For an interesting game-theory, realist perspective on war, check out this wiki article and especially the Fearon reference.
Please tell me you are in a terminal MA program. Then I’ll know not to waste too much time here.
The first part of your question is not well specified. The purpose of game theory is not to illuminate singular events. Even if this were the case, you can fit one of many models to any one event. This is no different than verbal argument. The “fall of the Soviet Union” itself is underspecified. What phenomena are you actually talking about here?
The second part is even more ill-informed. The fall of the Soviet Union, broadly construed, gave a tremendous boost to game theory in IR because the dominant schools of IR botched it so badly. The main paradigm of IR in 1989 was Realism. There were almost no game theorists in IR back then, and game theory tech from 30 years ago is drastically inferior to the technique used today. Realists, of course, were utterly wrong about what happened in the world in 1989, so much so that it very nearly destroyed the paradigm. What’s left of Realism is an incoherent mess of “classical,” “neo-classical,” “offensive,” “defensive,” and a profusion of other Realisms. Surely you’ve read Vasquez & Elman’s Realism and the Balancing of Power. The strategic approach has since become quite dominant, and for good reason. Have you read any articles from IO in the past 20 years or so? At least perhaps you are familiar with War and Reason or The Logic of Political Survival?
I hope you are not going into much debt for your degree.
Re: Chessic Sense’s post above, do check out Fearon and Powell. Both are excellent scholars and have made huge contributions for years to the field.
I think the best analogy for Nixon and Kissinger is that they were using the good cop/bad cop scenario. Kissinger was good cop and he’d tell other countries they should make a deal with him before Nixon, the bad cop, started throwing them around the interrogation room. Because Nixon was a loose cannon cop who didn’t play by the rules.
Undeservedly smug, poor writing, and you missed the point entirely. Have you considered government work?
I know the Prisoner’s Dilemma is tough. Sometimes it has fractions. Just keep trying and you’ll get it eventually.
SNOB FIIIIIIIGHT!!!
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I’m going to try to put it another way to get back on track with a little less rancor. Game theory is just a tool that helps us understand how people interact with each other strategically. It is not even a “theory” in the strict sense; game theory does not explain strategic behavior like the theory of gravity explains the motion of objects in space. Game theory is a set of analytical tools that help us simplify and understand messy things in the real world. A game represents reality as much as a train map represents an entire train line. Games are not the real thing and should not be confused with reality. But they can help us to get from one place to another without getting too lost.
Games are handy for a few reasons. For starters, theorists express them mathematically. As long as the math is correct, this forces the conclusions of the game to follow from its axioms. This is often not true in verbal argument, where it can be very easy to mix up causal relationships or argue both sides of an issue with equal plausibility. It’s especially easy to do this when the strategic interaction is dynamic or has a lot of feedbacks.
The analysis you derive from a game is also portable. An economist named Spence first proposed in 1972 the kind of game even sven mentioned above. Spence’s game had nothing to do with international relations: it was a model of college education and the job market. The question at issue is how much higher education workers should pursue and how this choose is interpreted by prospective employers. Superficially the invasion of Iraq and how much education a worker gets have nothing in common whatsoever. But you can find similar decision-making logic running through many different kinds of strategic interactions. Games help us tease out these logics. You can model whether people chip in for the office coffee pot and whether they join a revolution in a very similar way because the logic of these decisions is similar.
The hard part is looking at the world and figuring out what kind of game you’re actually playing. Maybe the Iraq war was a costly signalling game; maybe it is a domestic politics/selectorate theory game. People thought that game theory was really useful during the Cold War because back in the 70s, the Prisoner’s Dilemma was one of the only games that was really well-understood. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is actually kind of useful as a model of mutual nuclear deterrence, so we were lucky that when we really had a nail to deal with, the one tool in our box was a hammer.
But game theory is not some sort of general policy guide. That has always been kind of insane. Game theory is just a framework. The theorist has to provide plenty of his own assumptions to make a model work. The real world really is messy, and two game theorists often will disagree what game is being played at some particular moment. Strategic actors don’t usually play a repeated signalling game; they do the best they can to make good decisions under often difficult circumstances But game theory does force us to think about incentives, rules, communication, and information in a highly rigorous and structured way. This has led to practical innovations in election rules, constitutional design, auctions, and all sorts of other things that involve strategic behavior.
But it would be perverse for policymakers to erode the complexity of the real world to make single decisions because a game says so. Nobody wants life to imitate art here. That’s not the point of art in the first place. Game theory is by no means “inadequate” to inform policy and even if it were, it would have nothing to do with “multipolarity.” Game theory uses simplification and rigor to understand broad classes of decision-making. It doesn’t guarantee magically good outcomes in any single game if you slavishly adhere to some equilibrium strategy. We want our decision-makers to think in a rigorous and structured way about strategy, but we also want them to not simplify. If strategic actors did all the simplifying and abstracting for us, there would be no need for game theorists and we’d probably have a lot of bad decisions on our hands.