Insights from a Man from the Left on the Game/ Decision Theory of World War III By Brian Simpson

While I am political worlds apart from Left-wing thinker Umair Haque, I found his thoughts on Putin’s moves if pushed into a corner worth considering. In this debate, a war of misinformation, we need to consider as many view points as possible. It does not mean that we agree with it, merely read and assess.

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“The question then is this. If this is World War III, are we ready to win it? Who is going to win it?

The message in Putin’s pattern of escalation and duplicity gives us a clear indication of what is to come. Putin will quite happily reduce Ukraine to Syrian levels of devastation. Indeed, he already is. And having done that, he will move on. To the next set of targets in his campaign to reconstitute a neofascist political entity which cuts into the heart of Europe, made of former Soviet states. Putin’s pattern of rampant, runaway escalation is meant to tell us that he is not deterred, and that he will continue escalating.

That brings us to Anthony Blinken. Blinken appears confident in his belief that Putin will experience a “strategic defeat” in Ukraine — and therefore, he will be stopped. Blinken is surely a fine statesman — he has helped coordinate the West’s response to Putin’s campaign of war and terror. But what Blinken perhaps might not be is a grandmaster of strategy, of winning wars.

Because the question is: if a “strategic defeat” for Putin is reducing Ukraine to Syrian levels of devastation, to rubble, and Putin himself also regards that as an acceptable victory, then does it mean anything at all?

Let me put that another way. If a “strategic defeat” for Putin is chemical weapons and bombs that burn kids and mothers to death alive en masse, Europe’s greatest refugee crisis since World War II, civilian death on a horrific scale…is that really much of a defeat at all?

Opinions are divided. On the one side, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has said Ukraine is paying the price NATO’s “sins of sloth and greed.” John Bolton has noted that Putin isn’t deterred — the West is effectively appeasing him.

On the other stand figures like Blinken — who is convinced that “strategic defeat” will be enough to stop Putin.

Let’s try to think about all this as clearly as we can. Here we have what happens in any war — the emergence of hawks and doves. In the case of this war, World War III, or what looks like its beginnings, figures can be hawks and doves along two dimensions: military and economic.

Do you know the hawk-dove game from game theory? If you don’t, don’t worry about it. I’m about to explain it to you.

Blinken is an economic hawk, and a military dove. His stance is that sanctions and boycotts and financial pressure can win this war. Military action, on the other hand, isn’t something to be considered, at least in any serious way. So, yes, the West is running guns and Stinger missiles to Ukrainians — but, notably, America is reticent to share fighter jets, or provide an Iron Dome style defence system, or of course enforce a no-fly zone. The limits to military intervention are small arms, effectively. The reason is that this faction — economic hawks, military doves — believe that this war can be won economically.

Opposing them — on our side — are figures like Kasparov and Bolton. They are economics hawks and military hawks. They believe in sanctions and financial pressures and embargo and so forth. But they also believe that America and NATO should and must go further. Direct military intervention is an inevitability, this faction thinks: sooner or later we will have to confront Putin, and the sooner, the better, because the longer it takes, the more damage he does, the more divided we grow, and the more he can retaliate.

Which faction is right?

That brings me back to the hawk dove game — at least a little bit. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you do matrix algebra. We’re just going to discuss how this plays out.

To understand the way all this plays out, we have to understand what Putin is. Quite obviously, he’s a military hawk. He invaded Ukraine on a ludicrous pretext, without any kind of justification. A pure war of aggression is what he began. But Putin is also an economic hawk.

So the way this game is playing out goes like this. In the first round, Putin invaded Ukraine — military action. The West responded with economic and financial retaliation. And now something very much like an economic world war is breaking out.

The effects of the West’s sanctions are being felt in the Russia — but Putin is about to retaliate. By putting the squeeze on commodity prices. His erstwhile allies — Saudi, the UAE — have refused to ease energy pressures.

This is the round of the game to come. In this round, the West begins to suffer terribly, economically. Prices of everything skyrocket, because more or less everything we consume is effectively made in some way or other of Russian resources as key inputs, whether oil, gas, steel, iron, nickel, wheat, or cooking oil. We were in an inflationary spiral before — and now we in the West are about to encounter the cluster bomb equivalent of it.

Do you see how this game is working a little bit yet? Military action (from Putin’s side), followed by economic retaliation (on our side), followed by economic and military retaliation (from Putin’s side.)

That is because Putin is a military and economic hawk — but our leaders in the West are largely economic hawks, and military doves.

The problem is that in this game, the hawks tend to win. The way that they win is through commitment. Think of the Cold War’s nuclear threat. Then, each side built systems that were automatically designed to trigger armageddon for the other. They were committed to total destruction. Paradoxically, that’s how both sides backed down — the game (in the game theory sense) reached a kind of equilibrium there, both sides having committed to total destruction of the other, but neither then wanting to actually trigger the other side’s response.

I’m not saying that we should do something like that. I am just teaching you about the central mechanisms in this game, which is a very useful to understand warfare and conflict. Commitment matters. Hawks tend to win. “If only one player chooses Hawk, then this player defeats the Dove player. If both players play Dove, there is a tie, and each player receives a payoff lower than the profit of a hawk defeating a dove.”

That’s easy enough to understand, I hope. It’s just saying the more aggressive party will dominate the lesser one. And if both back down, then there’s a kind of peace — but they share resources, or payoffs, which are lower than when the most aggressive player wins.

