Procrastination and the Art of Nuclear Deterrence

Thomas Schelling's Strategy Of Conflict, Ending The War in Ukraine & Breaking Bad Habits

Sometimes, the best way to win is to make losing impossible. If you can take away your own ability to back down, others have no choice but to take you seriously.

Maybe it was telling your landlord you’d move out if they didn’t fix the plumbing—even though you didn’t have another place lined up. If they call your bluff, you either have to follow through or lose credibility forever. Or maybe it was negotiating a raise by telling your boss you’d quit if they didn’t match your expectations—knowing full well you didn’t have another offer. If they don’t budge, do you walk? Or do you reveal your hand, proving they never had to take your demand seriously?

Nations have to do this too. And sometimes, the best way to win is by weakening yourself.

In 310 BC, the Sicilian general Agathocles of Syracuse led an army across the Mediterranean to invade North Africa. But when he arrived on enemy shores, he did something extreme: he burned his own fleet (unlike the myth of Cortés, Agathocles actually did this). With no way to retreat, his soldiers had no choice but to fight with absolute commitment. His gamble worked—his army, forced into total war, won stunning victories and threatened the very heart of Carthage.

Thousands of years later, the economist and strategist Thomas Schelling formalized this idea in The Strategy of Conflict (Yes, that Schelling). He argued that limiting your own options can create power—whether in war, diplomacy, or even personal decision-making. His insights shaped Cold War nuclear policy, trade negotiations, and international diplomacy. And now, decades later, we’re seeing them play out again in the war in Ukraine and in how the U.S. approaches negotiation in conflicts like this one.

But this paradox of commitment doesn’t just apply to international relations—it also explains why so many people (including myself) sometimes fail to commit to their own goals. Whether it’s a nation or a person, credibility is everything. And if your subconscious knows you can retreat, you’ll never fight as if you have no choice.

Thomas Schelling’s Strategy Of Conflict

I. "Weakness is Strength" in International Relations

If a nation’s deterrent strategy is to be effective, it must be generally recognized and understood by potential adversaries. A deterrent strategy that is ambiguous or inconsistently applied will not have the desired effect, as adversaries will not have confidence in the credibility of the threats it entails. Thus, paradoxically, a nation must coordinate with those it seeks to deter in order for its deterrent to be effective.

- Thomas Schelling

The problem with threats is that they only work if people believe them. When you say, “If you do X, I will do Y,” but when the time comes, Y is costly, unpleasant, or outright stupid, there's a good chance you'll back down. And if your opponent knows this, they never had a reason to take you seriously in the first place.

This is the commitment problem, and it underlies everything from military strategy to business negotiations to everyday life. A nation draws a “red line” in foreign policy, but when the moment comes, it finds excuses to avoid escalation—weakening its credibility. A company threatens to fire employees who unionize, but everyone knows replacing them would be a disaster, so the employees call the bluff. A parent swears they’ll turn the car around if their kids don’t behave, but everyone knows the vacation has already been paid for.

Rationally, the best move—once a bluff is called—is often to back down. But that also means the original threat was never real to begin with. The paradox of commitment is that sometimes, the only way to make a threat effective is to remove your own ability to reconsider.

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Getting the Terms Straight

Schelling, in The Strategy of Conflict, makes an important point about language: strategy is not just about competition. People tend to hear words like “opponent” and “threat” and assume zero-sum thinking, but most real-world strategic interactions involve both common and competing interests. War, diplomacy, trade, business, even friendships—these are strategic games where each party has both mutual and mutually exclusive goals.

Let’s define the core ideas:

• A Promise is any commitment to a future action, conditional or unconditional.

  • “If you do X, I will do Y.”

  • “I will always do Y, regardless of what happens.”

  • Example: A country guarantees military aid to an ally to deter an invasion.

• A Threat is a special type of promise—one that punishes the opponent if they take an undesired action.

  • “If you invade my ally, I will retaliate with force.”

  • The problem: If the opponent calls the bluff, retaliation may no longer be rational.

  • Example: A country warns it will impose severe sanctions if another country crosses a red line—but then fails to act when the line is crossed.

• An Opponent is simply the other player in a negotiation, not necessarily an enemy.

