Strategic Coercion Within Alliances: The Greenland Sovereignty Game as an AI Stress Test
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Physics > Physics and Society
arXiv:2605.22841 (physics)
[Submitted on 11 May 2026]
Title:Strategic Coercion Within Alliances: The Greenland Sovereignty Game as an AI Stress Test
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Abstract:What happens when the strongest alliance member pressures a weaker member over territory and strategic control? We examine the Greenland sovereignty crisis as a stress test for LLM geopolitics, centered on the 2019-2026 U.S. push to acquire Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark. The crisis nests two collective-action problems: Arctic strategic control and whether NATO can enforce alliance norms against the dominant member. We develop three games (asymmetric coercion; a NATO assurance game with a critical-mass tipping point; a triadic extensive-form game with social preferences) and test them with a multi-agent simulation in which eight frontier LLMs play six geopolitical roles (United States, Denmark, Greenland, NATO, Russia, Canada) across 3,604 completed games and 108,120 action observations. Using inverse game theory, we recover each model's structural utility parameters (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, eta) for material self-interest, reciprocity, inequality aversion, norm respect, and commitment consistency. Three findings stand out. First, all eight models become more escalatory under coercion framing (four-action escalation rises from 10.7% to 28.6%). Second, Chinese-origin models show systematically different power-weight profiles from Western-origin models when playing the U.S. role. Third, peaceful US acquisition emerges in only 1.9% of clean games and only 3 of 8 frontier models ever achieve it, most prominently DeepSeek V3.2, which executes a stable five-round playbook through the metropole. Prompts emphasizing jus cogens and self-determination reduce escalation back near baseline in the English-only confirmatory sample; multilingual contrasts are reported as exploratory sensitivity checks. We position this as a structural benchmark for LLM geopolitical behavior, complementing action-frequency benchmarks.
| Comments: | 78 pages, 17 figures, 18 tables. Multi-agent LLM simulation recovering structural utility parameters across 8 frontier models in the Greenland sovereignty crisis. v3: typo pass, fixes phantom action names (REQUEST_MULTILATERAL, INDEPENDENT) and a Blunden date mismatch. v2 added Section V safety findings (legitimacy-laundered escalation, signal decoupling) and Appendix H |
| Subjects: | Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); General Economics (econ.GN) |
| MSC classes: | 91A35, 91A40, 68T50 |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7; I.2.11 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.22841 [physics.soc-ph] |
| (or arXiv:2605.22841v1 [physics.soc-ph] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.22841
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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View a PDF of the paper titled Strategic Coercion Within Alliances: The Greenland Sovereignty Game as an AI Stress Test, by Rommin Adl and 1 other authors
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