Claims

The speaker prefers quiet, slow chess positions with minimal piece interaction for 10-20 moves (like those arising from the Queen's Gambit opening) where they can carefully arrange pieces before combat, and deliberately engineers the game from the opening to steer toward positions of their preference.

The prisoner's dilemma game shows that under conditions of mutual uncertainty and competitive incentives, both the U.S. and Russia rationally choose escalation even though mutual de-escalation (cooperation in the top-left cell) would leave both better off, trapping them in the bottom-right cell of mutual loss—the core of the tragedy of great power politics.

Game theory research shows that when parties playing the prisoner's dilemma communicate with each other before playing, they cooperate approximately 90 percent of the time even without binding agreements, demonstrating that dialogue fundamentally changes the game structure and enables cooperation.

Uncertainty and Bluffing Are Correct Calculations

The first cause of war is not a 'miscalculation' but a correct calculation under imperfect information: when you genuinely don't know your opponent's strength and they have an incentive to bluff that they're strong to get a better deal, your optimal strategy may sometimes be to attack to find out—like calling or bluffing in poker—and even without bluffing, if both sides start with sufficiently different priors about relative strength, that inherent uncertainty alone is a risk factor for war.

Commitment Problems Drive Preventive War

The commitment problem—best understood through preventive war—occurs when an opponent will be much stronger in the future and you could head that off now by attacking; even though the rising power could promise a good deal later or give up something now, when they cannot credibly commit to honor that promise (because there's no enforcement architecture), the bargain breaks down and war becomes attractive, as seen in WWI (Russia's rise vis-a-vis Germany), the Iraq invasion (Saddam's potential WMD), and Russia's fear of a Western-armed Ukraine.