Going back to Olympic badminton, Olympic swimming, and college football, recall the following:
Law: People will strategize according to the institutional features put in front of them.
Here’s the beautiful Lebanon Municipal Airport in New Hampshire:
Lebanon Municipal Airport is one of those tiny airports that services a sparsely populated area. The federal government subsidies these airports so they stay afloat…but only if they have enough customers. In fact, it needs to have 10,000 passengers to qualify for a $1 million grant. Administrators want that grant but are about a thousand short for the year.
Whoever set up the grant system surely did not intend for this to happen. A customer should only count as a customer if he is willing to pay for the good at a price that the business can sustain. But the 10,000 passenger threshold was some arbitrary break point that “separates” worthless airports from airports worth subsidizing. This system is obviously prone to abuse. Credit the Lebanon Municipal Airport administrators for figuring it out.
How do you fix the system? Simple: create a formula to determine the maximum federal grant money as a function of number of passengers per year. An airport that flies 10,000 per year should not be worth $1,000,000 more than an airport that flies 9,999 per year. Offering $100 in subsidies per passenger, for example, would eliminate Lebanon Municipal Airport’s perverse incentives.
Earlier this month, I wrote about Iranian nuclear intransigence. In this post, I want to generalize the argument: war exhaustion sabotages long-term arms treaties.
This is part of my dissertation plan, so some background is in order. My main theoretical chapter shows that if declining states can’t threaten preventive war to stop rising states from proliferating, they can buy them off instead. The idea is that weapons are costly to develop. Rising states don’t have any reason to proliferate if they are already receiving most of the concessions they wish to obtain. Meanwhile, the declining state is happy to offer those concessions to deter the rising state from proliferating.
Let’s boil it down to the simplest version of the game possible. The United States has two options: bribe or not bribe. Iran sees the US’s move and decides whether to build a nuclear bomb. American preferences (from top to bottom) are as follows: not bribe/not build, bribe/not build, not bribe/build, bribe/build. Iranian preferences are as follows: bribe/not build, bribe/build, not bribe/build, not bribe/not build.
(I derive these utilities from a more general bargaining setup, so I suggest you look at the paper if you think these seem a little off. I personally wouldn’t blame you, since it seems strange that Iran prefers accepting bribes to taking bribes and proliferating anyway.)
Given that, we have the following game:
By backward induction, Iran builds if the US does not bribe but does not build if the US bribes. In turn, the US bribes to avoid having Iran build.
Great! Iran should not proliferate. But…yeah…that’s not happening at the moment. Why?
One problem is the reason why Iran prefers not building if the United States is bribing. The idea here is that bribes are permanent. By continuing to receive these bribes for the rest of time, Iran sees no need to proliferate since it is already raking in the concessions and nuclear weapons will only waste money.
But what if the United States had the power to renege on the concessions? In the future, the US will no longer be suffering from war exhaustion from Afghanistan and Iraq and will force Iran not to proliferate by threat of preventive war. At that point, the US can renege on the bribe without any sort of repercussions.
Again, boiling the argument down to the simplest game possible, we have this:
Backward induction gives us that the US will renege (why give when you don’t have to?). So Iran builds regardless of whether the US offers a bribe (it’s a ruse!). Proliferation results today because the United States can treat Iran as essentially nuclear incapable in the future. Iran has a window of opportunity and must take it while it can.
This is neat because a commitment problem sabotages negotiations. Recovering from war exhaustion makes the United States stronger in the sense that it will be more willing to fight as time progresses. Yet, this additional strength causes bargaining to fail, since Iran fears that the United States will cut off concessions at some point down the line. More power isn’t always better.
In addition to discussing Iran, the chapter also talks about the Soviet nuclear program circa 1948, which is fascinating. We often take Moscow’s decision to proliferate as a given. Of course the Soviet Union wanted nuclear weapons–there was a cold war going on! But this doesn’t explain why the United States didn’t just buy off the Soviet Union and avoid the mess of the Cold War. Certainly both sides would have been better off without the nuclear arms race.
Again, war exhaustion sabotaged the bargaining process. The United States was not about to invade Russia immediately after World War II ended. Thus, the Soviets had a window of opportunity to proliferate unimpeded and chose to jump through that window. The U.S. was helpless to stop the Soviet Union–we had zero (ZERO!) spies on the ground at the end of WWII and thus had no clue where to begin even if we wanted to prevent. The same causal mechanism led to intransigence in two cases separated by about 60 years.
