All About Game of Thrones

This post will be slightly different than previous ones, because I'm going to connect pop culture to real-world events, not just political theories and concepts.  The post's title gives away that it'll be focusing on Game of Thrones, because season 7 of GoT wrapped up recently and I need a "fix".  So let's dive in. 

I'll start by making the case that Game of Thrones is, in one major way, an allegory for World War I, because I'm a huge WWI buff.  Let's start with how the series begins.  At the start of the show, Westeros has been at peace for several years, but there are tensions simmering beneath the surface.  The Starks and the Lannisters don't get along, House Martell is nursing a grudge against Tywin Lannister, the exiled Targaryan children want to reclaim their throne, and the Night King is raising an undead army in the north.  The glue holding that peace together has started to dissolve.  This state of affairs is somewhat analogous to Europe in 1913; although it's not a perfect match, there are a few parallels.  Despite regional conflicts like the back-to-back Balkan Wars and minor crises like the Fashoda Incident, Europe was enjoying a few decades of relative peace.  However, just like in Westeros, tensions were brewing beneath the surface.  Britain and Russia worried about an up-and-coming Germany, France smarted over its loss in the Franco-Prussian War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was clumsily mismanaging the Balkans, and so on. And both the European great powers and major houses of Westeros were ensnared in a web of entangling alliances that increased the likelihood of a continent-wide conflict.  I suppose that makes either Ned Stark or Robert Baratheon the Archduke's fictional counterpart.

The next couple of parallels are just coincidental similarities I noticed between the show and mostly 20th century events:

• The loot train battle from S7E4 is kind of like the early battles of World War I (the first few months, before the front lines stabilized and trench warfare began.) Dany's dragon is like the machine gun, a new and effective weapon that creates massive carnage, and the Lannister soldiers are the unlucky troops on the receiving end.  
• The Night King's army vs, well, pretty much everyone else is maybe symbolic of the Cold War.  I'll admit, I'm probably stretching this connection to the absolute limit, but consider this: the dragons represent nuclear weapons and everybody on the side of the living represents NATO.  Also, the White Walkers and especially the wights somewhat resemble a communist society, or at least how other works of fiction have portrayed one; I might be reaching here, but think about the "bugs" in Starship Troopers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Animal Farm.  

Finally, Game of Thrones can probably be used to explain the concept of realism (which I briefly discussed in my Prisoner's Dilemma post).  Realism proposes that nation-states are the primary actors, exist in an anarchic system, have interests but not allies, and constantly struggle for power.  Sounds a lot like the interactions between the various houses of Westeros, doesn't it? Those same interactions also illustrate two international relations explanations for how alliances develop, known as "bandwagoning" and "balancing." The two terms are pretty easy to figure out, so I won't insult your intelligence by explaining them; but to understand their relevance to Game of Thrones, recall how one of the lesser houses positions itself in relation to a more powerful house, like the Starks or the Lannisters.

That's all for now.  I may revisit and expand on Game of Thrones as an example of realism in the future, because I barely scratched the surface and I also stumbled across some excellent reference material. And if you want to learn a little about how GoT references pre-20th century events, here is a fun article.

The Prisoner's Dilemma: World War I, The Cuban Missile Crisis, the X-Men, and arms races

Two college students decide to go on a road trip and do a little partying on the weekend before one of their final exams on Monday.  They get a little carried away and end up missing the exam.  When they go to the instructor, they admit they were out of town but say a flat tire made them late.  The instructor graciously allows them to take a make-up exam the following day.  The instructor seats them in separate rooms and hands them the test, which consists of only one question: "Which tire?"

That's an old joke/urban myth, but it's a good lead in to this entry's subject: the Prisoner's Dilemma.  The PD is a situation in which a person must make a decision based on an assumption of another person's actions.  Here's how it works (most people already understand how the PD works, but I'm recapping it anyway).  The police arrest two suspects and place them in separate rooms, and each suspect must choose whether to confess or to stay silent.  The catch is that each suspect's choice affects the other.  If both suspects keep their mouths shut, they each get one year in jail.  If they both confess, they each get a two-year sentence.  But if Suspect B keeps quiet and Suspect A confesses (ratting out B), A goes free while B serves three years; and vice versa if B confesses and A doesn't.  Here's a quick and easy explanation in picture form:

The PD's effectiveness lies in how much the two suspects trust each other, because it's set up to incentivize betrayal.  It's a useful tool for understanding and analyzing decision-making in a broad range of topics, including arms races, economic and environmental treaties, preemptive war, and nuclear weapons tactics, among other things.  I'll lay out a theoretical scenario first, then mention a few real world examples. 

