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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @CruncherDefi 22h \ on: Who are the best intellectual defenders of stronger intervention in Ukraine? Politics_And_Law
How about using mathematical game theory?
War/Peace is game-theoric Prisoner Dillema. If we want to increase probability of having pareto-optimal solution (peace-peace) we want to increase penalty on 'War' action (which would include helping Ukraine).
If 'war' is profitable (which might be the case if US doesn't help Ukraine), the rational actor is incentivized to play 'war' again and again. And it just a matter of time until 'war' is played against you or your allies, so it's better to penalize the war-strategy player early (and achieve pareto-optimal solution earlier).
Yes, that's along the lines of what I'm looking for and makes the most sense to me.
But what I never hear from this side is whether the punishment is politically feasible or realistic to carry about by US and Europe. That's what folks like John Mearsheimer argue. They don't think that any punishment severe enough to deter Russia (at this point) is politically realistic nor safe, and thus prolonging the war is just prolonging the damage being done to Ukraine and its people.
So I guess what I'm looking for is some argument for why further intervention is realistic and safe and actually can succeed in deterring further Russian aggression (or even the Chinese, as this is part of the calculus going on in the background too)
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They don't think that any punishment severe enough to deter Russia
Here is another interesting thing about game theory. Mathematically speaking optimal actions depend ONLY on opponent reward matrix.
So pretending to be crazy/irrational is very basic international-game-theory strategy. If you can convince others that you are crazy and your reward matrix is actually different than common-sense one (for example by saying "Spreading communism is worth all the human lives sacrificed!" or something like that) you might get away extracting more reward at the expense of others.
But I would imagine that todays politics are savvy enough to see through it.
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