If this argument sounds interesting to you, I suggest reading my chapter on it. (Apologies that some of the internal links will fail, since the attachment contains only one chapter of a larger project.) I give a much richer version of the model that removes the hokeyness. Feel free to let me know what you think.
Iran is almost certainly trying to build a nuclear bomb right now. For the past four years, President Obama has been trying to get Iran to back down with a combination of rewards for nonproliferation and sanctions in the meantime. Why has Iran ignored us thus far?
A lot of people believe that you simply cannot appease rising states in this manner–they need weapons to secure concessions, so bargaining is fruitless. A few years ago, I was one such person. But in my effort to verify what I thought, I discovered I was wrong, and turned my results into an interesting paper. Settlements almost always leave both sides better off, even if the rising state can freely take the concessions and proliferate anyway.
So, again, why is Iran trying to proliferate?
I have a working paper that I think provides a reasonable explanation. (It is still preliminary, so I am not posting it here. Please email me and I will gladly send you a copy, though.) Conventional wisdom portrays Iran as the villain and us as the good guys. But if you think about the situation from their perspective, Iran’s motivation will be obvious.
The United States has always had a bad relationship with Iran since the revolution. There was a glimmer of hope on September 11, 2001 when Iran (quietly) assisted us with the invasion of Afghanistan. But that cooperation tanked when Bush declared Iran part of the “axis of evil” a few months later. This infuriated Iran, and things went cold for a couple of years.
Nevertheless, Iran again extended an olive branch in May 2003 in a remarkable effort that has amazingly escaped our collective memory. Iran put everything on the table–full diplomatic relations, dropping the nuclear program, recognition of Israel, ending support of Hezbollah, help with al-Qaeda–and asked for shockingly little in return. It is the type of deal we would jump at today, so much so that it is difficult to believe it was within our grasp just nine years ago.
How did Bush respond? He didn’t.
Yes, you read that correctly. The Bush administration completely ignored the offer.
So consider how Iran views Obama’s overtures. Iran knows the United States is weak right now–yet another war in the region would be difficult at the moment. So Iran has two choices. Option one is to proliferate now while it is still an option and force the United States to play ball in the future. Option 2 is accept Obama’s concessions now and hope the United States will continue them into the future without the threat of nukes in the background. Given the experience from 2003, which would you choose?
The unfortunate part is how inefficient the result is. Both sides would be better off if the United States could credibly commit to continued concessions into the future. But because the U.S. cannot, we are stuck with Iran attempting to go nuclear.
Of course, this does not mean proliferation will certainly be the ultimate outcome. Trade sanctions could lead to some domestic shock which changes Iranian priorities entirely. The proliferation process itself is uncertain as well; it is possible that Iran will find that proliferation will take too long and ultimately give up. But until we reach that point, don’t expect U.S.-Iranian relations to suddenly thaw.
Here is a generic criticism that has been, is, and will be levied at forecasting models like Fivethirtyeight and Votamatic:
The forecasting models fail to account for x, y, and z. But x, y, and z are fundamentally important! Therefore, we should not use the forecasting models.
Fallacious! I think we can all agree that, for various reasons, being able to predict the outcome of elections is important. We cannot just stop forecasting tomorrow. Given that, the question is a matter of what methodology we use to predict outcomes.
In that light, the above criticism fails to highlight the real question. Rather than asking “are forecasting models perfect?” we should be asking “are forecasting models better than the alternative?” In other words, we should treat what we currently have (talking heads on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC) as the null hypothesis and the forecasting models as the alternative hypothesis. And that being the case, the forecasting models beat the hell out of political punditry.
Yet, the full criticism we often hear is this:
The forecasting models fail to account for x, y, and z. But x, y, and z are fundamentally important! Therefore, we should not use the forecasting models and instead keep pretending my inane rants actually have meaning.
Of course, the political pundit’s inane rants have absolutely no meaning. The pundit is quick to criticize what he does not like but then gives himself a free pass. However, not only does his punditry fail to account for x, y, and z, it is also completely made up horse manure, often fabricated for the sake of ratings. (Or page views…coughunskewedpollscough…)
Now, we should not take forecasting models completely off the hook. They have problems, and their creators are the first to admit that. But, as with anything else in life, we need to ask ourselves whether this devil is better than the other devil. And personally, I’d rather have Nate Silver’s pitchfork pointed at me than Joe Scarborough’s.
Within a few hours (hopefully), we will know who won Ohio, and this election season will mercifully come to a close. All of the sophisticated forecasters agree: Obama is going to win Ohio and therefore the White House. (See Nate Silver and Drew Linzer.)
