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Speaker 1

00:00

What are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine? How do you analyze it within your framework about war?

Speaker 2

00:06

How far would they go to hang on to power when push came to shove is I think the thing that worries me the most and is plainly what worries most people about the risk of nuclear war. Like at what point does that unchecked leadership decide that this is worth it? Especially if they can emerge from the rubble still on top.

Speaker 1

00:31

The following is a conversation with Chris Blattman, professor at the University of Chicago, studying the causes and consequences of violence and war. This he explores in his new book called, Why We Fight, the Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. The book comes out on April 19th, so you should pre-order it to support Chris and his work.

Speaker 1

00:54

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Blattman. In your new book titled, "'Why We Fight, The Roots of War, "'and the Paths for Peace,' you write, quote, "'Let me be clear what I mean when I say war.

Speaker 1

01:15

"'I don't just mean countries duking it out. I mean any kind of prolonged, violent struggle between groups. That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Wildly different as these may be, their origins have much in common.

Speaker 1

01:34

We'll see that the Northern Irish Zealots, Colombian cartels, European tyrants, Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs, Chicago gangs, Indian mobs, Rwandan genocide dares, a new word I learned, thank you to you, those are people who administer genocide. English soccer hooligans and American invaders. So first, let me ask, what is war? In saying that war is a prolonged violence struggle between groups, what do the words prolonged, groups, and violent mean?

Speaker 2

02:12

I sit at the sort of intersection of economics and political science, and I also dwell a little bit in psychology, but that's partly because I'm married to psychologists, sometimes do research with her. All these things are really different. So if you're a political scientist, you spend a lot of time just classifying a really narrow kind of conflict and studying that.

Speaker 2

02:30

And that's an important way to make progress as a social scientist. But I'm not trying to make progress, I'm trying to sort of help everybody step back and say, you know what, there's like some common things that we know from these disciplines that relate to a really wide range of phenomena. Basically we can talk about them in a very similar way and we can get really similar insights. So I wanted to actually bring them together, but I still had to like say, let's hold out individual violence, which has a lot in common, but individuals choose to engage in violence for more and sometimes different reasons.

Speaker 2

03:06

So let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit. And let's really put aside short incidents of violence because those might have the same kind of things explaining them, but actually there's a lot of other things that can explain short violence. Short violence can be really demonstrative. Like you can just, I can use it to communicate information.

Speaker 2

03:27

The thing that all of it has in common is that it doesn't generally make sense. It's not your best option most of the time. And so I wanted to say, let's take this thing that should be puzzling. We kind of think it's normal.

Speaker 2

03:39

We kind of think this is what all humans do, but let's point out that it's not normal and then figure out why and let's talk about why. And so that, so I was trying to throw out the short violence, I was trying to throw out the individual violence, I was also trying to throw out all the competition that happens that's not violent. That's the normal, normal competition. I was trying to say let's talk about violent competition because that's kind of the puzzle.

Speaker 1

04:03

So that's really interesting, so you said, usually people try to find a narrow definition, and you said progress, so you make progress by finding a narrow definition, for example, of military conflict in a particular context. And progress means, all right, well, how do we prevent this particular kind of military conflict? Or maybe if it's already happening, how do we deescalate it and how do we solve it?

Speaker 1

04:29

So from a geopolitics perspective, from an economics perspective, and you're looking for a definition of war that is as broad as possible, but not so broad that you cannot achieve a deep level of understanding of why it happens and how it can be avoided.

Speaker 2

04:46

Right, and a common, basically like recognize that common principles govern some kinds of behavior that look pretty different. Like an Indian ethnic riot is obviously pretty different than invading a neighboring country, right? But, and that's pretty different than 2 villages, or 2 gangs.

Speaker 2

05:05

A lot of what I work on is studying organized criminals and gangs. 2 gangs going to war you'd think is really different, and of course it is, but there are some common principles. You can just think about conflict and the use of violence. And not learn everything, but just get a lot.

Speaker 2

05:19

Just get really, really far by sort of seeing the commonalities rather than just focusing on the differences.

Speaker 1

05:24

So again, those words are prolonged, groups, and violent. Can you maybe linger on each of those words? What does prolonged mean?

