How the rules of foreign affairs have changed
This was originally written as part of an ill-fated application for a summer internship at the economist. While it probably isn’t getting me into any magazines, I’m still pretty happy with it. The contest had a word-count of 600, but I’m currently kicking around ways to expand on my thoughts!
For most of human history2, foreign affairs have been roughly treated as a zero-sum game. While philosophers and citizens alike have long had an intuition that we should strive for better, zero-sum thinking persisted because it was effective. If given a military advantage, a wise king could invade a weaker state, enslave or kill nearly all the people, wipe out their entire culture and expect the wealth of his nation to grow, all the while preemptively saving his people from a similar gruesome fate3. For his people to win, some other people had to lose. Peace and prosperity could be purchased with blood. For the world’s most powerful empires, this mindset continued to make sense well into the 20th century. Imperialists conquered half the world, decimating native cultures wherever they went and grew richer for it.
By dramatically accelerating the pace of social change, the emergence of liberal, democratic values would change things forever. Following the American and French Revolutions, conquered people everywhere believed that they were entitled to self-government. Exploiting a conquered people was now a good way to stoke the fires of rebellion, and a mistreated enemy today could pose a serious threat tomorrow. The world truly should have learned this from the disastrous treatment of post-World War I Germany that helped to set the stage for Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II4. Nevertheless, with “soft” military and economic power, the world’s post-war leaders carved up the world map to suit their interests over their enemies with zero-sum thinking that has continued to cloud international relations into the Cold War and beyond.
Radio, television and now the internet have again altered everything5. Suddenly a sway in the popular opinion of the people can radically change a political regime in a matter of days, and, as we learned in Egypt in 2012, it is not always for the better. As a result, the zero-sum approach to the Cold War did not succeed in bringing about lasting peace or security, and it continues to fail at doing so today. Yes, at the cost of countless lives, the USSR collapsed and communism fell out of favor worldwide. But did anyone really win? The forces armed to fight communism in Afghanistan became Al-Qaeda, and now make up the backbone of ISIS. Even today, Russia is a dangerous, nuclear autocracy and China is a human rights disaster that the west stands on the brink of a trade war with. In 2018 there are still 49 dictatorships in the world, many of them put in place by the west to stop communism. This isn’t to say that our stand against totalitarianism, the war on terrorism, or our demands for fair trade terms are wrong, or that the use of violent force and harsh sanctions isn’t necessary at times. It is clear though that in today’s interconnected world foreign affairs is no longer a simple game. Despite paying with 58,220 American lives, the problem of communism could not be solved by toppling the Vietnamese government, in the same way that terrorism did not stop with the eradication of Taliban leadership, nor will the trade imbalance with China be solved by escalating tariffs6. For better or worse we are all in this together now, and a defeated people exploited today will become tomorrow’s criminals and despots. Every child who watches his parents get killed in a drone strike could be the next Osama Bin Laden. The world is no longer black and white, and if we are going to succeed in this new game, we need to acknowledge that the rules have changed1.
Footnotes: 1. Word Count: 599. If I were to expand on this topic I would do so in the following ways 2. This statement refers to human history pre-agriculture. Hunter gather societies would have to be analyzed separately. There is some reason to expect that they might not have behaved as if the world was a zero-sum game. 3. There are countless historical examples. An example of a particularly violent and successful empire is the ancient Assyrians. 4. This is not the only reason for the rise of the NAZIs or World War II. 5. This process was quite gradual and complicated in itself. 6. A deeper discussion of the game theory implications of these issues could go here.