However, there is one unsophisticated forecaster who is convinced everyone has it wrong. His name is Unskewed Polls Guy. He is convinced that Romney is going to win. Why? Well, Unskewed Polls Guy’s methodology is that we should take all the state polls and arbitrarily add 5% or so to Romney’s total. Or something. Why? Well…uhh…the polls are skewed toward Obama. Or something. Hence, Unskewed Poll Guy unskews the polls by throwing votes Romney’s way. Or something.
As the last paragraph illustrated, I have absolutely no respect for Unskewed Polls Guy’s methodology. To say he is pulling numbers out of his…ahem…would be gentle. Hell, up until today, he had Oregon as a state Romney could potentially win. Oregon. Oregon? OREGON.
But my post title is not sarcastic: Unskewed Polls Guy is a true genius. Here’s why. First, regardless of the election results tonight, Unskewed Polls Guy is already a winner. His website gets a ton of traffic, half from crazy conservatives who believe math is a false paradigm and think he truly is unskewing polls and half from sane people (both liberal and conservative) who find his lunacy to be highly entertaining. The inaccuracy of his forecasting has brought him a substantial bounty–precisely due to how horrible his forecasting is. Brilliant!
But that’s not the real genius of Unskwewed Polls Guy’s ignorant plot. Suppose the other forecasting models do get it “wrong”–that is, the outcome of the election is far away from the mean prediction. This is well-within the realm of possibility. Silver’s model gives Romney a 9% chance to win. That is substantial, and you generally need 95% confidence to get published in social science. Put differently, social scientists would a Romney victory odd but not altogether shocking.
Of course, if this election cycle has taught us anything, it is that the media has absolutely no clue how the forecasting models work. 24/7 cable news has been embarrassing for a while now, but this has gone to a whole new level. If Romney wins, they will treat Unskewed Polls Guy as a prophetic god. He will be the hottest media commodity for the next two weeks. He will get a book deal. He will make a large sum of money. And why? Because he is a complete idiot, has no clue what he is doing or why he is doing it, and just happened to accidentally hit a miracle. If it has happened with an octopus, the frenzy will certainly happen with a human.
And that’s the real genius. If Obama wins, Unskewed Polls Guy takes home a lot of advertising revenue from the past few weeks, and we all forget about him. If Romney wins, Unskewed Polls Guy hits the jackpot. Consequently, if Unskewed Polls Guy is trolling us all, my hat is off to him. If I had thought about this a year ago, I might have been Unskewed Polls Guy.
Going forward, forecasters have awkward incentives. Fivethirtyeight has pretty much cornered the market. You would think that a forecaster should just maximize his chances of being right. But that pretty much means copying Nate Silver. So, to become famous, you really ought to make ridiculously crazy predictions, hope nature randomly makes you right, and reap the short-term rewards. Long-term, you are screwed. But who cares if you’ve already received your book advance?
As election day draws near, the chances of Mitt Romney winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college appears somewhat likely. If 2012 is anything like 2000, many Romney supporters will claim that Romney should be president because more people voted for him, just as supporters of Al Gore claimed that Gore should be president because he received more votes than George W. Bush.
With this post, I hope to prevent lunacy from proliferating around the United States. Anyone who thinks that the winner of the popular vote should be president needs to take a step back and understand that electoral strategies are a function of the rules of the game. If we change the rules of the game, we change the way the campaigns play. If you think that the popular vote is a better metric to select a president, that is perfectly fine. But you absolutely cannot use next Tuesday’s vote count to select a president based on that metric.
To use an analogy, to say the winner of the popular vote should win the presidency is the same as saying the team with the most hits should win a baseball game. The U.S. Constitution stipulates that only the electoral college matters. The candidates tailor their electoral strategies accordingly. Likewise, the rules of baseball stipulate that only the number of runs scored matters. The teams again strategize accordingly. A game of baseball to maximize hit differential looks fundamentally different than a game of baseball to maximize run differential. Sacrifice bunts would be completely off the table; bunting for a base hit would become much more frequent.
If only the popular vote mattered, the campaigns would be far different. The candidates would not pay such fervent attention to Ohio, since Ohio votes would count the same as Oregon votes, or Texas votes, or Maine votes. Campaign money would diffuse all over the country. Individual voters’ actions would change as well. A voter in California can rationally choose not to vote in next Tuesday’s election, since it is abundantly clear that Obama will win the state in a landslide, and therefore his vote is strategically irrelevant.[1] But if we changed how we count the votes, that would change that Californian’s incentives and might alter his decision to abstain.
