The end of the ‘win-win’ era
In these zero-sum times, the sunny optimism of the post-Cold War phrase seems a quaint and distant memory.
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Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law (left), shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on Sept 5.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Leo Lewis
Published shortly before the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Deterrence, Arms Control, and Disarmament: Toward a Synthesis in National Security Policy was not an uplifting work. “I am afraid, and I am pessimistic,” concluded its author, J David Singer, parsing the “insane and degrading” nuclear calculus on which human survival teetered.
Despite Singer’s well-founded bleakness, the book lives on as an unintentional beacon: the most plausible origin story of a term that has come to define optimism, aspiration and the addictive sugar rush of positive spin. Because, in a footnote on page 109, stands what is reckoned to be the earliest reference in print to the term “win-win”.