  • In strategic interactions, both sides usually have some shared interests and some competing interests. The ratio between the two can vary from as little as the mutual desire to avoid war for Nuclear Powers, to as much as married couple deciding on where to eat.

• Types of Strategic Games

  • Zero-Sum Games – One party’s gain is another’s loss (Chess, FPS Video Games).

  • Mutual-Sum (Strategic) Games – A mix of cooperation and competition (trade deals, diplomacy, even relationships).

  • Purely Positive-Sum Games Don’t Exist – No two players ever have identical incentives; negotiation always involves trade-offs.

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The Commitment Problem and Schelling’s Insights

Schelling’s core insight is that in negotiations, where there is a wide range of possible outcomes but no clear way to reach one that favors either party, the most powerful tool is controlling expectations. If you can make your opponent expect you to react in a mutually self-destructive way should they take a certain action, they will avoid it—preferring instead a path that is less costly for both sides, but also one more favorable to you than if the threat had never been made. In other words, by making an opponent believe that pressing forward will lead to an outcome that is worse for everyone—including themselves—they are incentivized to accept a resolution that benefits you more than they otherwise would have.

But hey! If all you need to do is convince everyone else that you will behave irrationally when a bluff is called, why not just lead with that? Threatening to annex your closest ally, antagonizing the rest, and flip-flopping on your commitments might make you seem unpredictable, but it doesn’t have the same power to control an opponent’s expectations as you might think.

The problem is that general unpredictability isn’t the same as a strategic commitment to irrationality. If you are truly erratic, an opponent has no more reason to think you will respond irrationally in a specific way once an action is taken. It increases uncertainty, which may make others behave more cautiously—but it doesn’t let you induce specific behaviors from them.

For threats to work, they must be backed by credible commitment mechanisms. Even if an external observer believes one side would irrationally follow through once its bluff is called, there is always the consideration that a rational actor might deliberately appear predictably irrational to gain credibility. The key distinction is that true strategic irrationality isn’t just about looking erratic—it’s about making sure that when the moment arrives, you genuinely have no better option than to follow through.

Since most threats aren’t intrinsically credible, the only way to make them work is to precommit—to remove your own ability to back down, so that when the moment comes, you aren’t actually making a choice at all. Schelling highlights a few interesting ways to do this:

• Burning Bridges (or Fleets) – Physically removing your own ability to retreat.

  • Example: When Agathocles of Syracuse landed in North Africa, he burned his own ships to make retreat impossible. Victory was no longer optional—it was the only way home.

• Automatic Triggers – Setting up consequences that happen without further decision-making.

  • Example: Nuclear launch systems that trigger on certain conditions absent human interference, eliminating the possibility of reconsideration in the moment.

• Reputation Costs – If you have a history of following through on promises (even costly ones), people will believe your next one.

  • Example: A company that rigorously fights every lawsuit, even the ones where settling would be cheaper, to build a reputation for being a nightmare to sue. By demonstrating that they will bear irrational costs just to punish anyone who takes legal action, they discourage frivolous or fraudulent claims—saving themselves more in the long run.

• Acts of Congress – In democratic nations, or those with separation of powers, laws and legislative commitments act as a commitment device.

  • Since legislation is difficult to reverse due to political inertia, this allows negotiators to credibly claim, “My hands are tied—Congress has already passed legislation mandating this response, so if you don’t do X, we will be legally required to do Y.”

  • Example: When the U.S. formally recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, committing the United States to assist in Taiwan’s defense. This law deliberately constrained future presidents, ensuring that America’s commitments to Taiwan couldn’t be quietly abandoned through shifting diplomatic preferences.

• Tradition of Trust – In ongoing or repeated negotiations, building a reputation for honesty and follow-through can create long-term credibility, even in the absence of immediate enforcement mechanisms.

  • Since complex negotiations are often broken into smaller agreements, each with its own low-stakes commitments, the parties gradually develop a track record of keeping their word. This tradition of trust reduces the need for constant explicit enforcement, since breaking a promise in the short term risks losing the benefits of cooperation over the long term.

  • Example: The U.S.-Soviet arms control process during the Cold War relied heavily on this mechanism. Each successful round of negotiations built credibility for the next, creating a pathway where both sides came to expect reciprocal restraint. Even though neither side fully trusted the other, the established habit of keeping to previous agreements made future deals more credible, forming a tradition of trust through incremental steps.

