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gwern comments on Morality and International Humanitarian Law - Less Wrong
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While I'm commenting here...
Don't the Mongol tactics fit brilliantly into game theory?
Razing and killing utterly the first resisting city is a bad outcome for the Mongol conquerors, but ''pour encourager les autres'', it leads to subsequent substantial gains as the next city on the list decides to 'defect' and surrender immediately rather than 'cooperate' and get burned, even if the cities had collectively resisted to the last man the Mongols might've been stopped before they got too far.1
It maps pretty well onto the Prisoner's Dilemma, I think - the Mongol's announced commitments put each city into a situation where its optimal outcome (surrendering peacefully) leads to a global suboptimum (China under Mongol rule).
Not really, you can write a just-so game theoretic story for everything, that doesn't mean it's true.
There were too many instances of countries not only resisting Mongols against really bad odds, but also of more ridiculous actions like killing Mongol envoys for no apparent reason, even when Mongols weren't trying to invade. I've never seen anyone using game theory to even make testable retrodictions for historical actions with any success.