Speaker 1

05:33

Where's the line between short and long? What does groups mean, and what does violent mean?

Speaker 2

05:39

So let me, you know, I have a friend who, someone who's become a friend through the process of my work and writing this book also, who was 20, 30 years ago, was a gang leader in Chicago. So this guy named Napoleon English, or Nap. And I remember 1 time he was saying, well, you know, when I was young, I used to, I was 15, 16, and he'd go to the neighboring gangs territory.

Speaker 2

06:03

He says, I'd go gang banging. And I said, well, I didn't know what that meant. I said, what does that mean? And he said, oh, that just meant I'd shoot him up.

Speaker 2

06:09

Like I'd shoot at buildings. I might shoot at people. I wasn't trying to kill, he wasn't trying to kill them. He was just trying to sort of send a signal that he was a tough guy and he was fearless and he was someone who they should be careful with.

Speaker 2

06:24

And so I didn't wanna call that war, right? That was, that's something different. That was, it was short, it was kind of sporadic. And he wasn't, and he was basically trying to send them information.

Speaker 2

06:37

And this is what countries do all the time, right? We have military parades, and we might have border skirmishes. And I wanted to sort of, so what's short, is it a 3 month border skirmish, a war? I mean, I don't try to get into those things, I don't wanna, but I wanna point out that like, these long grueling months and years of violence are like part of the problem and the puzzle.

Speaker 2

07:04

And I didn't want to spend a lot of time talking about the international version of gangbanging. It's a different phenomenon.

Speaker 1

07:13

So what is it about Napoleon that doesn't nap, let's call him, not to add confusion, that doesn't qualify for war. Is it the individual aspect? Is it that violence is not the thing that is sought, but the communication of information is what is sought, or is it the shortness of it?

Speaker 1

07:37

Is it all of those combined?

Speaker 2

07:39

It's a little bit, I mean, he was the head of a group, or he was becoming the head of a group at that point. And that group eventually did go to war with those neighboring gangs, which is to say it was just long drawn out conflict over months and months and months. But I think 1 of the big insights from my fields is that you're constantly negotiating over something, right?

Speaker 2

08:02

Whether you're officially negotiating or you're all posturing, like you're bargaining over something. And you should be able to figure out a way to split that pie. And you could use violence. But violence is, everybody's miserable.

Speaker 2

08:16

Like if you're Knapp, like if you start a war, 1, you know, there's lots of risks. You can get killed. That's not good. You could kill somebody else and go to jail, which is what happened to him.

Speaker 2

08:25

That's not good. Your soldiers get killed. No one's buying your drugs in the middle of a gunfight. So it interrupts your business.

Speaker 2

08:31

And so on and on and on. It's like, it's really miserable. This is what we're seeing right now. You know, as we're recording, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is now in the fourth or fifth week.

Speaker 2

08:40

Everybody's, if it didn't dawn on them before, it's dawned on them now just how brutal and costly this is. As you describe for everybody. So everybody is losing in this war. Yeah, I mean, that's maybe the insight.

Speaker 2

08:53

Everybody loses something from war, and there was usually, not always, but the point is there was usually a way to get what you wanted or be better off without having to fight over it. So there's this, it's just, fighting is just politics by other means. And it's just inefficient, costly, brutal, devastating means and so That's like the deep insight. And so I kind of wanted to say, so I guess like what's not war.

Speaker 2

09:20

And I mean, I don't, I don't want, I don't try to belabor the definitions cause some, some, you know, there's reams and reams of political science professors papers written on like what's a war, what's not a war. I, people disagree. The, I just wanted to say, where's the thing that we shouldn't be doing, or war is the violence that doesn't make sense. There's a whole bunch of other violence, including gangbanging and skirmishes and things that might make sense, precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating or they're not particularly costly.

Speaker 2

09:53

Where's the thing that's just so costly we should be trying to avoid is maybe like the meta way I think about it.

Speaker 1

09:59

All right, Nevertheless, definitions are interesting. So outside of the academic bickering, every time you try to define something, I'm a big fan of it, the process illuminates. So the destination doesn't matter, because the moment you arrive at the definition, you lose the power.

