Cooperation is a betrayal declined, not a betrayal prevented

A working relationship is not the absence of the option to hurt you. It is that option, held and set down. This sounds like word games until you try to manufacture cooperation by deleting the option, and get something else entirely.

Run the prisoner's dilemma as a simulation, where two agents each choose to cooperate or betray and mutual betrayal leaves everyone worse off. Lock every agent to one fixed move and the pure cooperators get farmed by the cheaters, and the whole population collapses to all-betray in a few hundred rounds. Cooperation only survives when agents can tell who they are facing and choose to spare some and fleece others. The capacity to defect is doing the work. Remove it and cooperation has nothing to stand on.

Churchill saw the same shape in May 1940, when part of his cabinet wanted to sound out Hitler's terms through Mussolini. His objection was about position, not principle: with France falling and invasion expected, Britain would not be negotiating, it would be receiving terms. Same words, different species. Take away the power to walk and the conversation quietly becomes pleading.

So loyalty you could not refuse is not loyalty, and a peace you cannot leave is not peace. Both are [an absorbing state](Decisions require ergodicity to succeed over time) wearing the costume of a choice. This is why engineering cooperation by removing someone's exit, through lock-in, dependency, nowhere-else-to-go, backfires: you get compliance that carries no goodwill and tells you nothing, right up until the moment it can defect again.

Source claim: Cooperation is a defection that stayed available and was declined, so eliminating the capacity to betray converts a partner into a captive rather than an ally.