One aspect of “night watchman as transition” is that the negotiated exit from the night watchman state might depend a lot on what’s the BATNA that happens in the absence of such an exit. Today, geopolitics is shaped by the fact that war is available as a last resort. If war is banned, then it matters a lot what this new “last resort” is.
This seems strongly related to the section on “Preventing premature claims to space”. It seems probably reasonable to specify the BATNA on Earth as whatever you’d get with present property rights + no war. But it seems hard to do something similar for unclaimed resources, like in space.
And for any particular new proposed BATNA, major powers might object to that version of the night watchman if they think it leaves them worse-off than the default trajectory. If the gains from trade are large enough, it might well be possible to find a compromise that people would agree to. But there’s a risk that it it requires you to decide on a bunch of thorny questions up-front, rather than being able to kick the can down the road.
Thanks for the post!
One aspect of “night watchman as transition” is that the negotiated exit from the night watchman state might depend a lot on what’s the BATNA that happens in the absence of such an exit. Today, geopolitics is shaped by the fact that war is available as a last resort. If war is banned, then it matters a lot what this new “last resort” is.
This seems strongly related to the section on “Preventing premature claims to space”. It seems probably reasonable to specify the BATNA on Earth as whatever you’d get with present property rights + no war. But it seems hard to do something similar for unclaimed resources, like in space.
And for any particular new proposed BATNA, major powers might object to that version of the night watchman if they think it leaves them worse-off than the default trajectory. If the gains from trade are large enough, it might well be possible to find a compromise that people would agree to. But there’s a risk that it it requires you to decide on a bunch of thorny questions up-front, rather than being able to kick the can down the road.