. In this model, it’s not personal. It’s just a rule the UN agreed on.

There is great persuasive power in saying something is a general rule as opposed to a specific action against one player. It takes ego out of the game and it has a non-negotiable feel from the start.

Note: My main topic for this blog lately is persuasion. I’m not an expert on North Korea or international affairs. I don’t expect anyone to take my noodling on this topic today too seriously. If you learned something about persuasion by reading this far, that’s all I’m hoping to achieve here.

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