Pretend there are two countries that don't really like each other.  One country gets intelligence that the other country is buying up millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art weaponry - tanks, fighter jets, artillery, and so on, and that it's growing its army's size by 100,000 people.  Assuming the intelligence is true, Country A just got much more powerful.  Now Country B has a choice: believe the intelligence and start its own military buildup, or not believe it and do nothing.  If the intelligence is wrong and Country B rejects it, then nothing changes.  If the intel is correct and Country B rejects it, Country A gets a strong military advantage.  If the intel is true and Country B believes it, both nations have a greater destructive capacity but they're evenly matched again.  If Country B believes the intelligence even though it's wrong, then it has the military advantage now.  Now think through the scenario again, only imagine the intelligence says Country A is about to invade. John Mearsheimer summed it up well when he said "Uncertainty about the intentions of other states is unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other do not have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities." (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics)

This scenario is called the security dilemma, and it has been the subject of a fair amount of scholarly work.  There's a school of thought within the international relations field called realism which is based on the premise that states must not trust their neighbors because international politics is anarchic (in a way, a scaled-up version of Hobbes' state of nature), a nation's survival is the ultimate goal, and other nations' motives cannot be known or trusted.  If you're interested in learning more about realism, I recommend reading some of Mearsheimer's stuff, along with works by Hans Morthenthau and George Kennan; and if you want to go way back, try some Thucydides, Machiavelli, and of course, Thomas Hobbes.

Now for a few real world examples:

• World War I: By the time the Great War broke out, warfare had changed dramatically from the days of foot soldiers carrying spears and shields.  Industrialization, mass production, technological advancements in weaponry, and railroads had made warfighting much more complex.  The speed with which a nation could mobilize its military and the firepower it could bring to bear meant that the first nation to be ready had a substantial advantage - maybe one that could decide the war's outcome.  Although both nations mobilizing rapidly made the war much bloodier, standing down was not an option because hesitation made defeat likely.  
• The 2003 invasion of Iraq: the United States had suffered a horrible terrorist attack about eighteen months before the invasion, and was obsessed with eliminating threats before those threats could attack the country.  The US government accused Iraq's ruler, Saddam Hussein, of possessing massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and the (since discredited) fear of being on the receiving end of a chem/bio weapon attack prompted the US to launch a preemptive invasion.  As the Bush Administration's National Security Advisor remarked, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

So where does the Prisoner's Dilemma show up in pop culture? (AKA, Where is the fun part?) It actually serves as a reliable plot device for creating a story's central conflict.  Here are two good examples:

• Crimson Tide.  If you don't remember what this 1995 movie is about, here's a brief recap.  A nuclear-armed submarine is deployed and given a mission to preemptively launch its nukes at a Russian nuclear missile installation, if Chechen rebels who seized control of the installation appear to preparing to launch.  The sub loses communication between its higher command, and must decide whether to launch or to stand down.  The central conflict is between the sub's CO, who wants to launch, and the XO, who dissents.
• Thirteen Days.  This movie is based on the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the point of view of the participants as the events were actually happening.  Hindsight is 20/20, but remember, the people making decisions at the time didn't have all the information.

The Prisoner's Dilemma also shows up in The Dark Knight (the Joker places bombs on two ferries and gives each ship's passengers a detonator to the bombs on the other ferry) and Thor (a trio of Frost Giants invade Asgard, and Thor argues with Odin about whether the trio is a rogue faction or a precursor to an invasion, and whether Asgard should strike back or let it slide).  It also forms a core element of my second-favorite Marvel movie series (The Avengers is #1), the X-Men, although it's an imperfect fit: go back up to that graphic I posted and imagine Suspect A is humanity and Suspect B is mutantkind.  The top left square represents a war between equally matched sides, the top right represents mutant supremacy, the bottom right is an uneasy coexistence, and the bottom left is the bleak future portrayed in Days of Future Past.  You could go a step further and say that the X-Men universe's two chief ideological adversaries (Professor X and Magneto) represent the PD's two courses of action: cooperation or betrayal. 

This has been a long entry, so I'll bring it to a close by linking to a clip from LA Confidential, to show what happens when someone exploits the Prisoner's Dilemma to produce a lose/lose outcome.  Watch how Guy Pearce's character manipulates two of the suspects to make them sell each other out.  You only have to watch the first minute of this clip.

So that's the Prisoner's Dilemma.  Pretty cool stuff, huh?