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In a few days, the Iran nuclear deal, which is meant to prevent Iran from pursuing a nuclear program for military purposes, will most likely come to a whimpering end. The termination of an international agreement without any substitute in place is only the latest symptom of an approach to international relations that has a certain stench to it. It reeks of resentful desperation, of ignorant chauvinism, and of guilty, angry fear. It smells of the old pathetic mix of acting tough while being scared—the sad substitute of a macho man persona that can never materialize in real life. It comes with the usual noisy mix of arguments, such as “caring for ourselves,” “kicking the ass of anyone who fucks with us,” and, less colorful but barely less hollow, “pursuing the national interest.”
Yes, the new tough guys of world politics mean business: Gone are the days when faggy little snowflakes could sell out their countries. It’s time to leave all that Utopian Kumbaya crap behind, and to face the world as it really is. It’s time to secure a big slice of the pie. It’s time for some Realpolitik. This is the age of straight up nationalists who are rising all over the world, burning to do away with the transgressions of globalism, migration, and international agreements that only benefit those ominous others.
Of course, the idea of politics based on pragmatism and realism, free of ethical and ideological baggage, is hardly original. Italian diplomat philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli is usually credited with its introduction into modern political thought. Other proponents include military strategist Carl von Clausewitz and international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau. But not just bookish scholars were intrigued by Realpolitik. Klemens von Metternich, Otto von Bismarck, and Henry Kissinger are only some of the most prominent political practitioners who wholeheartedly embraced this approach.
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What is crucial, tough, is that none of these statesmen, all as conservative as they come, proposed to engage in international relations like an oversized bully on a playground. Instead, they pursued their respective national interests with painstaking negotiations, relentless diplomatic efforts, and the willingness to establish mutually beneficial relations. Their efforts resulted in stable international orders, cooperation, or, at the very least, peaceful coexistence.
Such splendid outcomes are unlikely, even counterintuitive, given the one characteristic that defines the international realm above all: its anarchic structure. Unlike the political organization of countries, or other institutional entities, there is no central authority in the international realm. In other words, there is no world government that could enforce cooperation and compliance among nation states, and only the most Utopian fantasies envision that there will ever be one.
Given this anarchy in the international realm, the mere existence of cooperation is truly remarkable. How it emerges, under such unlikely circumstances, is a central puzzle of the field of game theory. This relatively young discipline has accumulated no less than five Nobel prizes. A standard game theoretic problem, hugely popular among international relations theorists, is the so-called prisoner’s dilemma. At the risk of boring the educated reader with its gazillionth description, it goes as follows:
Consider two criminals, A and B, who decide to rob a bank. After the naughty deed is completed, the police arrest them. The officers are convinced they have the right guys, but they have only enough evidence for illegal firearm charges. Knowing this, A and B have, before the arrest, agreed to keep quiet about the robbery. The detective in charge interrogates A separately and lays out the situation as follows. If both suspects keep quiet, they will get off with a one-year sentence for the gun charges. If they both confess the judge will be lenient and sentence each of them to three years. But here comes the tricky part. If A confesses and B remains silent, A will go free and B will get 10 years. If A confesses and B remains silent, however, B will walk, and A will do 10 years in the big house. In another separate interview, the detective will make the equivalent offer to B. The predictable result in this scenario is that both criminals will confess, and thus violate their previous agreement to keep quiet. Their cooperation fails, and they face 3 years in a jail.
What is remarkable about this outcome is that an undesirable outcome results, although the decisions of both hoodlums are completely rational. Consider the problem from A’s perspective. If B keeps silent, A will be better off confessing, because he will walk free. But even if B confesses, A is better off confessing as well, since this is the only way to avoid ten years in jail, the worst possible outcome. Confessing is, what game theorists call, a “dominant strategy.” It is the better choice, regardless of the other player’s choice. And so, each criminal does what’s best for him, regardless of what the other guy does, and yet they end up in a situation that is less than optimal. They both win themselves into misery.
