Ukraine Russia game theory

I was watching this video and they showed us this graph from game theory

The answer the video said is that the US should do appeasement because of some multiplication, which isn’t how game theory works, so we will ignore that part of the video.

You go down the tree. The highest score for the United States is 0 in the entire tree. They have two negative scores.

We can ignore the first part of the tree because Russia is already acting with aggression, which brings us to our current game theory tree

The United States can either appease Russia. Ukrainian independence is lost, the West will not defend allies before they join NATO, but here’s the problem, if the United States and the rest of NATO threatens military action against Russia for their threats toward Ukraine, then we are at a point where Russia has a decision to make, The rest of the tree is no longer relevant if NATO threatens military action.

Now Russia’s action is obvious, Russia will back down, they will not fight a war they will certainly lose. NATO has a far more advanced military, with far more troops, and is far richer than Russia. Russia backs down because status quo is preferable to them than war according to the scores in this video.

Once you realize that Russia will back down once America threatens a military response, we know that Russia will always go for the status quote over war (assuming scores are correct), meaning the USA has a score of -1 for appeasement, and 0 for threatening to go to war. 0 > -1 so NATO Should threaten to defend Ukraine, knowing Russia won’t engage in a direct conflict and they will back down.

That’s how game theory works.

The dominant strategy for NATO at this point in time, according to the scores presented in the video, is to threaten military action against Russia, knowing that Russia backs down.

Welcome to Game Theory.