Speaker 2

10:20

Yeah, 1 of the interesting things, I mean, so people, you know, if you wanna do, you know, some of what I do is just quantitative analysis of conflict, and if you wanna do that, if you wanna sort of run statistics on war, then you have to code it all up. And then lots of people have done that. There's 4 or 5 major data sets where people or teams of people have over time said, we're gonna code years of war between these groups or within a country.

Speaker 2

10:43

And what's interesting is how difficult, these data sets don't often agree. You have to make all of these, the decision gets really complicated. Like when does the war begin, right? Does it begin when a certain number of people have been killed?

Speaker 2

10:58

Did it begin, What if there's like lots of skirmishing and sort of little terror attacks or a couple bombs lobbed and then eventually turns into war? Do we call that, do we backdate it to like when the first act of violence started? And then what do we do with all the times when there was like that low scale, low intensity violence or bombs lobbed and do we call those wars? But or maybe only if they eventually get worse.

Speaker 2

11:24

Like so you get, it actually is really tricky.

Speaker 1

11:26

And the defensive and the offensive aspect. So everybody, Hitler in World War II, it seems like he never attacked anybody. He's always defending against the unjust attack of everybody else as he's taking over the world.

Speaker 1

11:41

So that's like information propaganda that Every side is trying to communicate to the world. So you can't listen to necessarily information, like self-report data. You have to kind of look past that somehow. Maybe look, especially in the modern world, as much as possible at the data.

Speaker 1

12:00

How many bombs dropped, how many people killed, how the number of, the estimates of the number of troops moved from 1 location to another, and that kind of thing. And the other interesting thing is there's quantitative analysis of war. So for example, I was looking at just war index, or people trying to measure, trying to put a number on what wars are seen as just and not. Oh really, I've never seen that.

Speaker 1

12:26

It's, there's numbers behind it, it's great. So it's great because again, as you do an extensive quantification of justice, you start to think what actually contributes to our thought that, for example, World War II is a just war and other wars are not. A lot of it is about intent and some of the other factors that you look at, which is prolonged, the degree of violence that is necessary versus not necessary, given the greater good, some measure of the greater good of people, all those kinds of things. Then there's reasons for war, you know, looking to free people or to stop a genocide versus conquering land, all those kinds of things.

Speaker 1

13:17

And people try to put a number behind it. And a lot of- And it's

Speaker 2

13:20

based on, I mean, what I'm trying to imagine is, I mean, suppose I wake up and, or whatever, suppose I think my God tells me to do something, or my God thinks that, or my moral sense thinks that something that another group is doing is repugnant. I'm curious, are they evaluating the validity of that claim or just the idea that, well, you said it was repugnant, you deeply believe that, therefore it's just?

Speaker 1

13:46

I think, and I could be corrected on a lot of this, but I think this is always looking at wars after they happened. So it's, and trying to take a global perspective from all, sort of a general survey of how people perceive. So you're not weighing disproportionately the opinions of the people who waged the war.

Speaker 2

14:05

Yeah, I mean I kind of ended up dodging that because, I mean, 1 is to just point out that wars, actually most wars aren't necessary, And so in the sense that there's another way to get what you wanted. And so on 1 level, there's no just war. Now that's not true because take an example like the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Speaker 2

14:30

The United States has been attacked. There's a culpable agent, reliable evidence that this is Al Qaeda. They're being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban. And then the Taliban, this is a bit murky.

Speaker 2

14:46

It seems that there was an attempt to, say, hand him over or else, and they said, no way. Now, you can make an argument that invading and attacking is strategically the right thing to do in terms of sending signals to your future enemies, Or you just, if you think it's important to bring someone to justice, in this case, Al Qaeda, then you, maybe that's just war or that's a just invasion, but it hinges on the fact that the other side just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing, which is say, okay, we'll give them up. And so it was completely avoidable in 1 sense, but if you believe, and I think it's probably true, if you believe that for their own ideological and other reasons, you know, Mullah Omar in particular and Taliban in general decided we're not going to do this. Then, then now you're, you're not left with very many good choices.

