World War II: Triadic Closure in its Strongest Sense – How did this “game” play out?
We all know that World War II was one of the most devastating and terrible time periods in world history. Some of us have had grandparents and great-grandparents battle to their deaths; some of our relatives have lived to tell the tale. Either way, the historical details have been discussed over and over again all throughout the years of our secondary education. Having digested all of that information long ago, new knowledge of networks can be applied to analyze two dominating concepts of the war: the relationships between the main countries involved and their strategies used to work toward winning the terrible “game” of war.
Throughout the 1930’s until the official declaration of war in 1939, European countries gradually began to take sides with one another. In January of 1939, Hitler signed Germany’s “Pact of Steel” with Italy, marking them their ally. Britain and Poland signed a mutual alliance as well, just before Germany invaded Poland. After this attack, Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand together declared war on Germany. The Soviets invaded Poland in September, and gradually all turmoil broke lose. In September of 1940, the Axis Pact was signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. This pact formed an alliance between the three countries—sound familiar? Because all three countries were strongly, positively connected to each other, strong triadic closure was formed.
The Axis Powers were exploiting violence and power up against numerous countries by the middle of 1941, but the United States had still managed to stay uninvolved. However, President Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the U.S. and suspended all relations in July 1941 due to the fact that though they were officially neutral, America’s true sympathies certainly did not lay with the Axis Powers. Since the U.S. was an enormous source of natural and industrial resources for Japan, this created disastrous consequences for the Japanese and consequently made them extremely angry.
A mere four months later, Japan left Pearl Harbor in ruins after a tremendous aircraft attack on November 7, 1941; this was the beginning of the game that ended World War II. Japan had made its first move, and the U.S. was left with the choices of whether or not to retaliate. For four years, plans were developed and the payoffs of their options were weighed. Applying Game Theory, the first option was to make the best efforts to recover from the attack on Pearl Harbor and try to negotiate. The payoffs for this would most likely have been negative, as Japan was such a strong force and would probably attack again, therefore making the payoff equal to the loss of thousands of further American lives. On the other hand, the alternative move was to design a retaliation plan. The payoffs for this move would most likely have been positive due to the fact that they would be causing Japan to be severely incapable of continuing in the war, as well as the fact that many more countries were on their side rather than Japan’s. Though this move involved taking many lives, the payoffs in question appeared to be much greater for America. Therefore, the first atomic bombs were developed and in August 1945, two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within three days of each other. Another three days after the second bombing, Japan surrendered; World War II was over.
From this analysis of World War II, we can see that things like strong triadic closure and game theory appear in scenarios of all different types. They are present in a wide variation of situations, whether through a war or a social network.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/pearl_harbour_01.shtml
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/teacher/abomb.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4785786