In all of these cases, the person making the threat deliberately limits their own options—which paradoxically gives them more power.

A Plausible Commitment

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3. Strategic Weakness as Strength

Once you understand this paradox, a lot of strategic behavior starts making more sense.

Take Cold War nuclear deterrence. The entire logic of mutually assured destruction was built on the fact that nuclear threats must be credible.

If the Soviet Union nuked Berlin, would the United States really decide to start a completely mutually destructive war, leading to the deaths of hundreds of millions of its own citizens in order to enact revenge for an ally who can’t possibly benefit now that they’ve already been attacked?

Probably not. Thus, the U.S. can't simply promise to respond to nuclear attacks on its allies. Instead, it must create credible mechanisms whereby it must act against its own best interests after a hypothetical nuclear attack on an ally—thus making the attack irrational in the first place.

This is the essence of Schelling’s argument. Rational actors must sometimes construct systems that remove their own ability to act “rationally” in the moment—because only then do their threats and promises become real.

Schelling’s point was that strategic weakness—removing your own ability to reconsider—can be an enormous source of power.

This idea, first formalized by Schelling in the 1950s, has shaped everything from Cold War nuclear policy to modern diplomacy to business negotiations. But it also applies to personal decision-making—because, just like nations, individuals often struggle to make credible commitments.

II. The U.S., Russia & Ukraine

If you want to understand how "weakness is strength" works in practice, there’s no better case study than the war in Ukraine. Nearly every move—by Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and NATO—has been shaped by the central problem Schelling laid out decades ago: how do you make threats and promises credible?

To see how this dynamic built up over time, we need to go back to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Ukraine became independent. From the very beginning, Ukraine’s survival depended not just on its own military power, but on the credibility of promises and threats made by its neighbors—and by the global powers that claimed to support its sovereignty.

Soviet Collapse Visualized

When Ukraine became independent, it found itself in possession of the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, inherited from Soviet stockpiles on its territory. Almost immediately, Ukraine’s independence forced the world into its first round of strategic bargaining. The U.S., Russia, and Ukraine all shared a mutual interest in nuclear non-proliferation, but had wildly differing preferences for how to get there. Ukraine wanted guarantees for its security if it gave up its arsenal. Russia wanted those weapons dismantled—and Ukraine weak. The U.S. wanted to reduce global nuclear risks while keeping Ukraine out of Russia’s direct control.

The result was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security "assurances" from the U.S., U.K., and Russia. Not guarantees—just assurances. This vague language mattered. It left open the very credibility gap that would haunt Ukraine decades later. If and when Russia decided to test these assurances, the West would have no compelling rational to respond with force after an invasion had already begun, making the assurances gestures of empty goodwill.

NATO Expansion and Russian Grievances

From Moscow’s perspective, NATO expansion into Eastern Europe wasn’t just geopolitically threatening—it felt like a betrayal of what Russian leaders believed was an informal understanding at the end of the Cold War.

The roots of this belief trace back to 1990, when the Soviet Union was negotiating the reunification of Germany with the United States and West Germany. At the time, the big question was whether a reunited Germany would be part of NATO, and if so, how far NATO’s military infrastructure would extend into what had been East Germany.

During these negotiations, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker famously told Gorbachev that NATO would not move "one inch eastward" beyond a reunified Germany. This wasn’t written into any formal treaty, but it became one of those oral assurances that Russian officials would obsessively cite for decades.

From the Western perspective, Baker’s comment was about Germany specifically—not a promise about all of Eastern Europe, and certainly not about future independent countries like Poland or the Baltics. But from Moscow’s perspective, they saw it as a broader spirit of the agreement—a handshake understanding that NATO would respect the former Soviet sphere as a buffer zone.

When, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, NATO admitted former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and later even the Baltic states, Russian leaders—from Yeltsin to Putin—interpreted this as a progressive violation of that unwritten deal.

The key point is that this was a credibility crisis in slow motion. Russia believed NATO had promised restraint, and when NATO expanded anyway, Russia concluded that Western promises meant nothing. This perception of broken tradition of trust became central to how Putin would later justify defensive aggression—the idea that Russia must push back before it’s encircled and helpless.

