Chess moves to transform world politics

Political analysts often use chess as a metaphor to describe world affairs. States and peoples move around the board struggling to make incremental gains. Every now and then, a grandmaster arrives and transforms the game with a new and unexpected gambit — something like Mr Richard Nixon and Mr Henry Kissinger’s “opening to China” in 1972.

At the moment, international politics looks badly in need of some brilliant, new thinking. Many of the big powers are in a diplomatic mess. America is back at war in the Middle East. Russia is isolated. China has antagonised almost all its neighbours. Britain is drifting to the margins of Europe. The geopolitical chessboard seems to cry out for bold, new moves. What might they be?

THE NEW YALTA DEFENCE

Opinions differ as to whether Mr Vladimir Putin is a political grandmaster or a fool who is on the verge of being checkmated.

The Russian President’s admirers saw his annexation of Crimea as a bold gambit that caught the West off guard. (At the time, Mr Putin’s admirers in the West sometimes said: “He’s playing chess and we’re playing checkers.”) But with the Russian economy reeling, it looks increasingly like Mr Putin’s move was too impetuous. In an effort to recover ground, the Russians are now pursuing a game plan that could be called the new Yalta defence.

This harks back to the period when leaders such as Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill really did treat the world as something like a global chessboard — and divided post-war Europe into spheres of influence. Mr Putin’s dream is to be granted a renewed Russian sphere of influence over most of the former Soviet Union. Some in the West are tempted by a new Yalta.

Others find the idea sinister and distasteful. Mr Putin did himself no favours when, discussing the idea of great-power bargains, he suggested the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had received an unfairly negative press. Bad move. Chances: 3/10

The Perfidious Albion counter

Perfected over many years, this traditional British strategy is based around the principle of divide-and-rule in Europe and the patient assembly of coalitions. In previous centuries, it has been successfully employed to defeat the Spanish, the French and the Germans.

The European chessboard currently looks perfectly set up for a classical deployment of the Perfidious Albion counter-attack. There is a growing rift between France and Germany and raging antagonism between northern and southern Europeans. However, the British seem to have lost their chess-playing abilities and are proving remarkably inept at building alliances. Unable to achieve their ends through diplomacy and cunningness, the British are now considering leaving the European Union altogether.

This is the equivalent of responding to a weak position by turning over the board and stalking out of the room — not so much a tactic as a temper tantrum. Chances: 0/10 (under current conditions)

The Mad Mullah gambit

This holds that the key to reordering the Middle East lies in a rapprochement between the United States and Iran. The two countries have a shared interest in defeating the Islamic State jihadi group and in keeping Iraq together. Iran is also the main external prop of Mr Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria — and so holds the key to ending the war there.

Some Americans also argue Saudi support for jihadism is a bigger threat to the Middle East than Iran’s regional ambitions and that the sophisticated, worldly Iranians are ultimately more attractive partners than the backward fundamentalists of Riyadh. Strike a deal on the nuclear issue with Iran, lift economic sanctions on the country and you have a new Middle East in the making.

It sounds beguiling. But there is no guarantee Tehran is prepared to end its nuclear programme or that the US Congress would lift sanctions, even if it did. America’s two key allies in the region — Israel and Saudi Arabia — would also be enraged by the gambit and would react dangerously and unpredictably. So it is probably not going to happen. Chances: 2/10

The Korean opening

China has only one formal treaty ally, North Korea, which is more of a liability than an asset. However, in an effort to break their diplomatic isolation in Asia, the Chinese are now warming up to South Korea. Chinese President Xi Jinping has visited Seoul, but not yet set foot in Pyongyang; much to the chagrin of the North Koreans.

Building on the South Korean opening has many attractions for Beijing. It exploits the growing antagonism between South Korea and Japan and so potentially drives a wedge between America’s two most important allies in East Asia.

A Beijing-Seoul rapprochement also makes economic sense. But there is a snag. South Korea relies on the US security guarantee to protect it against the North. Would it be prepared to trade that in return for the uncertain benefits of an alliance with China? Probably not — at least yet. Chances: 3/10

Attentive readers might notice the odds are against any of these great diplomatic gambits actually happening. That is partly because, in a democratic age, it is much harder to behave like a Richelieu or a Bismarck. Social media, financial markets, popular movements and terrorist outrages are all capable of upsetting the calculations of even the most brilliant geopolitical strategist. These days a would-be grandmaster, staring at the global chessboard, is liable to find that the pawns have started moving around on their own. THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist at The Financial Times.