Speaker 2

15:45

And now I, you know, I didn't want to talk about, is that a just war? Is that what's justice or not? I just wanted to point out that like, it 1 side's intransigence, if that's indeed what happened, 1 side's intransigence sort of maybe compels you to basically eliminates all of the reasonable bargains that you could be satisfied with and now you're left with really no other strategic option but to invade. I think that's a slight oversimplification, but I think that's like 1 way to describe what happened.

Speaker 1

16:14

So your book is fascinating, your perspective on this is fascinating. I'll try to sort of play devil's advocate at times to try to get a clarity. But the thesis is that war is costly, usually costly for everybody.

Speaker 1

16:30

So that's what you mean when you say nobody wants war, because you're going to, from a game theoretical perspective, nobody wins. And so war is essentially a breakdown of reason, a breakdown of negotiation, of healthy communication, or healthy operation of the world, some kind of breakdown. You list all kinds of ways in which it breaks down. But There's also human beings in this mix.

Speaker 1

17:05

And there is ideas of justice. So for example, I don't want to, my memory doesn't serve me well on which wars were seen as justice. Very, very few in the 20th century of the many that have been there. The wars that were seen as just, first of all, the most just war is seen as World War II by far.

Speaker 1

17:24

It's actually the only 1 that goes above a threshold as seen as just. Everything is seen as unjust. It's less, it's like degrees of unjustness. And I think the ones that are seen as more just are the ones that are fast.

Speaker 1

17:41

That you have a very specific purpose, you communicate that purpose honestly with the global community, and you strike hard, fast, and you pull out. To do sort of, it's like rescue missions. It's almost like policing work. If there's somebody suffering, you go in and stop that suffering directly and that's it.

Speaker 1

18:02

I think World War II is seen in that way, that there's an obvious aggressor that is causing a lot of suffering in the world and looking to expand the scale of that suffering. And so you strike, I mean, given the scale, you strike as hard and as fast as possible to stop the expansion of the suffering. And so that's kind of how they see. I don't know if you can kind of look with this framework that you presented and look at Hitler and think, well, it's not in his interest to attack Czechoslovakia, Poland, Britain, France, Russia, the Soviet Union, America, the United States of America, same with Japan, is it in their long-term interest?

Speaker 1

19:01

I don't know. So for me, who cares about alleviating human suffering in the world, yes, it's not, it seems like almost no war is just. But it also seems somehow deeply human to fight. And I think your book makes the case, no, it's not.

Speaker 1

19:25

Can you try to like get at that? Cause it seems that war, there is some, that like drum of war seems to beat in all human hearts, like it's in there somewhere. Maybe it's, maybe there's like a relic of the past and we need to get rid of it. It's deeply irrational.

Speaker 2

19:44

Okay, So obviously we go to war and obviously there's a lot of violence and so we have to explain something and some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness. So I guess what I wanted us to sort of start with, I think it was just useful to sort of start and point out actually, you know, there's really, really, really, really strong incentives not to go to war because it's gonna be really costly. And so all of these other human or strategic things, all these things, the circumstantial things that will eventually lead us to go to war have to be pretty powerful before we go there.

Speaker 2

20:17

And most of the time-

Speaker 1

20:18

Sorry to interrupt. And that's why you also describe, very importantly, that war throughout human history is actually rare. We usually avoid it.

Speaker 2

20:27

You know, most people don't know about the US invasion of Haiti in

Speaker 1

20:31

1994.

Speaker 2

20:32

I mean, a lot of people know about it, but people just don't pay attention to it. We don't, we're gonna, you know, the history books and school kids are gonna learn about the invasion of Afghanistan for decades and decades. And nobody's going to put this 1 in the history books.

Speaker 2

20:47

And it's because it didn't actually happen. Because before the troops could land, the person who'd taken power in a coup basically said fine. There's this famous story where Colin Powell goes to Haiti, to this new dictator who's refused to let a democratic president take power, and tries to convince him to step down or else, and he says no, no, no, and then he shows him a video, and It's basically troop planes and all these things taking off. And he's like, this is not live, this is 2 hours ago.