NATO Expansion 1949-2024

Gas, Nord Stream, and Germany’s Strategic Dependence

At the same time, Europe—especially Germany—was making itself dependent on Russian natural gas, a dependence that didn’t just happen, but was the result of a series of political and economic choices. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Germany’s Green Party and broader environmental movement successfully pushed for an accelerated phase-out of nuclear power. This left Germany in need of a reliable energy source to fill the gap—and with renewables nowhere near ready to fully take over, the only viable short-term solution was importing more natural gas. And who do you think had a cheap, high-volume supply right next door that was all to eager to create a dependent Europe?

By the late 2010s, over half of Germany’s natural gas came from Russia through the Nord Stream pipelines. This dependency was so deep that even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Germany continued supporting Nord Stream 2, a second pipeline doubling down on the very reliance that would later hamstring European policy.

This wasn’t just an energy issue—it became a strategic liability. Every potential escalation between the West and Russia now carried an implicit threat: if Europe pushed too hard, Russia could simply turn off the taps, triggering an energy crisis that would devastate German industry, spike household energy prices across the continent, and possibly trigger recessions or political unrest in multiple EU states. In other words, European deterrence came with a heavy price tag—and Russia knew it.

German dependence on Russian LNG leading up to the invasion of Ukraine.

This is a textbook example of how economic interdependence, often thought to promote peace, can actually create strategic vulnerability—where one side’s dependence becomes the other side’s leverage.¹ This wasn’t a strategy—it was the equivalent of tying your shoelaces together before a footrace and hoping your opponent would trip out of pity. By making itself dependent, Europe didn’t just lose leverage; it guaranteed any serious response to Russia would hurt Berlin more than Moscow. Unsurprisingly, Russia noticed.

The Invasion and the Calibrated Response

When Russia invaded in 2022, the West’s response was shaped as much by history as by immediate strategy. Ukraine wasn’t a NATO member, so there was no automatic obligation to intervene directly. But abandoning Ukraine entirely would signal weakness—not just to Moscow, but to Beijing, where China’s leadership was watching to see just how serious American security promises really were. If America left Ukraine to fend for itself, it would be hard to convince Taiwan that its own guarantees were worth much either.

This left the West walking a deliberate tightrope: support Ukraine enough to fight back, but not enough to win decisively. Military aid dripped in—enough to keep Ukraine alive, but never enough to end the war on its terms.

This wasn’t just hesitation or caution; it was the natural consequence of the credibility trap the West had built for itself. Going all-in would mean committing vastly more resources and risking direct conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia. Doing too little would reinforce the suspicion that Western commitments—formal or implied—were paper-thin.

The result? A calibrated, incremental response that stretched the war into an open-ended stalemate. It was a policy designed to avoid catastrophe, but one that made victory impossible—and guaranteed that Ukraine’s suffering would be measured not in months, but in years.

Ukrainian Stalemate

Enter Trump: Playing Both Sides Against the Middle

Now, with Trump signaling he wants to end the war quickly, all of this strategic baggage comes into play. Trump’s approach to Ukraine, Russia, NATO, and China isn’t starting from scratch. It’s entering a game where every player remembers the broken promises, ambiguous assurances, and credibility crises of the past thirty years.

But if Trump understands anything, it’s that leverage comes from making others believe you’ll do something irrational should they resist—and then leaving yourself just enough room to avoid actually doing it. Ending the war isn’t about charming Putin or bullying Zelensky; it’s about constructing credible threats that leave both sides convinced they have no better option than to negotiate. And to do that, Trump has to commit—not just to one side, but to both.

This is not a prediction. Trump’s actual plans are unknown, and his grasp of strategy—along with the influence of his advisors—is anyone’s guess. He could just as easily be bluffing without a plan, basing his moves on gut instinct or cable news. Or, he could have intelligence showing that Ukraine or Russia is closer to collapse than anyone realizes. What follows is not prophecy—it’s a theoretical exercise in how someone could apply Schelling’s logic to end the war, if they were thinking strategically.

Step 1: The Threat to Ukraine

First, Trump needs Ukraine to negotiate—meaning they need to believe that, without a deal, US aid will dry up. This threat is entirely plausible. Trump could, with very little institutional resistance, dramatically reduce or suspend American support. Congress is divided, public opinion is fractured, and much of the Republican base already sees the aid as wasteful. Trump wouldn’t need to persuade the entire political establishment to go along—he would only need to make sure there’s no veto-proof majority to force the aid through over his objections.

