Macromegas #32 - Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence & Libertarianism
Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence & Libertarianism
Hello Friends,
And happy Friday!
I have two fascinating articles for you this week.
Both are based on game theory. The first one applied to interstate geopolitics. The second one applied to intrastate social politics.
You might really enjoy the first one: great storytelling. Especially if you are into crypto, blockchain, and you see complex systems to decentralise everywhere - not autobiographical at all. ;)
However the second one is even more brilliant in my opinion. For the story, I nearly dismissed it initially because the beginning seemed quite mainstream. But the development of the argument turned out fascinating. Please share your thoughts after you’ve read it!
America Needs Decentralized Deterrence to Counter Chinese, Russian Threats 10min
After World War II, the United States built a global network of alliances to contain Soviet expansion and secure U.S. interests in critical parts of the globe.
Traditionally, U.S. alliances also served a second, less appreciated purpose.
For decades, the United States took responsibility for deterring attacks on dozens of allies and quasi-allies around the world, principally in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.
It did so not simply to deter aggression but also to discourage its allies from acquiring nuclear capabilities of their own. In effect, the United States sought to contain allies as well as rivals—a luxury it could afford as an unchallenged superpower but one that is becoming unsustainable today.
But the United States now faces more, tougher adversaries than it did two decades ago. China and Russia have both conducted broad military modernization programs to undermine the United States’ ability to defend geographically distant allies in Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific.
In cybersecurity, networks that are highly centralized or have a single point of failure are particularly prone to catastrophic collapses when subjected to intense pressure. To address this vulnerability, increasing a network’s “redundancy” can make it far more resilient. This entails adding links and nodes that enlarge the number of data paths in a network, thereby making it harder for attackers to compromise the network’s overall integrity.
The same is true in geopolitics. By decentralizing deterrence capabilities within its alliance network, Washington can make it costlier and more difficult for adversaries to compromise that network.
There are historical precedents for this approach.
In the 1970s, the Nixon administration coped with exhaustion after the Vietnam War by devolving greater responsibility—through arms sales, intelligence support, and diplomatic cooperation—to “regional sheriffs,” such as Brazil, Iran, and South Africa.
That strategy worked temporarily but eventually faltered because former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s regional sheriffs were mostly brutal and often unstable authoritarian regimes that relied on morally abhorrent methods to contain those movements.
The new nodes, in other words, were not sufficiently reliable.
Today, the situation is more favorable because in regions where aggression would be most damaging—East Asia, followed by Eastern Europe—most of the United States’ key allies are stable democracies.
This matters because the United States and its democratic allies can leverage a key asymmetric advantage: Democracies don’t wage war on one another. Autocracies regularly do.
Unlike China or Russia, the United States enjoys a global alliance network of largely responsible democracies that are neither militarily aggressive nor set on revising the world’s geopolitical status quo. Unlike democracies, autocracies rarely maintain long-term loyalty or trust one another—for good reason.
The United States can thus afford to delegate increased responsibility for deterrence and defense to its allies in a way that Russia or China never could because those countries lack a comparable alliance network and autocratic pacts—even when they do emerge—simply cannot boast the same level of cohesion and trust as partnerships between democracies.
That’s a strategic edge the United States should exploit.
In practice, decentralizing deterrence would involve two complementary approaches.
The first approach entails substantially expanding the supply and sale of select conventional weapons to key allies.
The better method is to focus on helping allies and partners acquire larger numbers of relatively inexpensive, asymmetric capabilities that can blunt aggressive action or inflict a serious toll on an authoritarian attacker. In doing so, the United States can complicate Russian or Chinese use-of-force decisions by making it harder or costlier for them to secure swift military victories.
A second approach to decentralizing deterrence would focus on nuclear weapons.
To be clear, this would be a radical and controversial move. But if the United States is serious about maintaining a global alliance structure at a time of stagnant resources and increasing threats, it must discuss whether containing allies’ ambitions is still viable.
The logic behind nuclear deterrence has changed in recent decades. During the Cold War, the United States extended a “nuclear umbrella” over its allies, promising to undertake nuclear escalation on their behalf if it could not defend them conventionally. That was only plausible, however, because the loss of Western Europe to a Soviet attack would have radically shifted the global balance of power against the United States.
Today, a Chinese attack on Taiwan or a Russian attack in the Baltic would be very damaging to U.S. interests but not so catastrophic that Washington could reasonably justify initiating a nuclear war. An attack on the periphery of the United States’ alliance system would probably not merit a direct nuclear response from the United States.
More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship 10min
In an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.
In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.
That second point is a bog-standard libertarian argument. You want there to be as many things as possible, as different from each other as possible, so that there can be at least one that's good. You can apply the argument to freedom of speech (you want to hear as many opinions as possible to maximize your chance of hearing the true one), charter cities (you want as many different political regimes as possible so you can figure out which one maximizes human flourishing, and then you either move to that one, or take advantage of the scientific and economic goods it produces), charter schools (you want as many different kinds of school as possible, so you can find out which one educates kids best and go there), et cetera.
But maybe it’s not bog-standard enough. People tend to get surprised whenever libertarians differ from the most strawmannish version of Ayn Rand. But I find my disagreements with her map pretty closely to this idea of “diversity libertarianism”. I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much. And I’m more likely to care about conformist pressures from religions or mobs, even though technically those don’t involve government.
Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.
If you're an anti-government libertarian, I'm not sure there's much you can do besides shrug and say that religion isn't government, so this kind of thing is fine. In fact, I think some paleolibertarians think of this as a feature rather than a bug; they want government out of the way so (their) religion can rule the roost. But if you're a diversity libertarian, you're worried that religions can decrease variance of options the same way governments can. The evangelical Christian town where nobody will tolerate gay people may not have laws against homosexuality, but gay people still won't be able to find a church, community, or business that meets their needs.
Please don’t forget to share if you think this type of readings can interest others:
Thanks for reading, and have a free-thinking weekend,
V