Thus, we cannot use next Tuesday’s electoral vote count to decipher who would have received more votes in the world where we decide elections without the electoral college. Consequently, anyone who argues that Gore should have been elected in 2000 based off that vote has a defenseless argument[2] The same goes for anyone who says something about Romney next week, in case of an electoral/popular vote split.
On the other hand, to say that we should remove the electoral college from play is defensible. There is good theoretical reason to believe that simple majority votes are better able to pick the “better” of the two candidates, supposing there exists some sort of metric that makes Romney better than Obama or vice versa.[3] And personally, I am annoyed that all of the elections in my post-childhood lifetime have basically been decided by a handful of states, and the system perversely requires the candidates to spend all of their time, energy, and money in those states.
[1] See the paradox of voting:
[2] I, as a 13 year old during the 2000 election, was included in this group. My perspective has improved a great deal in the last twelve years.
A couple weeks ago, I read an interesting article about how illegal immigrants can sway Electoral College votes. As it turns out, the Constitution bases electoral votes off of population counts from the census, which in turn must count all people–citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants–living in the states. Thus, even though only citizens can vote, states with larger numbers of immigrants receive a disproportionate number of electoral votes.
This has obvious electoral consequences. In particular, California gets hammered. California currently has 55 electoral votes but would drop to 50 if the census only counted citizens. On the whole, traditionally red states tend to gain from the alternative method of counting.
Based on this, the article makes the following causal claim:
If President Obama wins reelection by three or four Electoral College votes next month, the reason may be simple: noncitizens, mostly immigrants, who don’t have the right to vote.
But are immigrants really causing Obama to win reelection? Well, yes, but in a very narrow sense of causation. Presidential campaigns, if nothing else, are extremely strategic. The candidates receive a set of rules and base their strategies off the rules. In such a strategic world, you cannot change the rules and hold strategies as being constant, since the strategies are a function of the rules.
To better understand the relationship, consider the following game. All you have to do is pick A or B. If you pick A, I give you $1. If you pick B, I kill you.
Obviously, you are going to pick A. But that does not mean you prefer A. You just prefer the outcome associated with A. If I were to flip the rules on you and say A leads to your death and B pays you $1, you will suddenly really like B and really hate A.
So now imagine we switched the rules of the election to only grant electoral votes based on citizen population counts. Suddenly, some of Obama’s electoral maps are no longer winning strategies. Will Obama naively continue to pursue those strategies? Certainly not–not anymore than you would continue to select A after I switched A from rewarding $1 to killing you. Obama would spend more time and money in new “must-win” states. Romney would likely follow suit. Obama would probably campaign on different issues. Romney would as well. From here, it is not immediately clear who would win the election, since some red states might switch to blue states due to the new policy offerings and vice versa.
In fact, it is not even clear to me whether Romney would have been nominated or if Obama would have been elected in 2008 under the different set of rules. Indeed, the only clear implication of switching the rules is that both candidates would have selected more conservative policy positions. But this is exactly what you should expect when the median (electoral) voter shifts to the right.
Overall, the original article reflects a common problem with our understanding of causation. James Fearon’s article on counterfactuals is a good reference here. When making a counterfactual argument, his guideline is that a premise A only causes B if in the absence of A we have an absence of B. In other words, when making causal arguments, we must give equal weight to the counterfactual story. What does a world without A look like? If we could still reasonably find that B persists in the absence of A, it is hard to claim that A causes B.
This process isn’t too difficult when players are nonstrategic. But throw in strategic players and you really have to do a lot of work. In fact, game theory has a whole process of calculating such changes called comparative statics. Comparative statics are known for producing brutally counterintuitive results. Below is an example with soccer penalty kicks. Strikers actually aim to their weaker side more often than their stronger side. Weird, right?
Absent learning a lot of game theory and learning how to calculate comparative statics, I suppose the moral of the story is to be very careful when making counterfactual claims and to seriously consider how the entire strategic interaction might change if you alter one of the inputs. Apologies for the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion.
Disclaimer: I either read this book because it just won the Lepgold Prize or because Goemans will be grading my comprehensive exam in a week.[1] I will let you decide which is true.