The real question isn’t whether Trump could cut aid. It’s whether Europe could (or would) replace it if the U.S. walked away. Europe’s economic weight is more than sufficient to match American contributions, but its willingness and internal political cohesion are far more doubtful. German domestic politics, Eastern European fear of provoking Russia without U.S. backing, and Europe’s own sluggish defense industrial base all make it uncertain whether the EU could move quickly enough to replace the missing American support.

If Trump can credibly make Ukraine believe that European aid alone would leave them fatally under-supplied, Ukraine has every reason to take negotiations seriously. But if Ukraine believes Europe would step up—and could sustain the war effort indefinitely—Trump’s leverage over Ukraine disappears.

Step 2: The Threat to Russia

But threatening Ukraine isn’t enough. If Russia believes Trump will eventually cut off Ukraine no matter what, they have no reason to negotiate either. Why make a deal if you can just wait out the clock and get everything you want from an aid-free Ukraine? So Trump has to pair his threat to Ukraine with a second threat—to Russia. If Russia refuses to negotiate, Trump must credibly threaten to flood Ukraine with weapons, money, and intelligence—escalating Western support to a level that makes Russian victory impossible.

Step 3: The Credibility Problem

Now we hit the real challenge: neither of these threats is fully credible on its own. Without some mechanism to prove that Trump can’t back down once the moment arrives, Ukraine and Russia may assume it’s just bluster.

Ukraine could gamble that Congress or the EU would override Trump and keep the money flowing anyway—especially if abandoning Ukraine outright looked like a strategic disaster for the West. But Russia faces the opposite calculation: why take Trump’s threat to flood Ukraine with weapons seriously, when Trump has spent years railing against foreign aid, particularly aid that doesn’t come with a clear payoff for the U.S.?

The issue isn’t that Trump fears escalation with Russia—it’s that Trump doesn’t want to flood Ukraine with aid unless it fits into a broader transactional deal that he can sell domestically. Without some mechanism that forces his hand, Russia can assume that Trump’s threat to escalate is conditional on a deal being politically advantageous, not a firm commitment to Ukraine’s victory at all costs.

In other words, the credibility gap isn’t about Trump being “scared of Putin.” It’s that both Ukraine and Russia understand Trump’s preferences well enough to know he won’t want to follow through on either extreme threat (abandoning Ukraine or massively arming it) unless he’s locked into doing so.

Step 4: Creating the Commitment Device

This is where Trump’s transactional instincts and his sense for spectacle come into play. By publicly demanding something tangible—like resource rights in Ukraine—in exchange for aid, Trump can create a visible “deal” that binds his hands. If Congress signs off on an aid package contingent on Ukraine offering these rights, the aid becomes conditional by law. Suddenly, Trump can credibly say to Ukraine: No deal, no aid—my hands are tied.

At the same time, if that very same aid package guarantees massive US support in the event that there isn’t a ceasefire, it creates a second commitment. Russia now has to believe that refusal triggers a flood of aid. And once the deal is enshrined in law, even Trump himself could not reverse it without persuading Congress to actively repeal or rewrite the legislation—something far more difficult, slow, and politically costly than simply “changing his mind.”

Step 5: Europe and the Bonus Threat

Europe, especially the EU leadership, wants to keep Trump from abandoning Ukraine. By positioning his demand for resource rights as a transactional “win” for America, Trump could simultaneously pacify his domestic base (“we’re getting something out of this!”) and present a fait accompli to Europe: If you don’t step up your own aid, the US will walk away. This is already happening to some degree—Trump’s mere suggestion of cutting aid triggered a sudden flurry of pro-Ukraine positioning from European leaders.

In effect, Trump uses the threat of abandonment to extract more resources from both Ukraine and Europe, while using the threat of escalation to push Russia to the table. It’s a double-bind: negotiate or face either abandonment (if you’re Ukraine) or escalation (if you’re Russia).

