The Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds me to continue with the debate seen on YouTube on the long term Sino-US relationship: Whether they are enemies now and in the long run future. Let’s face it, China is unlikely (if I say impossible, that would be determinism, see more discussions below) to dominate the world in the 21st century, but the Sino-US relationship will likely shape up other international relationships along its way.
The team of John Mearsheimer & Peter Brookes argued for the motion, while the opponent team of Robert Daly & Kevin Rudd argued against it. I have lots of respect to Daly & Rudd and I wish their view prevails in this country today. Unfortunately although they won the debate among the live audience in 2015, I must say Mearsheimer won both popular and political views hands down today.
Triple Determinisms
Why is Mearsheimer so popular? Two ideas starting with the letter “D” tend to sell well: democracy and determinism. The latter is especially powerful among people having little understanding of, or little interest in, something, as the message in a deterministic statement tends to be simple and memorizable to create a sense of certainty, and certainty is preferred to uncertainty due to an false impression among the poorly informed people that they now posses a solid grip on something they really know very little.
I was impressed by Kevin Rudd, the former PM of Australia, who quickly and correctly pointed out that the Mearsheimer model was deterministic in nature and did not allow the role of agency, a criticism Mearsheimer quickly accepted during the debate.
Rudd was referring to the determinism in the final conclusion of Mearsheimer that China and the US are and will inevitably be enemies. But that deterministic conclusion is derived from triple determinisms in his reasoning. More specifically, Mearsheimer sees a deterministic role of the supervising entity, a deterministic order of priority between economic and military or more generally, security, concerns, and finally a deterministic mindset for all nations (therefore China included) to act like the US in seeking regional hegemony and eliminating peer competitors. The mission of this is to discuss how his deterministic reasonings led to a deterministic conclusion, starting from a supervising entity in international relations.
Three Preconditions of A Zero-Sum Game
The idea of Mearsheimer is not new from the game theoretical perspective: International competition is a zero-sum game and the equilibrium will be reached only in a unipolar world dominated by a single country with no peer competitor.
Mearsheimer started with three characteristics, features or preconditions in international relationships: (1) There is no supervising power or higher authority sitting above sovereign states (like nobody in the other end of the 911 emergency line as Mearsheimer vividly put it) for countries to turn to when they get into troubles with each other, making the international system one of self-assistances; (2) every country has some offensive military capabilities, a few have much more than others and (3) there is no way to tell or to learn the future intentions of each other, which points to the need of a theory or theories to help explain the past and predict the future.
The Central Role of Supervising Power
Interestingly, shortly after the opening statements, the opponent team of Daly and Rudd pointed out that Mearsheimer was contradicting himself by first claiming it was impossible to predict the future intentions of a country, but later asserting that China will definitely want regional hegemony by eliminating peer competitors, just like the US did. To that Mearsheimer replied that if you put the three features together then you must reach the conclusion that every country wants hegemony but not peer competitor.
He did not elaborate but since we know his third feature was the impossibility of predicting a country’s future intent, it must be his first and second features that defeated the third, triggering an about-face by Mearsheimer. Furthermore, since every country has at least some offensive power or resource (Feature 2), offensive capabilities cannot be very scarce, and it must be the first feature of no international supervising entity that matters the most.
A side note: When there are more than two resources at stake, it is often the scarcest that becomes the biggest constraint, commonly known as the “bottleneck”, which can sometimes arise from abundant resources quickly and abruptly, as we witnessed recently when the Colonial Pipeline was hacked. The once smooth supply of oil suddenly became scarce, “setting off a cascading crisis that forced some airlines to make fuel stops on long-haul flights and led to emergency meetings at the White House, a jump in gas prices and panic buying at gas pumps.” according to NYT.
Given Features (1) and (2) — but ignoring Feature (3) — Mearsheimer told us that countries would quickly figure out the best way to survive International competitions was to stay preemptively strong and powerful, expanding the power gap over others to ensure regional dominance and eliminate peer competitors, like the US did to imperial Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. The US story shows that a country will achieve a global absolute dominance in a unipolar world that is stable and in equilibrium.
It’s The Expected Payoffs, Stupid
Since Daly and Rudd did not question the presumably crucial role of the supervising entity, I will add comments of my own.
The existence of a physical entity of higher authority matters far less in international games than Mearsheimer would like us to believe. Instead, the game theory tells us something else matters the most: agents’ or players’ expected payoffs, which hold in domestic just as well as in international games.
Why is emphasizing expected payoffs superior to demanding a supervising entity? The issue is game flexibility and diversity to prevent all games from being zero-sums. If supervising entity plays such an important role as Mearsheimer said, there would be only two kinds of games, with or without supervising entity. The formal defines all domestic games, while the latter all international games.
What we have been observing in reality however tells us not all domestic games are the same, nor are all international games. More specifically, having a supervising entity does not always save us from the “survival first” zero-sums, while not having it does not always lead to chaotic, law of the jungle games in which all players are either to kill or to be killed.