Speaker 2

21:21

So it's a, and basically, he basically gives up

Speaker 1

21:25

right there. So that was- That's a powerful move.

Speaker 2

21:29

Yeah. I think Powell might've been 1 of his teachers in like a US military college, because a lot of these military dictators were trained at some point. So they had some, there was some personal relationships, at least between people in the US government and this guy that they were trying to use. The point is, and that's like what should have happened.

Speaker 2

21:45

Like that makes sense, right? Like, yeah, maybe I can mount an insurgency and yeah, I'm not gonna bear a lot of the costs of war because I'm the dictator and maybe he's human and he just wants to fight or gets angry or it's just in his mind, whatever he's doing. But at the end of the day, it's like, this does not make sense. And that's what happens most of the time, but we don't write so many books about it.

Speaker 2

22:08

And now some political scientists go and they count up all of the nations that could fight because they have some dispute and they're right next to 1 another, or they look at the ethnic groups that could fight with 1 another because there's some tension and they're right next to 1 another. And then whatever, some number like

Speaker 1

22:23

999

Speaker 2

22:24

out of 1000 don't fight because they just find some other way. They don't like each other, but they just loathe in peace because that's the sensible thing to do. And that's what we all do.

Speaker 2

22:35

We loathe in peace. And we loathed the Soviet Union in relative peace for decades and India loathes Pakistan in peace. I mean, 2 weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, again, it was in the newspapers, but most people didn't, I think, take note, India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan, and calm ensued. So they were like, yeah, this is, we do not want to go to war, this will be bad.

Speaker 2

23:03

We'll be angry, but we'll accept your explanation that this was an accident. And so, these things find the radar. And so we overestimate, I think, how likely it is sides are going to fight. But then of course, things do happen.

Speaker 2

23:17

Like Russia did invade the Ukraine and didn't find some negotiated deal. And so, and so then the book is sort of about half the book, it's just sort of laying out, well, actually like, there's just different ways this breaks down. And some of them are human. Some of them are this, I actually don't think war beats in our heart, it does a little bit, but we're actually very cooperative.

Speaker 2

23:40

As a species, we're deeply, deeply cooperative. We're really, really good. So the thing we're not, we're okay at violence and we're okay getting angry and vengeant and we have principles that will sometimes lead us, but we're actually really, really, really good at cooperation. And so that's again, you know, I don't, I'm not trying to write some big optimistic book where everything's gonna be great and we're all happy and we don't really fight.

Speaker 2

24:03

It's more just to say, let's start, let's be like a doctor. As a doctor, we're gonna focus on the sick, right? I'm gonna try, I know there's sick people, but I'm gonna recognize that the normal state is health and that most people are healthy. And that's gonna make me a better doctor.

Speaker 2

24:17

And I'm kind of saying the same thing. Let's be better doctors of politics in the world by recognizing that the normal state is health, and then we're gonna identify what are the diseases that are causing this warfare.

Speaker 1

24:30

So yeah, the natural state of the human body with the immune system and all the different parts wants to be healthy and is really damn good at being healthy, but sometimes it breaks down. Let's understand how it breaks down. So what are the 5 ways that you list that are the roots of war?

Speaker 2

24:48

Yeah, so I mean, they're kind of like buckets. They're sort of things that rhyme, right? Because it's not all the same.

Speaker 2

24:54

There's like lots of reasons to go to war. There's this great line, you know, there's a reason for every war and a war for every reason. And that's true. And it's kind of overwhelming, right?

Speaker 2

25:02

And it's overwhelming for a lot of people. It was overwhelming for me for a lot of time. And I think 1 of the gifts of social science is actually people have started to organize this for us. And I just tried to organize it like a tiny bit better.

Speaker 1

25:14

Buckets that rhyme. Buckets,

Speaker 2

25:15

yeah, the terrible metaphor, right? I got it metaphors. So the idea was that like that basic incentive, like something overrides these incentives.

