Matt Gurney: Trudeau sets course for the Kobayashi Maru
Much like aspiring starship captains, the PM's only real choice is whether he wants to get his crew killed in a hopeless cause.
By: Matt Gurney
As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau navigates the fallout of this week's sudden resignation by Chrystia Freeland, I wonder if he realizes he's now stepping into the Kobayashi Maru scenario. Since he's notably a fan of the inferior sci-fi franchise, I worry he might not.
The Kobayashi Maru scenario is, thankfully, from the good franchise — Star Trek! The scenario is a training exercise that any cadet aspiring to command a Federation starship must take. Note I didn't say "pass" — the scenario is designed to be impossible to pass. The cadet is ordered to take their (simulated) starship into a dangerous region of space to rescue a friendly vessel, a freighter named the Kobayashi Maru, that has been damaged in Klingon territory. The notably territorial Klingons have sent a large force of battlecruisers to destroy the wayward freighter. If the cadet, heeding the Klingons’ superior numbers, keeps their starship out of harm’s way, the Maru and all aboard will perish when the battlecruisers arrive. If the cadet does order their starship to mount a rescue, the Klingons will destroy the Maru and the cadet's ship.
There is no way to rescue the crew and escape alive. It can’t be done. That's the purpose of the test — to study how a would-be captain faces a no-win scenario.
The notion of the Kobayashi Maru test, or more simply the no-win scenario, is one of the Star Trek concepts that has moved far enough into the pop-culture psyche that even people who aren't fans of Star Trek may have heard of it, or at least the concept. Our prime minister is, alas, a Star Wars guy, but there's still a decent chance he'd get the reference.
But would he understand that he's the cadet here? And that there's simply no way he can win this one, and he'll get his crew killed — politically, I hope! — if he tries to pull off a bold move?