Step 6: What Makes This Schelling-esque

This is exactly the kind of strategic maneuver Schelling described—where limiting your own future options forces your opponents to take your threats seriously. Trump doesn’t have to want to flood Ukraine with weapons, or necessarily want to abandon them. He just has to make sure that, once the process is set in motion, he no longer has a choice. By creating conditions where walking away or escalating becomes the only viable paths dependent on the actions of Ukraine and Russia, he forces all sides to take his threats seriously.

But Schelling’s brilliance also comes with risk. Even if Trump successfully builds this double-bind—where Russia fears escalation and Ukraine fears abandonment—there’s no guarantee that either side will actually negotiate a ceasefire. Even if it becomes rational for both Russia and Ukraine to seek a settlement under these conditions, rationality doesn’t guarantee specific action. The key decision makers may have hidden motivations that drastically alter their preference vis-a-vis continuation of the war.

Leaders don’t just negotiate for national interest; they negotiate for personal survival. For Zelensky, accepting a deal that concedes territory could be politically fatal. For Putin, so long as the war is ongoing, he can still claim that ultimate victory—and the defeat of the West—is just over the horizon. This allows him to justify enhanced political suppression at home, framing dissent as sabotage in a time of national struggle. But a ceasefire on the current frontlines would be hard to spin as anything other than a strategic failure—Russia would have bled for years, only to end up with a stalemate. That kind of outcome could weaken Putin’s position, not just in the eyes of the public, but among the elites who have tolerated the war because of the extraordinary powers it grants the regime. Once the war stops serving as a blanket justification for domestic repression, those powers become harder to defend—and Putin’s hold on power becomes more fragile.

If either leader calculates that prolonging the war is safer for them personally than facing the domestic fallout of an unpopular compromise, either might both choose to gamble—dragging the war forward despite every rational incentive to end it.

In that case, Trump’s carefully constructed threat system could backfire, leaving the US in a position it doesn’t actually want: either forced to massively escalate aid to Ukraine (even if victory still isn’t guaranteed), or forced to truly abandon Ukraine, despite the enormous blow this would deal to American credibility with allies like Taiwan.

Schelling’s logic is powerful—but it only works if the players you are maneuvering care more about the strategic outcome than about their own political survival. In wars driven as much by personalist regimes as by national interest, that assumption is never safe.

III. Applying This to the Individual: The Problem of Commitment

Personally, while I find game theory fascinating and international politics fun to argue about, none of it actually matters in my day-to-day life. I’m not running a country. I’m not negotiating a nuclear arms treaty. And while it’s nice to think that understanding The Strategy of Conflict makes me better at spotting bluffs and predicting outcomes, the truth is I don’t spend much time issuing threats or promising retaliatory sanctions.

But I do spend a lot of time negotiating with someone whose motivations are even murkier than Putin’s — myself.

It’s not just that my subconscious is irrational — it’s that we aren’t even aiming at the same goals. My conscious self wants long-term achievement, meaning, and a sense of competence. My subconscious, on the other hand, is a creature of simpler tastes: dopamine, comfort, and the immediate absence of unpleasantness. Calling this a negotiation is generous. It’s closer to hammering out a peace treaty between a retirement account and a toddler in a candy store.

If I can’t apply these ideas to solve that problem, then they’re nothing more than intellectual junk food. And I try — sometimes successfully — to make sure that even my hobbies and idle interests feed back into something useful. In this case, the “something useful” is tackling the single biggest and most universal enemy of anyone trying to accomplish anything: procrastination.

These days, I’m generally productive. Most of my waking hours are spent either working (often too much) or doing something arguably productive, like reading dense books about Cold War deterrence for fun. But that wasn’t always the case. In fact, it’s hard to overstate just how much of a lazy, high-IQ underachiever I was growing up.

A selection from my bookshelf from 2024. See My Book List for more.

I was the classic smart kid who coasted through middle school without ever learning how to study, because I never needed to. Combine that with parents who valued independence and gave me plenty of freedom to chart my own path, and by the time I hit high school, my only real skills were watching YouTube, optimizing my CSGO rank (I have 5,000+ hours across three video games I played religiously), and writing essays at 2AM the day they were due. I honestly don’t think I read a single book cover to cover during high school — not because I couldn’t, but because it was so easy not to.

Unlearning that and becoming even marginally functional has been a years-long uphill battle. Even now, my default setting is to wait until the last possible second to do anything.

Which brings us back to Schelling.