Speaker 2

25:24

And I guess I was saying there's 5 ways that they get overrided, and 3 are, I'd call, strategic. Like they're kind of logical. They're circumstances that, and this is, they're sort of, where strategic is, strategy is like this, game theory is, you could use those 2 things interchangeably, but game theory is sort of making it sound more complicated, I think, than it is. It's basically saying that there's times when this is like the optimal choice because of circumstances.

Speaker 2

25:51

And 1 of them is when the people who are deciding don't bear those costs. So that's or maybe even have a private incentive that's going to, that's, that's if they don't, if they're ignoring the cost, then maybe the costs of war are not so material. That's a contributing factor. Another is just there's uncertainty, and we could talk about that, but there's just the absence of information means that actually there's circumstances where it's your best choice to attack.

Speaker 2

26:17

There's this thing that political economists call commitment problems, which are basically saying there's some big power shift that you can avoid by attacking now. So it's like a dynamic incentive. It's sort of saying, well, in order to keep something from happening in the future, I can attack now. And because of the structure of incentives, it actually makes sense for me.

Speaker 2

26:34

Even though war is in theory really costly, or it is really costly nonetheless. And then there's these sort of human things. One's a little bit like just war. 1 sort of thing, there's like ideologies or principles or things we value that weigh against those costs.

Speaker 2

26:50

Like exterminating the heretical idea or standing up for a principle might be so valuable to me that I'm willing to use violence, even if it's costly. And there's nothing irrational about that. And then the fifth bucket is all of the irrationalities, all the passions and all of the most importantly, I think, like misperceptions, the way we get like, we basically make wrong calculations about whether or not war is the right decision. We get, we misunderstand or misjudge our enemy or misjudge ourselves.

Speaker 1

27:22

So if you put all those things into buckets, so how much can it be modeled in a simple game theoretic way and How much of it is a giant human mess?

Speaker 2

27:32

So 4 of those 5 are really, on some level, easy to think strategically and model in a simple way, in the sense that any of us can do it, right? We do this all the time. Think of like bargaining in a market for a carpet or something, or whatever you bargained for.

Speaker 2

27:54

You're thinking a few steps ahead about what your opponent's going to do, and you stake out a low price, and the seller stakes out a high price, and you might both say, oh, I refuse to, I could never accept that, and there's all this sort of cheap talk, but you kind of understand where you're going, and it's efficient to like find a deal, and buy the market, buy the carpet eventually. So we all understand this like game theory and the strategy, I think intuitively. Or maybe even a closer example is like, suppose, I don't know, you have a tenant you need to evict or anyone normal, like kind of legal, it's not yet a legal dispute, right? Like we just have a dispute with a neighbor or somebody else.

Speaker 2

28:37

Most of us don't end up going to court. Going to court is like the war option. That's the costly thing that we just ought to be able to avoid. We ought to be able to find something between ourselves that doesn't require this hiring lawyers and long drawn out trial.

Speaker 2

28:53

And most of the time we do, right? And so we all understand that incentive. And then for those 5 buckets, So everything except all the irrational and the misperceptions are really easy to model. Then from a technical standpoint, it's actually pretty tricky to model the misperceptions.

Speaker 2

29:09

And I'm not a game theorist, and so I'm more channeling my colleagues who do this and what I know. But it's not rocket science. I mean, I think that's what I try to lay out in the book is like there's all these ideas out there that can actually help us just make sense of all these wars and just bring some order to the morass of reasons.

Speaker 1

29:33

Well, to push back a lot of things in 1 sentence. So first of all, rocket science is actually pretty simple.

Speaker 2

29:40

People like. I'll defer to you, actually.

Speaker 1

29:43

Well, I think it's because unfortunately, it's very, like engineering, it's very well defined. The problem is well defined. The problem with humanity is that it's actually complicated.

Speaker 1

29:53

So it is true it's not rocket science, but it is not true it's easy because it's not rocket science. But The problem, the downside of game theory is not that it helps us make sense of the world, it projects a simple model of the world that brings us comfort in thinking we understand. And sometimes that simplification is actually getting at the core first principles understanding of something. And sometimes it fools us into thinking we understand.

