Game Theory #22: Twilight of the Nation-State
4/28/202656 min
In this Tuesday, April 28, 2026 lecture to his Beijing high school students, Professor Jiang explains that 21st century warfare is about turning the civilian population against the state.Notes and References:1. "The Social Contract" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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First 90 secondsJiang Xueqin· Host0:00
There is a ceasefire now between Iran and United States, but most analysts expect that this war will resume in a week, two weeks, a month, but it will res- it will resume because it is impossible for the United States and Iran to come to a mutually beneficial and satisfying, um, arrangement. So today, I want to look at how this war will evolve. And my argument to you today is that this US-Iran war, it's really the first war of the 21st century. Um, and so I want to explain to you how warfare has evolved these past few hundred years. So the simplest way to fight a war is you would destroy a state's capacity to fight by killing as many soldiers as possible, right? You would arrange to fight the enemy on a battlefield. Whoever wins this, uh, battle would win the war. And that was how traditionally wars, wars were fought for hundreds and hundreds of years. But in the 20th century, something happened, which is that the state, the nation state, developed the capacity to have a lot of people, millions of people. And so the state could always replenish its forces on the battlefield. And so now what you had to do was you had to destroy the state's capacity to produce, to manufacture. Okay? And this is really...