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Although such simple game scenarios abstract a great deal from the real world, they are instructive. It is precisely this condition of repeated encounters that makes cooperation in international politics possible. The relations between countries are not limited to one-shot interactions. Consequently, defecting from mutual agreements is no longer a dominant strategy, since the repeated gains from continuous cooperation outweigh the one-time rewards for defection.
Indeed, international cooperation has grown remarkably since World War II. From the U.N. system to free trade agreements, from supranational integration to the joint regulation of nuclear proliferation, the nations of the world have never been more willing to cooperate. And the rewards were abundant. A prolonged period of unprecedented economic growth, the persistence of relative peace (at least the absence of war between major powers), and worldwide progress in public health and other issue areas leave no doubt: international cooperation is good.
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But then there is Munich, the eternal counterexample illustrating the potential drawbacks of the cooperative approach. At the conference of Munich in 1938, British and French representatives made major concessions, facing the aggressive demands of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, in a desperate attempt to prevent the outbreak of another world war. The apparent benefits were short-lived. The concessions were fruitless, and the deadly war came anyway. And the Munich conference became forever synonymous with the futility of unreciprocated appeasement.
The example of Munich is a stern reminder that, when operating in the realm of international anarchy, it is not conducive to replace mistrust with blind trust, hostility with appeasement, and forcefulness with helplessness. More importantly, it shows that the players involved may play different games. While France and the United Kingdom deemed themselves in a situation in which mutual benefits were possible, Hitler and Mussolini, thinking in terms of absolute gains and losses, remained committed to a strictly uncompromising strategy.
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In game theory the structure of games is determined by the players’ payoff, which are assumed to be common knowledge. When everybody agrees on the possibility of mutual gains, the game could be a prisoner’s dilemma (or any other game that allows, at least in principle, for cooperation). When one player’s win is another player’s loss, one speaks of a zero-sum game, since the sum of the player’s payoffs is always zero. In zero-sum games there is no room for cooperation, no possibility of mutual gains—only winning or losing.
So what follows from the anarchy of the international realm, cooperative or zero-sum games? Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut answer. The structure of games is determined not only by players’ own payoffs, but also by their perception of other players’ payoffs. And rarely is the value of the rewards as objective and unambiguous as jail time or business profits. The goals of governments in particular are often complex, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable. Hence, the nature of international interactions is often ambiguous. Whether cooperation can emerge depends on the games players play and the games they believe other players play.
In one of the most widely cited articles in international relations theory, Professor Alexander Wendt of Ohio State University proposed “anarchy is what states make of it.” Hostile, cooperative, or conditionally cooperative environments are all possible, depending on the international climate and the mindset of the key players involved. Only when the players have, at least some, overlapping interest in cooperative outcomes can negotiations lead to stable international agreements.
There are countless issues that have already greatly benefited from cooperation among nations. There are many more challenges, ranging from worldwide terrorism to man-induced climate change, that cannot be tackled in isolation. Above all, the existential threat of nuclear proliferation requires the coordinated efforts of various countries.
In the long run, solutions based on the mutual recognition of common interests promise more stability than coercion, which poses permanent incentives to undermine control efforts. While history has shown that the unconditional appeasement of aggression can be disastrous, it is also imperative that the potential for cooperation is recognized and actively pursued. Cooperation is not weakness. but rather rational, and self-serving, Realpolitik.
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To summarize, international relations are difficult. (Who would have thought?) The stakes are high, and the consequences of failure can be deadly. Smart minds have produced powerful tools to analyze games that correspond to various challenges in the real world.
But they cannot replace diplomacy and deliberate efforts to create the international climate that the players will operate in. International relations entail dangerous games. To play them, one should rely on the rich lessons of history, rather than ignorant tough guy fantasies that transform the world into a universe of nasty zero-sum interactions.
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