Conversations with my wife: the Hobbsian Trap

Sunday night I had the rare opportunity for a conversation with my wife about something other than diapers and baby triceratopses (we have a 2-year-old). This was the result:

On the subject of simon-roy and sandralanz‘s new post-singularity project:

How do we stop radicalization?

We talked about the Hobbsian Trap:

When two adversaries are not equally powerful, the weaker one’s only hope is to attack first and hope the element of surprise will win the day.

Knowing this, the stronger one will attack first, to avoid being surprised.

Knowing that, the weaker one will attack first, and so on. It’s very hard to avoid a situation of all-out war, in which the weaker side is utterly obliterated by the stronger with much loss of life on both sides.

The only solution (that we could think of) is for the stronger power to strengthen the weaker one until both are equal, and the incentive to fight is gone. This is the purpose of the European Union and the MacArthur administration of post-WWII Japan. Where else is equalization succeeding? Where is it failing?