85949 - Transcription: Podcast With US #154: Proxy war, War and Wargame

N. Lygeros

Now it’s clear for everybody that in the Middle East we have the application of Game Theory. So we have a game at a local level with tactical principles but we have also a game at the strategic level and even another one at the grand strategy level. So the idea to avoid errors and misinterpretation or even misunderstanding of the situation is to consider those three levels in a different way and to understand that there is a relation. The level of the grand strategy is related in fact to the opposition between the US and China. The level of the strategic situation is related to the local level with the neighborhood of Israel and the opposition between Arabic states and Israel. The local level is related only to, we could say, a community level to the level of the Hamas as a proxy war. So we have a proxy war, war and wargame. The situation is rather complex to be understood at the local level without the other levels. We have to consider that the grand strategy allows to understand the strategy which allows to understand the tactics. If we try to understand the tactics by itself, it’s already an error. In this proxy war, war and wargame the dominant strategy is made by the wargame. The position is to understand that this local problem is in fact in and  on a strategic highway which is very important and we have to understand this to avoid small errors at the beginning and big misunderstanding at the and. We have to consider the Ukrainian problem, we have to consider the Israel problem as a local situation of a big position and a big picture. And we have to keep all these in mind to understand that the grand strategy is to avoid to waste too much time on local problems and to use them for the understanding of the global one. If we can do this, everything is clear. If not, everything is dark.