Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash We’ve spent the last year of the pandemic locked inside with our children, managing Zoom school and frantically trying to come up with new ideas for entertaining our increasingly bored offspring. But there’s a silver lining to parenting in a pandemic: It’s an education in the core concepts of international relations, as well as a useful reminder that whether you’re a toddler, tween, teen, grown-up, or fully fledged state, we’re all operating in a condition of anarchy. We proudly present a mom’s primer on deterrence, coercion, credibility, and reassurance.