The Laws of
Game Theory

The Law of Strangulation

Why do sieges and sanctions target populations rather than armies? When you cannot destroy the army and cannot destroy the population, you make the population the weapon that destroys its own government.

The mechanism

The theory requires a transmission mechanism: hardship reaches the population, the population pressures the government, the government concedes. Each link has to hold.

The first link usually holds. The second and third rarely do, and for a structural reason: the mechanism requires a population able to impose costs on its own rulers. Where such a mechanism exists, the state was not the kind that gets targeted this way. Where it does not, the pressure lands and stops.

Meanwhile the measure produces effects that run the other way. Scarcity increases the power of whoever allocates, which is the government. Anyone who can move goods across a closed border earns a margin that did not exist before, which enriches precisely the connected elite the measure was meant to punish. And the population becomes more dependent on the state, not less.

Every participant with a choice behaves sensibly. The joint outcome is the opposite of the announced one, and it is stable.

A worked example

List the players before assuming the mechanism.

The imposing government is rewarded at announcement, on a domestic clock. The measure is the deliverable; whether it works in three years is somebody else's problem.

The target government is rewarded for survival, and scarcity is useful to it. The connected elite is rewarded for proximity to allocation, and its relative position improves.

Third parties are rewarded for buying at a discount — a restricted commodity does not stop being wanted, it stops being competitively priced.

And the population, which absorbs the entire cost, is not a player at all. It cannot make a choice that changes the outcome. It is the terrain.

Run that forward and the resting point is legible: the government consolidates, the elite enriches, the population is impoverished, and the measure outlives the government that imposed it.

What would prove this wrong

A strangulation campaign that produces the announced political change through the announced mechanism, in a target where the population had no institutional means of removing its government.

Where it comes from

Book Two, chapter Game Theory #22: The Law of Strangulation.

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Last reviewed 31 July 2026