In 1997, soldiers prepared to
destroy a missile housed at a former Soviet base in Ukraine. After the
Soviet Union’s breakup, Ukraine gave up its portion of the old Soviet
nuclear arsenal.Credit
Associated Press
A
Russian occupation of Crimea raises the specter of the Cold War, in
which the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet
Union devolved into regional disputes around the world.
While
military and political frictions made the biggest headlines, the Cold
War couldn’t be well understood without using economic theory —
specifically, game theory, which analyzes the strategic logic of
threats, credibility and conflict.
It’s worth viewing the crisis in Ukraine through the prism of game theory, too, as applied on several fronts:
NUCLEAR DETERRENCE From the standpoint of game theory as developed by Thomas C. Schelling, a 2005 Nobel laureate in economic science,
the conflict can be seen as a case study in nuclear deterrence. That’s
because, after the Soviet Union split into many pieces in the 1990s, a
newly independent Ukraine gave up its portion of the old Soviet nuclear
arsenal. In part, it did so in exchange for a memorandum supporting its
territorial integrity, signed by both Russia and the United States.
Eliminating its nuclear weapons
may have seemed a good deal for Ukraine at the time, and it can be
argued that the world became a safer place. Yet if Ukraine were a
nuclear power today, it would surely have a far greater ability to deter
Russian military action.
TIPPING POINTSLong
before Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept, Mr. Schelling created
an elegant model of tipping points in his groundbreaking work
“Micromotives and Macrobehavior.” The theory applies to war, as well as
to marketing, neighborhood segregation and other domestic issues. In
this case, the idea of negotiated settlements to political conflicts may
be fraying, and the trouble in Crimea may disturb it further, moving
the world toward a very dangerous tipping point.
First,
some background: With notable exceptions in the former Yugoslavia and
in disputed territories in parts of Russia and places like Georgia, the
shift to new governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union was
mostly peaceful. Borders were redrawn in an orderly way, and political
deals were made by leaders assessing their rational self-interest.
In a recent blog post,
Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist, noted that for the last 25 years
the world has seen less violent conflict than might have been expected,
given local conditions. Lately, though, peaceful settlements have been
harder to find. This change may just reflect random noise in the data,
but a more disturbing alternative is that conflict is now more likely.
Why?
The point from game theory is this: The more peacefully that disputes
are resolved, the more that peaceful resolution is expected. That
expectation, in turn, makes peace easier to achieve and maintain. But
the reverse is also true: As peaceful settlement becomes less common,
trust declines, international norms shift and conflict becomes more
likely. So there is an unfavorable tipping point.
In
the formal terminology of game theory, there are “multiple equilibria”
(peaceful expectations versus expectations of conflict), and each event
in a conflict raises the risk that peaceful situations can unravel.
We’ve seen this periodically in history, as in the time leading up to
World War I. There is a significant possibility that we are seeing a
tipping point away from peaceful conflict resolution now....MORE