Personally, I study unitary actor explanations for war. The unitary actor assumption treats a state as though it were a single entity; there are no presidents, there are no parliaments, there are no people, and there are no revolutionaries. These are clearly strong assumptions, but they are useful and justifiable.[2]
War is quite puzzling from the unitary actor perspective. After all, war is costly to both sides because it destroys stuff. Why can’t we just implement the would-be results of war without actually fighting? In this manner, both states are better off since they get what they would get from fighting but without having to pay those costs. This is war’s inefficiency puzzle.[3]
Chiozza and Goemans start with this puzzle and then break out of the unitary actor framework by looking at leaders’ incentives, which has become a popular trend among recent scholarship. Presidents and dictators control their countries’ armies at least to some degree, but the “costs” they pay for fighting may not be the same as the costs that their citizens pay. We normally think of this as being beneficial to the leaders–citizens do the actual fighting (and dying) while the leaders sit back at home and wait for the favorable results. In contrast, Chiozza and Goemans care about what happens to the leaders after war ends, especially when things go badly. Do they retire? Do they go to prison? Into exile? Die? Presumably, the expected fate of the leader weighs heavily on his decision to fight, which in turn changes our expectation on when wars ought to break out.
Specifically, Chiozza and Goemans identify two new causal mechanisms for variation between war and peace: fighting for survival and peace through instability.[4] Let’s start with fighting for survival. Imagine I am the repressive Dictator of Virgon, and I am expecting to face domestic upheaval in the near future due to a food shortage. If the domestic uprising is successful, I expect to lose my head–I have been a brutal dictator for the last ten years. Thus, I have two choices: sit back and let the revolution happen or start a dispute with neighboring Aerilon. If I start the fight against Aerilon, I can send some of the military leaders most capable of plotting a coup against me to the front lines. If the war goes incredibly wrong and they die, I am little safer because I am short a few more coup plotters. If the war goes well, suddenly I am a military genius and everyone loves me. Or the war causes the citizens to finish their rebellion. In the first two situations, I am much better off because I am alive. In the third situation, I’m dead–but, hey, I was going to die anyway. So what the hell. I might as well fight.
This has the flavor of traditional diversionary war, so it is worth noting their emphasis on the role of truncated punishment in the theory. Imagine instead that I were the President of Canceron. We are a fledgling democracy. My power is somewhat stable but not as firm as the U.S. President’s is. I face plenty of domestic opposition, some from within the government and some from within the military. Suppose I am facing that same food shortage. Again, I can choose to attack Aerilon or not. If I don’t, it is quite likely that one of my political rivals will oust me. But we are a fledgling democracy with some rule of law, so I will go back and live a nice retirement on my ten-acre estate. But fighting is much riskier. Yes, I might be successful and save my presidency. But I could also spark further domestic upheaval from my own military. And if they launch a coup to overthrow me…well, I might just lose my head. So I decide to leave Aerilon be. This is Chiozza and Goemans’ peace through instability mechanism; I avoid wars because I prefer taking a lovely retirement with certainty to a gamble between remaining president and dying.
We can attribute the difference in outcomes due to the truncated punishment. The Dictator of Virgon has nothing to lose. His punishment (dying) can’t get any worse, so he willing to fight the war. The President of Canceron, on the other hand, is not. His possible outcomes is not truncated. Fighting can make things much worse–his outcome can switch from retirement to death. Hence he’s not fighting the war.
That, in a nutshell, is the argument. The authors spend chapters three and four empirically investigating the link between war and war outcomes to leader fate. The empirics are accessible to readers without much statistical background, so that is a huge plus. The fifth chapter then qualitatively looks at leader transition and war in Central America from 1840-1918. They find that their theory explains the outbreak of a good portion–though not all–wars during that period. Credit Chiozza and Goemans for being honest here. A single theory will never explain all wars, since wars happen for a variety of reasons. I too often read material that wants to explain everything, which is laughable. Chiozza and Goemans instead make an honest effort and do not unnecessarily oversell their theory.
Finally, I offer two practical reasons to read the book. First, it is just over 200 pages. The writing is succinct, clear of extraneous information[5], and you can easily read it in half a day.[6] It can also be had on Amazon Kindle for about $15, which is remarkably cheap for an academic book that only came out a year ago. Go check it out.
[1] You may then wonder whether I actually believe this book deserves five stars–after all, if I truly thought this book was terrible, I have incentive to misrepresent. However, rest assured that I think it is good. After all, if it were bad, I could have just written no review. But by writing a review, I face potential audience costs from readers who pick up this book because of me and then think it is terrible. Thus, the audience costs make my signal credible. Game theory at work, qed.
