Relevant for a lot of geopolitical and corporate strategic situations as well. The whole Mideast situation we're in now is because we were in zugzwang and a couple leaders felt the compulsion to move. Taiwan is a similar situation: the best policy is "strategic ambiguity", which is holding for now, but is a bit of an unstable equilibrium.

More relevant to a business site, this is the situation many large corporations find themselves in. Say you're Google and you own an immensely profitable monopoly. The very best thing you can do is nothing; anything you do risks upsetting the delicate competitive equilibrium that you're winning. If you're an executive, how do you do nothing? You can't very well hire thousands of employees to do nothing and pay them to do it. But if you don't have thousands of employees, and your job is doing nothing, how do you justify the millions that they're paying you?

The strategy many executives use is to set different parts of their organization at odds with each other, so that they each create busywork that other employees must do. Everybody is fully utilized, and yet in the big picture nothing changes. Oftentimes they will create big strategic initiatives that are tangential to the golden goose, spending billions on boondoggles that don't actually do anything, because the whole point is to do nothing while seeming like you need thousands of people to do it. And the whole reason for that is because most people are very bad at sitting still, and so if you didn't pay them a whole lot to do nothing useful, the useful stuff they'd be doing would be trying to compete with and unseat you. (You can also see this in the billion dollar paydays that entrepreneurs get when they mount a credible threat of unseating the giant incumbent.)

If you would lose even if you didn't move, that is not zugzwang. Zugzwang is when, because you must move per the rules of the game, you lose. I don't really see that dynamic in foreign policy. Any country has the option of maintaining its current policy. Whether or not it's wise, the option exists.

Geopolitically, the no-action move is rarely unavailable. The motivation to do something rash like start a war out of the blue is often down to the decision of a single person. That leader may have political reasons to do it but they aren’t being forced to do it, as they would in a turn-based game.

Two teams, one digs holes, the other one fills holes. Maybe an advice by Keynes during the Great Depression.

That’s a bit cynical to view every corporate action through that lens. There’s certainly the innovator’s dilemma, and plenty of busy work, but to your Google example, plenty of tasks and developments are needed to keep the thing running.

Detect and counter black hat SEO, build or acquire a new product you can spread ads to (Maps, YouTube), create a chatbot that can eventually get ads if search is supplanted. These things support or maintain that monopoly/equilibrium you’re talking about.

>Relevant for a lot of geopolitical and corporate strategic situations as well. The whole Mideast situation we're in now is because we were in zugzwang and a couple leaders felt the compulsion to move. Taiwan is a similar situation: the best policy is "strategic ambiguity", which is holding for now, but is a bit of an unstable equilibrium.

This isn't the case at all.

Obama HAD a deal with Iran that Trump tanked in his first term. Israel did not have to respond to a terrorist attack with genocide. Trump could have said No to Netanyahu who clearly threatened to attack Iran with or without us, it turns out we could indeed put pressure on them not to attack, but TACO.

Everything that's happening in the middle east is a series of blunders by fools.