No, not Al Gore. My childhood chum and 11th grade chemistry lab partner Roger B. Myerson was announced this a.m. as winner of the economics prize (he won with two others for the development of something called “mechanism design theory.“)
I’m so proud and happy for him. We always knew he was killer smart (although he did fail the driver’s license test on the first try because he drove the wrong way around a rotary), and now the whole world knows. (Perhaps this means that it’s the rest of us that drive the wrong way around rotaries.)
Roger’s field is “game theory,” and he’s so good at it that he has consulted with government agencies (including to the Pentagon) on how the logic of games can help find the best course of action.
Here’s Roger’s application of game theory to the Iraq War, which helps explain why it was such a colossal blunder. (I’m paraphrasing this from various conversations we’ve had about it, but I like his insight so much that I think I’ve got it right. I can’t reach him today to check it, because he’s probably busy drinking champagne. Nice goin’ buddy.)
After the Cold War, the world found itself in a historically unusual situation in which one nation held a vastly disproportionate share of all the military power in earth. The United States spends more on military than the next many countries combined, and, in a real military confrontation (we’re not talking counterinsurgency) could defeat almost any imaginable coalition that might form against it.
The United States wants this to continue as long as possible. The Bush administration has, in fact, made it explicit national security strategy to prevent any peer or competitor to arise. But there’s more than enough non-U.S. wealth to finance more non-U.S. military might. In the long run, Roger says, the continuation of this one-superpower situation depends on the rest of the world accepting it and deciding it is safe to allow the U.S. to hold a virtual monopoly on military might.
The best way for the U.S. to be trusted with a virtual monopoly on military might is to signal that it accepts some limits on what it will do with the monopoly and that it attaches serious weight to the wants and needs of the less powerful.
The best way for the U.S. to send the signal that this one-superpower situation is unsafe, is to use its military power in ways that make other nations nervous, that raise, for example, the fear that one day the United States might decide to use its military power against the other nations or their interests.
In 2002-2003, the U.S. signaled clearly that it accepts no limitations on its freedom and willingness to use its military might to invade and occupy another nation and topple its government for reasons had to satisfy only one test: the current occupant of the White House felt such invasion/occupation/regime change was in the interests of the United States.
The mechanisms of the United Nations and international law in general were disregarded and insulted. Those mechanisms may be imperfect, but what others are there might restrain the hegemon from doing the same thing again, perhaps against your small nation or one its allies or in direct contradiction to your small nation’s interests?
This message of a superpower deaf to any voluntary restraints on the use of its power is exactly the message you would want to send if your goal was to get the other nations of the world to decide that they and their interests were not safe in a one superpower world, and to be tempted to spend more and collude with each other to create a counter weight that could be used to deter the superpower from future such actions.
Perhaps the next president will find a way to send a different message.
Hey! Pass on the congrats from me and everyone else!
(Also, if he owes you any moolah from High School, this might be the time to bring it up)
Seriously, while I appreciate game theory immensely, and I’m very glad it got the recognition it deserves here, there’s another way to look at it.
Niccolo Machiavelli outlined a lot of the same reasoning in The Prince. It wasn’t quite as sophisticated, but it was there. You can find some other similar lines of thought in the Tao Te Ching, written about 2500 years ago.
It certainly goes without saying that anyone who has played a board game with a lot of other people knows better than to get too far out in front too quickly. Everyone will gang up on you and beat you down, possibly eliminating you. People respond to threats, but not always with vows of servitude. Sometimes, they find ways to gang up and strike back - and when they do, getback is a mofo.
But this isn’t really all that radical in and of itself. From game theory to classical literature to street fighting, it’s all there. Only an idiot could have missed it. So it logically follows that our President is, categorically, an idiot.
This year’s Nobels do make ya wonder what a few hundred votes in Florida coulda changed, don’t they?
Wight on, wabbbit!
Charles Kupchan makes the same point in The End of The American Era. The Project for a New American Century boys notwithstanding, the unipolar world will be ending, perhaps sooner than we think. The way that we manage that end will have a lot to do with the influence or antagonism that we end up with. Bush Jr.’s election was a victory for the isolationist and unilateralist impulses in the US, halted briefly by 9/11, but now very much in evidence in US foreign policy.
Kupchan calls isolationism and unilateralism a “lethal” combination.
I think another interesting approach to our current situation is to draw on lessons learned in evolutionary biology; specifically, the development of altruism and the methods by which self-interest can be maintained by seemingly counter intuitive action. I know it sounds kooky to reference bird breeding when talking about international affairs, but there are lessons to be learned from nature about how altruism and survival can be simultaneously achieved. Granted, self-awareness gums up our ability to measure the biological forces that make us tick, and I am in no way suggesting this as anything but a starting point idea, but the game theory argument that Myerson is making isn’t so far off from theories about why certain species of birds exhibit altruistic behavior that is seemingly detrimental to the individual actor (one particular species shares its food as a sign of strength.)
I watched the Myerson interview on the rebroadcast of The News Hour. I also had a high school friend who had the spelling of his last name: M-y; not M-e-y. I’ve been a tad more careful every since.
I am sure that it has been a great blog to write, as well as a great blog to read.
[I does trigger the memory of a goofy Bill O’Reiley tv show where he featured a person who was nominated for a Nobel Prize. It turned out that the person was nominated by a politician in Florida. The politician did not submit the proper forms, go through proper channels, etc.]
The idea of limits seems completely foreign to Bush; it must be the spoiled rich kid syndrome.
[…] admirer of my childhood chum Roger Myerson who won the Nobel in economics this week) was drawn (as I was in my Monday post) to Myerson’s application of game theory to the mess in […]