Speaker 1

30:26

So for example, I mean, mutually assured destruction is a very simple model and people argue all the time whether that's actually a good model or not, but there's empirical fact that we're still alive as a human civilization. And also in the game theoretic sense, do we model individual leaders and their relationships? Do we, the staff, the generals, or do we also have to model the culture, the people, the suffering of the people, the economic frustration or the anger, the distrust? Do you have to model all those things?

Speaker 1

31:04

Do they come into play? And sometimes, I mean, again, we could be romanticizing those things from a historical perspective, but when you look at history and you look at the way wars start, it sometimes feels like a little bit of a misunderstanding escalates, escalates, escalates, and just builds on top of itself, and all of a sudden it's an all out war. It's the escalation with nobody hitting the brakes. So, I mean, you're absolutely right, like in

Speaker 2

31:38

the sense that it's totally possible to oversimplify these things and take the game theory too seriously. And some, And people who study those things and write those models and people like me who use them sometimes make that mistake. I think that's not the mistake that most people make most often.

Speaker 2

31:58

And what's actually true is I think most people, we're actually really quick, whether it's the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, we're really quick to blame that on the humanness and the culture. So we're really quick to say, oh, this was George W. Bush's either desire for revenge and vengeance or some private agenda or blood for oil. So we're really quick to blame it on these things.

Speaker 2

32:23

And then we're really, we tend to overlook the strategic incentives to attack, which I think we're probably dominant. I think those things might've been true to a degree, but I don't think they were enough to ever, you know, bring those wars about. Just like, I think people are very quick to sort of, in this current invasion, to sort of talk about Putin's grand visions of being the next Catherine the Great or nationalist ideals and the mistakes and the miscalculations are really quick to sort of say, oh, that must be, and then kind of pause, or not pause, but maybe even stop there and not see some of the strategic incentives. And so, so I guess we have to do both.

Speaker 2

33:08

But the strategic, I guess I would say like the board's just such a big problem and it's just so costly

Speaker 1

33:15

that the

Speaker 2

33:15

strategic incentives and the things that game theory has given us are like really important in understanding why there was so little room for negotiation in a bargain that things like a leader's mistakes start to matter. Or a leader's nationalist ideals or delusions or vengeance actually matters. Because those do matter, but they only matter when the capacity to find a deal is so narrow because of the circumstances.

Speaker 2

33:45

And so let's not, it's sort of like saying, like an elderly person who dies of pneumonia, right? Pneumonia killed them, obviously. But that's not the reason pneumonia was able to kill them. All of the fundamentals and the circumstances were like, made them very fragile.

Speaker 2

34:02

And that's how I think all the strategic forces make that situation fragile, and then the miscalculations and all of these things you just said which are so important are kind of like the pneumonia. And let's pay attention to both.

Speaker 1

34:16

And you're saying that people don't disproportionately pay attention to the leaders. It's hard, I mean it wasn't, it took me

Speaker 2

34:23

a long time to learn to recognize them and it takes many people, you know, it took, and it took generations of social scientists, years and years to figure some of this out and to sort of help people understand it and clarify concepts. So it's not, it's just not that easy. No, it's not hard.

Speaker 2

34:41

I think it's possible to, just as I was taught a lot of the stuff I write in the book in graduate school or from reading, and it's possible to communicate and learn this stuff, but it's still really hard. And so that's kind of what I was trying to do, is like close that gap and just make it, help people recognize these things in the wild.

Speaker 1

35:01

Before we zoom back out, let me, at a high level, first ask, what are your thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine? How do you analyze it within your framework about war?

Speaker 2

35:12

A Russian colleague of mine, Konstantin Sonin, tells this story about a visiting Ukrainian professor who's at the university and 1 night he's walking down the street and he's talking on 2 cell phones at once for some reason. And a mugger stops him and demands the phones. In a sort of like deadpan way, Constantine says, you know, and because he was Ukrainian, he decided to fight.

Speaker 2

35:36

And I think that's a little bit like what happened. Most of us in that situation would hand over our cell phones and so In this situation, Putin's like the mugger, and the Ukrainian people are being asked to hand over this thing, and they're saying, no, we're not gonna hand this over. And the fact is, most people do. Most people faced with a superpower, or a tyrant, or an autocrat, or a murderous warlord who says hand this over, they hand it over.

