Thomas Schelling’s “The Strategy of Conflict” and “Arms and Influence”

A ‘Friends’ rule of politics

A great deal of politics comes from people trying to predict what others are going to do, and strategizing accordingly. This is the fundamental insight of game theory, which I’ve used as a lens for understanding Middle East instability and democratic backsliding this year.

But it’s a basic enough element of human behavior that it crops up in other contexts, too, including the classic “Friends” episode “The One Where Everybody Finds Out,” in which the main characters play a series of escalating pranks on each other by exploiting secret information to manipulate each others’ choices. (“They don’t know that we know they know we know.”)

Thomas Schelling’s work, including “The Strategy of Conflict” and “Arms and Influence,” lays out basic principles of game theory in international relations. But for a more accessible introduction to it, you might try “Jane Austen, Game Theorist,” by Michael Chwe, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He uses Ms. Austen’s novels to explain the dynamics of strategy and manipulation, a lighthearted approach that makes a serious point about how people and nations behave.