The Strategy of Conflict isn’t a self-help book (which I think are mostly useless), but it offers a framework to understand procrastination better than any self-help book ever could. At its core, procrastination isn’t about laziness or even time management. It’s about broken internal credibility — the fact that your future self makes all kinds of grand promises, and your present self knows full well those promises mean nothing.

This is what Schelling was talking about — just not applied to something as grand as nuclear war. It’s not “If you cross this red line, we will launch a retaliatory strike.” It’s “If I stay up late, I’ll work twice as hard tomorrow.” Both of these promises are worthless without something to make them real.

1. The Internal Cold War: You vs. You

Every person is a divided self. You aren’t just one entity with a single, unified set of goals. You are a battleground of conflicting desires, a Cold War being waged between two distinct players. To borrow the terms, if not the exact concepts from Freud:

• The Id: The part of your brain that responds to immediate pleasure and pain. It doesn’t care about long-term goals, only about dopamine right now. It’s the part of you that craves junk food, procrastinates, and tells you that you’ll “totally start tomorrow.”

• The Ego: The conscious, rational part of your mind. The one that sets goals, makes plans, and wants a better future. The Ego is the executive function that tells you to wake up early, go to the gym, and work on that long-term project instead of binge-watching YouTube.

These two players are constantly negotiating. Your Ego wants discipline, progress, and long-term success. Your Id wants another cookie, another hour of sleep, and another dopamine hit. And, unfortunately, your Id is a much better negotiator.

Why? Because it understands something fundamental: your promises mean nothing.

When you tell yourself, “I’ll go to bed late tonight, but I’ll make up for it by working extra hard tomorrow,” your Id doesn’t actually believe this—it just needs your Ego to believe it for now. Because when tomorrow arrives, the incentives change, and the same cycle repeats. The Ego’s mistake is treating these internal negotiations as if both parties share the same long-term interests. They don’t. The Id has no reason to honor a promise it made in a moment of weakness yesterday.

This is the exact problem Schelling describes in international strategy: how do you make a threat credible when both sides know there will be no incentive to follow through after the fact?

In effect, your Ego is making a concession now to your Id, on the promise that the Id will allow, or even support the Ego in its goals later on. The Ego won’t have any more power over the Id tomorrow than it does today—so if the Ego caves now, it should fully expect to cave again tomorrow.

Self-improvement, then, isn’t just about willpower or motivation. It’s about solving the credibility problem inside your own brain. Your Id makes all kinds of promises, but your Ego has no way to enforce them, so the Id will follow its later incentives and break the promise. To actually change, you need to force the Id’s hand—to make retreat impossible, just like Schelling’s nations did when they burned their bridges, locked in their red lines, and precommitted to courses of action that couldn’t be undone.

Because if you don’t? The Id will keep negotiating, keep finding ways to wriggle out of your resolutions, and keep convincing you that this time you really will be different—right after one more dopamine hit.

2. Precommitment in Everyday Life

Under this framework, self-control isn’t really about willpower. It’s about creating threats and promises — but more importantly, making sure those threats and promises actually mean something.

Your future self loves to hand out promises: If I work out for a month, I’ll buy myself something nice. Your present self throws out threats: If I skip the gym today, I have to donate $50 to a cause I hate.

But even if you desperately want to receive the changed behaviors these promises would entail, your subconscious knows the truth — these promises and threats are usually empty. There’s no enforcement mechanism. You can always change your mind later, and you almost always do. It is near-impossible to expect an empty threat with no enforcement mechanism, where there is no tradition of trust between you your Id to result in any meaningful change, any more than an obviously empty threat made by Trump to change the behavior of US rivals.

The only way to make these commitments real is to precommit — to remove your own ability to reconsider. This isn’t a metaphor. You have to physically alter the future landscape so that backing down either isn’t possible, or comes at such a steep cost that it’s not worth it.

Some of these precommitment devices are old classics:

• Deleting all food delivery apps if you’re trying to eat healthy.

• Signing up for a non-refundable gym members if you want to start exercising.

• Giving a friend $500 and telling them to keep it if you don’t finish your project.

• Setting your alarm across the room so you have to physically get out of bed to turn it off.

• Taking an embarrassing photo and instructing it to be mailed if you don’t accomplish your task.

Nathan Fielder’s attempt at precommitment.