Speaker 2

36:10

And that's why there are so many unequal imperial relationships in the world. That's what empire is. Empire is successive people saying, fine, we'll give up our, some degree of freedom or sovereignty because you're too powerful. And the Ukrainian said, no way.

Speaker 2

36:26

This is just too precious. And so I said, 1 of those buckets where that there are, there's a set of values. There's sometimes there's something that we value that is so valuable to us and important. Sometimes it's terrible.

Speaker 2

36:38

Sometimes it's the extermination of another people. But sometimes it's something noble, like liberty or refusal to part with sovereignty. And in those circumstances, people will decide, I will endure the costs. They probably, I mean, I think they knew what they were probably risking.

Speaker 2

36:57

And so to me, that's not to blame the Ukrainians any more than I would blame Americans for the American Revolution. It's actually a very similar story. You had a tyrannical, militarily superior, pretty non-democratic entity come and say, you're gonna have partial sovereignty. And Americans for ideological reasons said, no way.

Speaker 2

37:23

And that, you know, people like Bernard Bale and other historians, that's like the dominant story of the American Revolution. It was in the ideological origins, this attachment, this idea of liberty. And so I start, now there's lots of other reasons I think why this happened, but I think for me it starts with Ukrainians failing to make that sensible quote-unquote rational deal that says we should relinquish some of our sovereignty because Russia is more powerful than we are.

Speaker 1

37:50

So that's a very clinical look at the war. Meaning there is a man and a country, Vladimir Putin, that makes a claim on a land, builds up troops, and invades. The way to avoid suffering there, and the way to avoid death, and the way to avoid war, is to back down, and basically let, there's a list of interests he provides and you go along with that.

Speaker 1

38:32

That's when the goal is to avoid war. Let's do some other calculus. Let's think about Britain. So France fought Hitler, but did not fight very hard.

Speaker 1

38:48

Portugal, there's a lot of stories of countries like this. And there is Winston motherfucking Churchill. He's 1 of the rare humans in history who had that we shall fight on the beaches. It made no sense.

Speaker 1

39:05

Hitler did not say he's going to destroy Britain. He seemed to show respect for Britain. He wanted to keep the British empire. It made total sense.

Speaker 1

39:16

It was obvious that Britain was going to lose if Hitler goes all in on Britain as he seemed like he was going to. And yet Winston Churchill said a big F you. Similar thing, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people said F you in the same kind of way.

Speaker 2

39:33

So I think we're saying the same things. I'm being more clinical about it.

Speaker 1

39:38

Well I'm trying to understand, and we won't know this, but which path minimizes human suffering in the long term?

Speaker 2

39:49

Well, on the eve of the war, Ukraine was poor in a per person terms than it was in 1990. The economy's just completely stagnated. And Russia, meanwhile, like many other parts of the region, sort of is boomed to a degree.

Speaker 2

40:03

I mean, certainly because of oil and gas, but also for a variety of other reasons and Putin's consolidated political control. And from a very cold blooded and calculated point of view, I think 1 way Putin and Russia could look at this is, it says, look, we were temporarily weak after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And the rest, and the West basically took advantage of that, like, bravo, you pulled it off, you basically crept democracy and capitalism, all these things right up to our border. And now we have regained some of our strength.

Speaker 2

40:35

We've consolidated political control, we've kowt our people, we have a stronger economy, and we somehow got Germany and other European nations to give up energy independence and actually just, we've got an enormous amount of leverage over you and now we wanna roll back some of your success because we're powerful enough to demand it. And you've been taking advantage of the situation, which is maybe a fair, impartial analysis. And in the West, but more specifically Ukraine said, but that's a price too high, which I totally respect. I would, maybe I'd like to think I'd make that same decision, but that is, that's the answer.

Speaker 2

41:17

If the answer is why would they fight if it's so costly, why not find a deal? It's because they weren't willing to give Russia the thing that their power said they quote unquote deserve. Just like Americans said to the Britain, yeah, of course we ought to accept semi-sovereignty, but we are just, we refuse. And we'd rather endure a bloody fight that we might lose than take this.