Now that the dust has settled at least temporarily, a few readers have asked me for comment on the recent clash The events are difficult to understand, in part because of rampant misinformation and also because of genuine continuing uncertainty as to what happened. Nonetheless we do know two things:
1. The two sides whacked each other a fair amount, more than usual.
2. Neither sides resorted to nukes.
So in its simplest terms, we now know/suppose that the threshold for nuclear use is higher than we earlier might have estimated. Since very little was settled, the rational, game-theoretic presumption is that the two countries, in the future, will whack each other some more.
Yet there is a second-order effect. The more they whack each other with non-nuclear means, the more the weaker party (usually Pakistan, in this context) will feel tempted to lower the nuclear threshold, if only stochastically (this can be done, among other ways, by exercising imperfect control over factions in the armed forces). One way to put this point involves the Lucas critique — one instance of whacking never really establishes what the future nuclear threshold will be.
So there is more future whacking, and continuing and perhaps even growing uncertainty about where the nuclear threshold lies.
An institutionally more detailed take is possible, but perhaps this “crude” game-theoretic analysis captures some of the essentials. If you want to enrich the analysis, I would consider the variable “what we learned about the reaction functions of America and China,” although the full stories here are not yet out. The same is true for “what we learned about the possibly non-unitary nature of Pakistani governance.”
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