Someone named “Spengler” writes an interesting article entitled: Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess.
Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.
What an interesting supposition. The author is saying that the Bush Administration is playing “fake it till you make it” – a dangerous game because a lot of those who play make believe never actually achieve the reality of their fantasy. Believing you are free and actually being free are two different things.
We all play political games in life. Nation-states play these games with rulebooks, guns and lives in ascending order.
Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by “war games” is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers’ pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.
America’s idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a “moderate Muslim” government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.
Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent’s king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman’s crusader in The Seventh Seal.
So one side is fighting for “freedom” using Monopoly rules. The other side is fighting for “survival” using chess rules. As usual, the pawns are dying while the politicians move the pieces around on the boards. All we can count on is continued upheaval in former vassal states of the USSR. As usual, America will seed these conflicts by playing the world’s SuperNanny™ at our taxpayers’ expense.