Game theory, sanctions, and Ukraine

A couple of additional considerations that I wish people would bring up in posts on this topic:

1. Humans have a tendency/bias to think one's own side is good and only giving proportional/fair responses, and the other side is evil and always escalating, making overall escalation much more likely than game theory (that assume rational actors) would suggest.
2. Chinese leadership may seem mostly rational today, but what about tomorrow? Putin seemed fairly rational just a few months ago. Maybe "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is right after all?

Given these considerations, "deterring the next war" is harder than it otherwise appears, and we should plan accordingly. (I'm not sure what concrete conclusions to make yet.)

To take this straight to the nuclear winter dark side.

I've been reading a bit about MAD 101 and I hate it. I'm slowly embracing the idea that the most safe thing to do is to be as explicit and precommitted as possible to massive retaliation if red lines are crossed. Emotionally that sounds nuts and I'd like everyone on every side to just spam we're not using the nukes, calm down.

But.

IF people say that and red lines keep getting crossed, at some point Side A thinks they can push one more boundary and get away with it, but Side B decides this is the limit and they press the button.

As such I think, but don't believe if that makes sense, bellicose rhetoric about nukes reduces the risk of nuclear escalation. Implicitly people clamoring for the West to precommit to not using nukes if the Ukrainian war spills out of Ukraine are actually fuzzying Putin's calculus in a very dangerous way. 

On a lighter shade of dark note, I definitely think Putin getting away with all of his little salami tactics measures against the West in the past 10 years was why he thought he could get away with Ukraine. If massive sanctions had been issued at any point in the past, it would have never gotten to this point in Ukraine. But then again, the West would have had less justification for the sanctions...

Just a random thought -- in long term, I wonder if it would be a good idea to make an offer to every citizen of Russia to spend one month on a vacation in Europe (once in their life), with all expenses paid, including travel. Nothing too fancy, just enough so that "but I don't have enough money" is never an objection. Maybe that would create some cognitive dissonance between "that nice place where I spent a vacation once" and "those horrible enemies that besiege us from all sides". With a bit of propaganda, not anything directly anti-Russia, but rather like "EU is a place where former enemies, such as Germany and France, now live together in peace" and also "EU expands only when someone wants to join us; and if they later change their mind and want to leave, they are free to do so". As an antidote against the fear of another country near Russia joining the EU.

No idea how much that would cost, but if the interest exceeds the possible budget, we could select by lottery.

I strongly disagree with this way of thinking, for reasons similar to Bryan Caplan's (though I can't find a link to his relevant blog post right now).

What he points out is that having a policy of imposing costly penalties on "norm violators" or "aggressors" does two things in practice: it raises the cost of violating norms but it also increases the demand to do so. Think of the ultimatum game: from a game-theoretic point of view it's optimal for the person giving the ultimatum to demand as much of the pie for himself as possible, but we all know that in the real world that would be a terrible strategy even from a selfish point of view.

Since this is a situation in which both supply and demand curves shift outwards, the net effect on the amount of aggression in equilibrium is ambiguous. For example, the US could threaten to nuke Moscow unless Putin is deposed in 48 hours. Everyone knows that this would be an incredibly reckless move, and even if the commitment could be trusted it's not clear what the Russian reaction to it would be. This could be because people in general have a background policy of "not putting up with unreasonable demands" as a way to deter people from making such demands, but then you're really playing with fire when you provoke them by making demands which are skirting the line. As an example, consider that Japan took the US trade embargoes and sanctions on it in the lead up to Pearl Harbor as an act of war, an unreasonable imposition that Japan had to respond to with force.

My sense of it is that punishing aggressors in this way makes conflict lumpier: you have a few world wars instead of many small wars. The net impact on, say, the amount of people killed per year on average in wars is not clear to me. I think the ideological environment created by a period of prolonged animosity is essential for a total war such as the First World War or the Second World War to get going, and that's precisely the kind of environment I fear is emerging now between "the West" and countries such as Russia and China, just as it happened between the Axis countries and the Allies in the lead up to the Second World War.

[2] Evidence from the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine suggests that we'd go with option 2 and take major economic damage trying to throw China out of the world trade system while still failing to save Taiwan.

These are disanalogous in that the US has not previously implied an intention to go to war to defend Ukraine, but has (somewhat ambiguously) implied an intention to go to war to defend Taiwan. So the US declining to go to war to defend Ukraine is what you should have expected even if you also believed that the US would go to war to defend Taiwan.

We should be willing to end sanctions iff Russia calls off the invasion and brings its soldiers home

I'll just note that this would mean, assuming Ukraine surrenders in the next few weeks, and Putin then does exactly what he says he'll do and withdraws, our sanctions are withdrawn almost immediately after implementation, and Russia is implicitly vindicated. Which is an outcome I would be fine with? It seems like it would end with lots of small wars and no nuclear extinction, no genocide and no global empire.

But I would be very surprised to see a general consensus that it's fine to invade another country and force them to sign treaties so long as you aren't occupying them or [X,Y,Z].

You can make the same argument for a world where Russia invades a NATO member like the Baltic states. What do we do then? Start World War Three? Abandon huge parts of Europe to be invaded until Russian tanks are rolling through Germany?

Publically, saying that attacking a NATO state is equivalent to attacking Ukraine, seems to me a great way to signal that NATO promises about mutual defense aren't worth the ink they are printed on. 

Why do you do that? It seems pretty inconsistent with your overall position. 

Therefore the main goal of Western strategy should be to never get to that point. That means that our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine must credibly signal to Russia, China and any other potential invaders that the cost of invading another country is too high. Remember that their leaders are making comparable calculations: what is the best strategy for China/Russia to take given the expected response of the West.

Politicians, think about all sorts of decisions when invading other countries that are not just "what's the best strategy for my country". 

The sanctions on RT and Sputnik made it easier for the Russian government to censor their own population in a stronger way which is likely welcome for a lot of people in the Kremlin that pushed for the war. 

[2] Evidence from the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine suggests that we'd go with option 2 and take major economic damage trying to throw China out of the world trade system while still failing to save Taiwan.

No, evidence from the Russian invasion suggests that imports that are considered critical like gas in Germany were still going on while politicians engaged in economic damage at home that wouldn't inconvenience their population too much. 

The trade relationship with China is very different and doing significant damage to China involves a much bigger shock to Western economies. 

If you would want to signal that we are willing to accept a lot of damage you should write op-eds about how letting millions of Africans starve is worth it because that would actually signal that you are willing to sacrifice.