Now. Let’s unpack the implication for us, on the brink of World War III. The West is employing a less aggressive strategy than Putin. Its strategy is to be economic hawks, and military doves. Meanwhile, Putin’s strategy is maximally aggressive: being an economic hawk, and a military hawk. Putin is such a hawk along both these dimensions that he’s willing to reduce nations to devastation, kill civilians with extreme weapons of war, and destroy his own country’s economy along the way, too. That is maximal aggression — the limit of possible aggression, really.

Our strategy — the Western one — on the other hand, so far, is minimally aggressive. We are willing to impose sanctions, here and there — and some of our nations, like the UK, barely bother to really enforce them in time, or on many figures at all. Furthermore, those sanctions don’t do much to limit Putin’s power or funding — because he controls oligarchs, through iron-clad control of state-owned enterprises, which he can yank away at a moment’s notice, and because his war machine is receiving plenty of income from Asia.

So here we have a very particular interaction. A game in which one player is maximally aggressive, and the other is minimally aggressive. But in this game, hawks tend to win.

That does not bode well for us. It doesn’t mean “Putin takes over the world.” It means that Putin gets what he wants, even if that’s just reducing half of Europe to Syrian levels of rubble, and leaving us to deal with the horrific aftermath. Our terms of victory and defeat right now are inappropriate. They do not match the gravity of the moment, a brewing World War. Our definition of defeating Putin is the same as his definition of victory. And so how can we really win this game?

We haven’t quite understood that yet, because we in the West haven’t felt it. We can see that Putin is a military hawk, an aggressor — and it’s horrifying to witness, his pattern of escalation which is now bombing maternity hospitals and using extreme weapons of war.

But the part we haven’t felt, and which is coming up for us, is the economic retaliation. So far, Ukraine is a distant crisis for many of us, as sympathetic as we are. Soon enough, though, we will feel the pain of cripplingly higher prices, for more or less everything in our lives. Our savings will be depleted. Interest rates will skyrocket. Debt will rise. Living standards will fall, which is the point of any war.

You can begin to see why hawks tend to win this game. As that round of the game — only in this case, it’s not a game, but a World War — the economic round hits us, we are likely to grow divided. Our momentum and interest in it is likely to wane. People facing severely higher prices and dramatically falling living standards tend to turn on their leaders. I’m not casting aspersions on us — these are just basic facts of reality. The point of economic war is to weaken an enemy, and we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that we are invulnerable, that the coming attack on our economies isn’t going to hurt, isn’t going to damage us.

And yet right about now, that is what we are doing. We are imagining that today’s sentiments of unity and anger can carry the moment. They are rarely enough. Fighting wars over the long run — and this is going to be a long war — means thinking carefully and strategically, not just emotionally and sentimentally. We need to be planning for the very real damage that is to come in the next round of the game, when Putin’s economic attacks hit us hard — and so far, to tell you the truth, we are not even really doing that in the West. Our leaders have no real plan to offset the dramatical fall in living standards that will hit us shortly.

You can begin to see the larger problem I’m trying to point out. In this game, the game of war, the situation of conflict, hawks tend to win. The more aggressive party dominates the less aggressive party. And right now, we are the less aggressive party in the West.

That is why, as Bolton correctly points out, Putin isn’t deterred. He is escalating, in increasingly horrific ways. Putin is doing that not just because he’s desperate — but also because he doesn’t regard us a a very formidable enemy. And he doesn’t regard us a very formidable enemy because he is maximally aggressive — and right about now, as proud as we are of our unity and sanctions and so forth, the fact is that we are nowhere near as aggressive. Putin’s maximally aggressive strategy also indicates he will go to the edge of nuclear war and beyond.

That does not mean that we should turn into Putin, and invade Russia. That is not what I am saying at all. I am only explaining to you how conflicts work. How wars are won and lost. Our primary task right now, if we wish to win this war, is to be more aggressive. Much more so. Because our adversary is maximally aggressive — and therefore, he is not scared of us, deterred by us, at all at the moment.

That doesn’t mean that we lose our values. Being more aggressive doesn’t mean something like, I don’t know, turning Moscow into rubble. It means just what it says. Being more aggressive in fighting back. Think of all the many ways Russia has destabilized us, with all the mechanisms of hybrid war, from propaganda that spreads to funding the far right, to now, military arms. We are not really fighting this war, yet. We are arming Ukraine to fight a local conflict. We are sanctioning Russia so it stops attacking Ukraine. But we are not yet acting like we are fighting a brewing World War against an existential enemy.

I know that many of you will think we are. You will say “but sanctions!” Yes, sanctions. They take time — a lot of time — to work. Time we don’t really have, because the game is played in rounds of escalation. Furthermore, Putin’s war machine is still receiving copious funding from China and other nations. He is not that worried about our sanctions because he is still selling China and much of Asia vast amounts of oil, gas, nickel, iron, steel, and other resources. That is why China is not condemning Putin. Why it isn’t taking our side. It is leaning towards Putin’s side, because they are economically coupled tightly. And because they are economically coupled, Putin’s war machine has plenty of money to keep on killing.

Being more aggressive means thinking about all this much more clearly than we are. When Blinken says Russia will suffer a “strategic defeat,” that is an example of being minimally aggressive. He is saying that it’s OK if Ukraine becomes Syria, and millions have to flee. But is that really what winning a war is?

If it is, then it’s almost assured that we are about to have another World War. Because for Putin, that’s victory.”