Let me explain using domestic and international examples. The best (and most ironic) domestic example is the Capitol riot in this country on January 6th, when the lawmakers all had to run for their survival and safety. Apparently, having a higher authority of the law enforcement agency helped little on that day, even though everybody knows there are people at the other end of the 911 emergency lines.
Now turn to the international games and look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We know the Security Council of the United Unions is frequently divided on issues. More importantly, its resolutions lack the binding power, disqualifying it as a supervising agency. Yet the historical events had not always followed the Mearsheimer script of stronger players to kill and weaker players to be killed. Despite its far more superior military power, Israel once proposed and implemented a unilateral “dismantling in 2005 of the 21 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of the settlers and Israeli army from inside the Gaza Strip” according to this Wikipedia page.
Another example is the border skirmishes between China and India in late 2020 and early 2021. Again without an international supervising entity, “India and China have both maintained that there are enough bilateral mechanisms to resolve the situation” and indeed, according to Wikipedia, “In February 2021, disengagement from Pangong Tso was reported.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have no objection against the notion of military dominance being a part of international game. I also do not claim that just because the Israelis voluntarily pulled from Gaza before, the country will do that again. Look at the ongoing development today and everyone can see that the Israelis are killing far more Palestinians than the other way around. Similarly, although China and India had stopped fighting last time, they may get into border troubles in the future.
But these do not prove Mearsheimer was right that whoever stronger will kill and whoever weaker will be killed. If anything, they demonstrate that even the same bilateral International game (e.g., Israeli and Palestinian; India and China) can follow different courses over time. In other words, no game has a deterministic fate in real life, it all depends on how players see and maximize their expected payoffs from mutually contingent moves.
The problem with Mearsheimer is to reckon implicitly that an externally imposed supervising entity is the only constraint agents face, to the extent that without the entity something bad is bound to happen.
Later in the debate (about 46 minutes into the debate), Mearsheimer asked this simple but seemingly powerful question: “Show me a country that had the war capability to dominate its region of the world and passed that up. Not a single case!” For him, the answer proves that all countries always strive to gain dominance or hegemony when there is nothing external to stop them.
All Countries Face Multiple Constraints
But this is just another deterministic reasoning. To begin, achieving regional or global hegemony is not the goal for all countries all the time. I would propose a notion of “Resources Adjusted Ambitions” such that what a country wants is a function of the resources it owns or can leverage on. The landlocked small country of Nepal for example is unlikely to want, nor to achieve, hegemony in Asia.
A country’s constraint may be internal, with or without external authority as constraint. By maintaining a military neutrality since the early 19th century, Switzerland has shown little interest in hegemony in Northern Europe, either.
Domestic constraints are common and powerful. The Biden administration for example has adopted an officially multidimensional view of the relationship in words, but if you look at the moves it has made, China has been treated as nothing but an enemy. An important reason is that the American public as well as the Congress are now holding a very negative view of China, which in turn shapes the administration’s policies.
Similarly, inside Israel citizens of Arabs and Jews origins can face a danger of civil war, adding another source of uncertainty in the region.
In addition, constraints based on resource are real but also relative. A country may be strong with plenty of resources by itself, and yet weaker than others. Such a power gap presents constraint. Before WWI for example, the total GDP in 1990 prices for the central powers in 1914 was only $376.6 billion, while the total GDP for the allies was $1,096.5 billion according to this report. Although this did not stop the central powers from starting the war, it did play a role in its defeat.
There is another side of resource based constraint. Not only shortage of resources can act as the constraint, but abundance as well. We can see the point by looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict again from another perspective. Since the Israelis possess much more resources than the Palestinians, both military and economic resources, it makes sense for Israel to shoulder more responsibilities than the Palestinians — responsibilities that would match with its resources and power. For example, because Israelis are capable of striking specific target accurately — unlike the Hamas — the international community is entitled to accuse Israelis for violation of human rights if they brought too many civilian casualties in Gaza, or damaging too many humanistic targets like schools, hospitals and clinics.
The logic of more resources bringing more responsibilities or moral obligations is not much different from asking nuclear powers of the world to come to terms and agreements on restricting the use of their nuclear arsenal. The same logic applies to domestic and international resources equally, otherwise how can we justify the public demands from, and criticism about, private companies like Facebook, Amazon and Twitter?
This logic, I believe, is what defines fairness in the 21st century and also sets human competition apart from the animal world, where raw muscle power and physical strengths totally determine who wins and who loses.
Expected Payoffs & External Entity
The beauty of expected payoffs is its breadth and inclusiveness that allows us to cover more grounds than supervising entities do. The fundamental idea is that rational agents make game choices or game strategies by calculating potential returns.
Believe it or not, the concept of expected payoffs works just fine with supervising entity because the latter can be embedded in the former — if such an entity exists — agents can and will figure out how the entity would respond to their next or future moves and those expectations will in turn shape their game choices. But if no such an entity exists, agents still form expectations by shifting attention to the potential responses and resources of other players and act accordingly.
Will stop here to avoid getting too long. Tomorrow will have my second shot and more severe reactions are expected!