A Russian occupation of Crimea raises the specter of the Cold War, in which the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union devolved into regional disputes around the world.

While military and political frictions made the biggest headlines, the Cold War couldn’t be well understood without using economic theory — specifically, game theory, which analyzes the strategic logic of threats, credibility and conflict.

It’s worth viewing the crisis in Ukraine through the prism of game theory, too, as applied on several fronts:

NUCLEAR DETERRENCE From the standpoint of game theory as developed by Thomas C. Schelling, a 2005 Nobel laureate in economic science, the conflict can be seen as a case study in nuclear deterrence. That’s because, after the Soviet Union split into many pieces in the 1990s, a newly independent Ukraine gave up its portion of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal. In part, it did so in exchange for a memorandum supporting its territorial integrity, signed by both Russia and the United States.

Eliminating its nuclear weapons may have seemed a good deal for Ukraine at the time, and it can be argued that the world became a safer place. Yet if Ukraine were a nuclear power today, it would surely have a far greater ability to deter Russian military action.