Each one works not because it magically changes your personality, but because it shifts the cost-benefit calculation your Id faces when the moment of temptation arrives. It forces your future self to act in line with your past intentions — whether it wants to or not.

4. The Final Insight: You Are Both Players (and Both Liars)

In diplomacy, it’s one nation negotiating with another. In personal life, it’s you negotiating with yourself. But the rules are exactly the same: promises mean nothing if they aren’t credible, threats only work if they’re backed by something real, and every failed commitment erodes your internal reputation for follow-through.

The reason so many people lose these internal negotiations is because they make the same mistake over and over — they treat their future self like a responsible, rational actor. They assume that Future Me will honor Today Me’s intentions out of some vague sense of loyalty to the cause of self-improvement.

This is nonsense. Future Me is a liar. Future Me will eat the donut. Future Me will sleep in. Future Me will invent incredibly elaborate excuses for why doing the work right now doesn’t make sense, but tomorrow will somehow be perfect. Future Me is not your friend. Future Me is a lawyer defending the Id.

The only way to win this game is to think strategically like Schelling. You have to limit Future Me’s options so thoroughly that, when the time comes, the only choice left is the one Present Me wanted all along. The more escape routes you block off in advance, the more credible your promises become — to yourself.

Bonus:

If you really wanted to brute-force self-improvement the way ancient generals committed to victory, you’d do something drastic. You’d throw your phone into the ocean. You’d cut the power cord to your TV (I once literally cut the HDMI cable to my desktop monitor to prevent myself from playing video games). You’d tell everyone you know that you’re training for a marathon, and if you don’t finish, you’ll publicly donate $1,000 to a cause you find repulsive — and then you’d give a trusted friend the money in advance so you can’t back out.

This is the psychology behind apps like Beeminder, which literally charge you money if you miss your goals. It’s also why public accountability works so well — because embarrassment is one of the few things even the Id respects. Once the cost of failure becomes higher than the dopamine hit, the incentives flip.

But my personal favorite example comes from my own life: the shock-watch.

A few years ago, I had a serious problem with oversleeping — hitting snooze for hours, to the point where it became a reflex. No matter how many times I swore I’d get up early, my sleepy self always had other plans. So I bought a Pavlok, a wearable watch that delivers a small electric shock on command. At first, I’d just take it off in my half-asleep state. So I escalated: I zip-tied it to my wrist before bed. If I slept in, I got shocked. If I slept in I’d be shocked awake, and have to run to the kitchen, get a pair of scissors, and cut the zip tie, all while being shocked every few seconds. By the time this ritual was done, my wrist was actually hurting, and my brain was wide awake.

It was brutal — and it worked.

In less than two weeks, my brain got the message. Oversleeping meant immediate, unavoidable pain. Suddenly, getting up wasn’t a negotiation anymore. It was survival. My Id, which only respects what it can see and feel, finally fell in line with my Ego. A few weeks of wearing the watch and I now literally can’t sleep in. Surprisingly, the internal clock of your brain is better than you might think, as I wake up within 10 minutes of 7:00 every day.

This isn’t some quirky one-off trick. It’s a proof of concept: with the right precommitment device, even deeply ingrained bad habits can break — fast. The problem with most productivity advice is that it assumes your conscious, rational self is the only one making decisions. It’s not. Your Id is making most of them. And the Id doesn’t respond to motivational speeches. It responds to what it can immediately sense: pain, pleasure, embarrassment, or loss.

If you want to beat procrastination — or any other self-defeating habit — you have to stop negotiating and start building commitment devices that make retreat impossible. Whether it’s a shock-watch, a public bet, or locking your phone in a literal safe, the principle is the same: create credible threats your Id will actually believe.

The goal isn’t to become a productivity robot. The goal is to make the future you actually want easier than the one you always fall into by default.

After all, if you want to win the war with yourself, you can’t just make promises. You have to burn the ships.

Thank you for reading.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this essay. I’m working on a lot of other things at the moment, so it’s been a while since my last post and will probably be a while before my next one. I happened to have Sunday free for the first time in a long time, so I banged this one out over a few hours. If you liked this article, feel free to subscribe. If you dislike this article, I encourage me to hurl insults in the comments.

1. As an aside, this is also the most convincing case for Tariffs.