[2] See the following video:
[3] See the following video:
[4] Technically, they split fighting for survival into two categories, but I will gloss over it for the sake of time.
[5] Fine, there is extraneous information, but it is in the form of humorous anecdotes, so that makes it okay.
[6] Unfortunately for Goemans, my comprehensive exam will not be succinct. At all. And my dissertation? Well, let’s not go there…
Apparently “Iran threatens attack” is the top trending search on Yahoo right now. Here’s a news story of what is going on. Apparently some general in the Iranian air force (Amir Ali Hajizadeh) said that if Israel strikes Iran, Iran will retaliate by attacking American bases in the region.
Umm. Okay.
Iran will do no such thing. The American public does not have the will to engage Iran at the moment. If someone will launch a preventive strike on the Iranian nuclear program, it will be Israel, not the United States. (And, as Israeli officials are finally conceding, this is an unlikely outcome.) But do you know what would give the American public the will to fight? I don’t know, how about an attack on American bases? If Iran initiates on the United States, it undoubtedly ends badly for the Iranians. In turn, anyone who has spent two minutes learning backward induction (see video below) knows how preposterous Iran’s original threat is.
This news story reflects a curious and disturbing trend in American news media. Whenever some crazy person from another country says something inflammatory, it gets reported as though it is serious business, even if it is in no way the actual policy of the regime in charge. Then rhetoric explodes for no particular reason.
The only thing Americans should take away from this news story is that Amir Ali Hajizadeh is a complete idiot.
(Of course, we have some silly people in our country who say silly things, and I am sure that the Iranian media also reports them as though they are serious. This goes both ways.)
At the insistence of many of my friends, I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (the TV series, not the dreadful film). The show appears to take place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where humans have been divided into four tribes (fire, water, earth, and air), which can “bend” their particular element as a means of weaponization.
The world is constantly at war. The show’s narration blames this on the disappearance of the disappearance of the Avatar, the traditional peacekeeper and only person capable of wielding all four elements.
However, the lack of the Avatar fails to explain the underlying incentive for war. Today’s pre-apocalyptic world does not have an avatar, and yet most countries most of the time are not at war with most other countries. Moreover, the Avatar theory does not address war’s inefficiency puzzle, i.e. how the costs of fighting imply the existence of negotiated settlements that are mutually preferable to war. Why not reach such an agreement and end the war that has completely devastated the world economy? The Avatar might be sufficient for peace but is by no means necessary.
In contrast, I propose that the underlying cause of war is the presence of rapid, exogenous power shifts. As described in the episode The Library, the fire tribe’s ability to bend fire disappears during a solar eclipse. Likewise, the water tribe’s ability to water bend disappears during a lunar eclipse. These rare events leave their respective tribes temporarily powerless. In turn, that tribe faces a commitment problem. For example, on the eve of a solar eclipse, the fire tribe would much enjoy reaching a peaceful settlement. In fact, they would be willing to promise virtually everything to achieve a resolution, since they will certainly be destroyed if a war is fought on the solar eclipse.
But such an agreement is inherently incredible. Suppose the other tribes accepted the fire tribe’s surrender. The solar eclipse passes uneventfully. Suddenly, the fire tribe has no incentive to abide by the terms of the peace treaty. After all, their power is fully restored, and they no longer face the threat of a solar eclipse. They will therefore demand an equitable share of the world’s bargaining pie.
Now consider the incentives the other tribes face. If they fail to destroy the fire tribe during the solar eclipse, the fire tribe will demand that equitable stake. But the other tribes could destroy the fire tribe during the eclipse and steal their share. That is a tempting proposition. Indeed, the other tribes likely cannot credibly commit to not taking advantage of the fire tribe’s temporary weakness.
Finally, think one further step back, once again from the perspective of the fire tribe. If the fire tribe does not successfully destroy the other tribes before the solar eclipse, they run the risk of being destroyed on that day. From that perspective, it is perfectly understandable why the fire tribe fights.
Thus, there are commitment problems abound in the world of Avatar. The fire tribe cannot credibly commit to remaining enfeebled after the solar eclipse. The other tribes cannot credibly commit to not attack the fire nation during the eclipse. War seems perfectly rational.
Interestingly, one way out of the problem is for the fire and water tribes to agree to protect one another during their eclipses. Given that, neither side has incentive to attack during the eclipse; if that tribe did join the other tribes in an attack, then it would be left without any protection during the next eclipse. (This resembles a trual–a dual with three people.) Yet, in the series, the fire and water tribes appear to be the most bitter enemies.
William Spaniel 