realist” approach to conflict—a school of thought advanced by some of history’s most influential thinkers and politicians, from Niccolò Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger. They see nations as selfishly striving for their own interests, in an anarchic system where there’s no overarching authority to keep rivals from attacking one another. Peaceful deals depend on the two sides finding it in their mutual interest not to fight. This is exactly the kind of situation that noncooperative game theory—including our pie-splitting exercise—was designed to capture.
