The Vantasner Danger Meridian

Spiraling Out Through Bounded-Rationality

Patriot, Amazon

The Vantasner Danger Meridian refers to the point or line after which danger to your mission and/or sense of self increases exponentially—often used to demarcate conditions of grave and approaching danger.

The show Patriot¹ employs the term to mark a threshold wherein each corrective step deepens the crisis.

John Tavner tries to correct each problem with escalating improvisations—burying himself deeper into a self-created crisis—the same way States, or administrations, risk immense harm in pursuit of restoring control.²

It is one of the classic problems in international relations and security studies—the escalatory spiral. The isn’t with an explicit ideology—it’s a structural flaw in how power behaves under pressure, especially when institutions fail to distribute feedback or impose friction on decisionmaking.

In attempting to rationally respond to a crisis using a discrete action to regain control, you often find yourself driving affairs to an even more dire endstate. What starts as a single airstrike to ‘restore deterrence’ quickly metastasizes into a days-long bombing campaign, which turns into a conventional war that neither party ever intended.

Insular leadership and a lack of a systematized consultative process only lead to worse outcomes. An isolated decision-maker who has little input on calibrating the choices that they make tends to act erratically in situations where they have to make time-sensitive actions under immense stress.³

Without good advice—or people willing to advise on potential outcomes—the normal human instinct to attempt to control the course of events tends to take control. You’ll choose whatever option has the most immediate chances of reasserting your freedom of action.

For the sake of using a contemporary example, since it’s fresh—and ongoing—I’d point to the current Trump administration floating things like suspending Habeas Corpus.

In a certain sense, it’s an entirely rational course for them to take to implement a policy decision they want.

Their original idea—conventional ICE raids—has been largely anemic. They moved on to sending detained immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, but floundered due to a complete lack of infrastructure to support the move.

In turn, they attempted to revoke student visas, which have thus far largely been stymied by courts. They managed to get a planeload of immigrants to El Salvador through the use of the Alien Enemies Act—but subsequent deportation attempts have been blocked by habeas corpus.

Which brings you to Steven Miller floating the idea of suspending habeas corpus. It isn’t all that irrational if you’re thinking in terms of short-term steps to overcome setbacks in their preferred policy of mass deportations.

Each attempt to solve the previous failure only raises the stakes. From a more aggressive policy under existing lawful authorities (ICE raids), you arrive at the idea of implementing an arbitrary system of unchecked State violence in the United States (habeas is suspended).

It’s the sort of thing you get when decisions are being made in a completely isolated atmosphere. It’s not that they’re acting irrationally—they’re acting rationally while detached from information or dissent from other actors that could inform them of the cumulative risks they’re taking.

The only reason they keep attempting to do these things is because there’s nobody else in the room with them. There’s nobody around to tell them that the time has come to give up on the entire enterprise and admit that events got dangerously out of hand.⁴

Even in well-developed States with sophisticated bureaucracies, you run the risk of creating disastrous circumstances despite the immense institutional capacities to plan rationally across a long timespan.

The more centralized and insulated decision-making becomes, the more the timespan in decision-making becomes compressed.

What would have once been considered across a time horizon of years becomes months, and what was once months becomes a time horizon of weeks. Individuals are impatient and seek immediacy in results in a way that institutions do not.

This isn’t to say that conservative and sclerotic decision-making tends towards great results either—innumerable flaws come with overly consultative processes that overemphasize possible risk at the expense of action.

The Biden Administration’s policies in Ukraine are a good example of the inverse of this sort of mindset. You do need to attempt to win the fight you’re in from time to time, too.

I think it’s worth saying here that I don’t think this is a problem with the actual risk tolerance exactly, although risk tolerance is a factor in how decisions like this start to get made. It’s a problem with short-term calculations in managing a set of decisions.

You’re not pricing in the cumulative risk of where you stand at the given moment, so much as you begin to tunnel vision on near-term responses to obstacles that block your path.

You lose your grasp on the scope and scale of the prospective costs of what you’re doing are. It’s like worrying about how to get around a small rock while forgetting that you’re perched next to a cliff.

I don’t particularly think the Trump Administration is thinking much of the aforementioned risk when they’re floating the suspension of habeas so much as they’re looking for an immediate way to circumvent detained persons filing writs of habeas.

It’s the same pattern that exists from domestic governance to the outbreak of military conflict. Myopic decisions and short-term fixations by leaders trap governments into escalatory spirals. Every disaster had an off-ramp available if those involved were just willing to take it.

It’s not that the nations of Europe were thinking of the certainty of millions being dead when they started a general mobilization in 1914—it’s that they were thinking discreetly of how to deal with the partial mobilization of their neighbor.⁵

The risk calculus of these States was less of a problem than their inability to see where they currently sat on a long chain of short-term rational decisions to regain their ability to assert their preferred pathway forward.

It also doesn’t always turn into the First World War. Oftentimes it doesn’t, and you’re able to take control of events again. You can, in the parlance of the security studies world, assert escalation dominance. You get used to taking this approach because it worked in the past.

The problem is that you can’t do this every time, and eventually, events do spiral out of control. The second problem you created trying to fix the first problem suddenly becomes the third and fourth problems.

You find yourself steadily slipping over the Vantasner Danger Meridian.

1. Patriot is a show that is currently streaming now on Amazon Prime™. Go watch it. I need them to make a third season.

2. I’m not going to spoil any of the plotline of Patriot (streaming now on Amazon Prime™). You need to watch the show. So I can get a third season.

3. Is this a reference to the show Patriot that’s streaming now on Amazon Prime™? I don’t know. You should watch it to find out. So they’ll make a third season.

4. This narrative arc is featured in the show Patriot. You can catch it streaming now on Amazon Prime™. Possibly a show that will eventually have three seasons.

5. I don’t think this is part of the storyline for the show Patriot, streaming now on Amazon Prime™. But it could be if it got a third season.