This just in: Israel returns fire on Syrian targets from the Golan Heights

[Kuciwalker]

Please explain. If you just give in and make concessions without a fight, what's to stop your enemy from attacking you again and again until you have nothing left?

See #28. It may not always hold, but it should hold often enough. Fighting back against an inevitably victorious aggressor is very expensive deterrence, usually not worth the price.

[giblets]

See #28. It may not always hold, but it should hold often enough. Fighting back against an inevitably victorious aggressor is very expensive deterrence, usually not worth the price.

But if you give in and your aggressor learns you are a wuss they will attack you again and you will be in the same situation. Giving up the Sudetenland just because you expect to lose is stupid.

[SlowwHand]

Dinner, that's spoken like a true loser.

[Kuciwalker]

But if you give in and your aggressor learns you are a wuss they will attack you again and you will be in the same situation. Giving up the Sudetenland just because you expect to lose is stupid.

You're assuming that the resisting nation isn't able to prevent the aggressor from making some gains, but is strong enough to deter it from total conquest. That is a thin wedge that has rarely (never?) been true.

Historically, the losers of wars rarely expected the loss.

[SlowwHand]

Kuci, that doesn't mean you just lay there and pretend you enjoy it.

[giblets]

You're assuming that the resisting nation isn't able to prevent the aggressor from making some gains, but is strong enough to deter it from total conquest. That is a thin wedge that has rarely (never?) been true.

Historically, the losers of wars rarely expected the loss.

Japan probably would have been in that situation in WWII if not for nuclear weapons. The US could easily make gains, but total conquest would have been a *****.

[Kuciwalker]

You can make an argument that it may be immoral to do so, but "laying there and pretending to enjoy it" is usually a much more rewarding strategy. See also: Denmark.

edit: xpost

[Kuciwalker]

Japan probably would have been in that situation in WWII if not for nuclear weapons. The US could easily make gains, but total conquest would have been a *****.

Japan would have ultimately lost and would have been MUCH worse off for resisting.

[SlowwHand]

Which is why the atomic bomb was utilized, although no one suspected the reality of the devastation. The decision was based on Normandy.

[giblets]

Japan would have ultimately lost and would have been MUCH worse off for resisting.

It doesn't seem rational for the US to try a total conquest of Japan if they do resist. I know it was being planned.

[Kuciwalker]

It doesn't seem rational for the US to try a total conquest of Japan if they do resist. I know it was being planned.

That's your subjective value of "conquering Japan and forcing it to surrender". Americans of the time certainly placed a different subjective value on it. The problem with resisting when you know you will lose isn't just the material loss; it's that losing more or less by definition means that you didn't achieve whatever your aim was.

Yes, you can easily construct exceptions to these. No, they don't refute the general principle.

See e.g. World War I. Germany would have been way better off if they had been able to foresee their own loss and just not attacked.

[giblets]

Germany's actions in WWI have nothing to do with whether a victim of a powerful aggressor should try to resist even though they expect to be forced to make concessions anyway.

[Kuciwalker]

Of course they do.

[Aeson]

You are describing ex ante preferences based on ex ante expectations. I'm talking about ex post preferences based on observed consequences. Revealed preference arguments don't have any bearing on that distinction; they let us explore the difference between stated ex ante preferences and true ex ante preferences.

You're relying on future hind-sight to judge the preferences of people who never actually chose to do the counterfactual that was necessary to get to the end you'd be using hind-sight from. It is impossible to judge the results of a revolution that never happened. (Other than it didn't happen.) It is even difficult to judge the results of revolutions that did happen, or dictators that were allowed to persist. You will get all sorts of misinformation from participants in both cases, and the indirect and compoundign implications are rippling on into the future.

The reality is that in a revolution the choices that matter are made with a great deal of unknowns in play. They still reveal the preferences of the actors at the time, and those are the preferences that actually matter. They are really the only thing we can point to for "preferential" for many actors as well, as many of them won't make it to the end.

Why would we do that?

Actors knowing the exact consequences of the decisions being made was a given in reg's hypothetical and my response to it.

Elementary game theory disagrees that that would result in an immediate collapse. Ergo, metastability.

Dictatorships can only last as long as the illusion of centralized power remains. This is why dictatorships spend so much effort in fractionalizing the populace (and even their support structures) and trying to stamp out expression of anti-regime sentiment. If everyone could freely tell each other what they want and what they are willing to do to get it, the dictatorship cannot exist for long.

In the hypothetical the dictator can't stamp it out without killing everyone. The actors all know the end of their potential choices. This is effectively a method of communication among dissidents as they all know how everyone else is going to act and the net result. It is also forcing the dictator to kill everyone who would ever dissent to maintain power. This forces a very quick resolution, and everyone will know it. If you know the dictator is going to kill you now for future dissent, you dissent now with everyone else.

Also the chain of command would almost surely break very high up. Whoever can actually choose to be the new leader is going to do so very willingly because they will know that it will definitely work out that way. They will also see the eventuality that they will have to be a more populist leader to avoid the same fate as their predecessor.

[MikeH]

See #28. It may not always hold, but it should hold often enough. Fighting back against an inevitably victorious aggressor is very expensive deterrence, usually not worth the price.

In human conflicts historically and present day there are a lot of situations where the inevitably victorious aggressor is planning to kill you and your sons and rape/enslave your wives and daughters.

There is only so much fleeing you can do - and typically that only works these days if you can flee somewhere with a military strong enough to prevent the aggressor just attacking them too.

If that's going to happen it's in your interests to make them pay the heaviest price possible for that if only, as someone mentioned above, to make it clear that any future aggressors (of any survivors) should think very carefully before attacking. An "inevitably victorious aggressor" is always hard to predict before fighting starts. Any number of things can change during the course of a military campaign. And we have any number of examples of hugely superior forces being defeated by cleverly led weaker forces.

And there have definitely been military campaigns where the benefits for an aggressor outweigh the costs. Especially where the it's to gain control of a critical resource and especially in situations where the decision makers do not consider human life to be a high value item. Again, plenty of examples of this historically. In Britain we had a few hundred years of extremely high military spending and aggression which paid off handsomely. Many other historical Empires did too.