United States, China and Russia: chess and world geopolitics Analysis of the trends of the great powers on the international scene in the 20th and 21st centuries. Strategies, failures and wars.
By Mario Rapoport: In a recent television interview, Laura Jane Richardson, head of the United States Southern Command, who had recently met with Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, said that the rivalry between the United States and China should resemble a chess game. In any case, she used that metaphor to mean that the geopolitics of the world and the strategies of its main actors were interpreted by US defense and security agencies as if they had a playful aspect.
Some time ago an excellent painter friend gave me an oil painting with a boy thinking about his move on a half-empty chessboard, with the curiosity that he had a locker left over. Perhaps that is where the intuition of these lines came to me, confirmed by the American official. It occurred to me to compare the policies of the great powers on the international stage as if this were a game board to better test their strategies and their economic and political wars.
I am a simple chess fan, I only read a reference book when police novels bore me, with fewer and fewer intrigues to solve, films without scripts, or self-help best sellers. Few treat in their plot warps some of the great unknowns of a social or universal nature that humanity is going through and seek to link one to another.
In this story, it is the societies or collectivities that matter to me. For example, to replace in the history of great nations formidable commercial or political competitions, or battle or war plans as if they were the moves of a game of chess.
Did the second Cold War start?
Having a strategic vision of the world is not only seeing the enemy's troops in front of us and calculating their weak or strong flanks based on ours. So is spying on their hidden positions. Know how each contender distributes his propaganda and how they see and treat the inhabitants of the places they occupy and are seen by them. Know the type of resources they use and the economic and political bases that sustain them, the number of inhabitants, their superiority or inferiority; the geography of the place, that is, the type of flat or uneven land, the natural resources and the fruits of which they are self-sufficient and export and of which they lack; the existence of lakes, seas, hills and mountains; existing trees or forests; the towns, houses, bridges, buildings, industrial complexes, that cross the road. The strategic assets they need or have in the area, such as water, oil or minerals. The level of preparation of its population, its scientific and military knowledge and equipment. From the 19th to the 21st century, the main protagonists who face each other are different for each era and very powerful. They have given rise to two world wars and the cold war. Are we now facing a second cold war?
Before we begin our game of chess I am going to make one last reference to the table I mentioned at the beginning. I never asked the artist, because I was still very young or I was embarrassed, how was it that that board had a locker left over? In this way, it seemed to me that the game could never end. Sooner or later it was necessary to solve the enigma of the leftover locker. I had no doubt that the painter put it there not because she was unaware of the game, she was an excellent chess player, but for another reason, so that the viewer who saw the painting would consider that there is a space there that can be covered by the imagination of the players without make them prisoners of their rules. The Chinese player emerged for me in that space.
The match between the United States and China
Capablanca and Alekhine, Karpov and Fisher, Kasparov and Najdorf, Wenjun Ju, the fifth Chinese player to win the title of world champion, or her compatriot Hongyi Tan, the previous champion, alive or in her grave, began to examine the game of the match between the United States and China and they realized that it was not a simple game, that the future of the world could emerge from its resolution.
The United States imagined a different board, based on the experience of its long victorious match with the Russians, gave too much importance to ideology at the beginning and did not realize that in this case it was worth much less. He faces an even more dangerous enemy who plays largely with weapons similar to his own, and does not want to convince of his virtues by conviction or force, but rather to compete in the economic, technological and financial order.
China has not abandoned the lessons of its past. It was a great empire, to the point of self-destructing its navy that dominated the Asian seas because it believed that it was no longer needed and that it did not have a Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But her defense system was antiquated. Its extensive walls were easily breached by the Mongols. Then it was invaded and occupied by its Japanese rivals and by foreign troops from different Western countries in order to appropriate its riches.
After the two opium wars in the mid-19th century against the United Kingdom, China had to cede the port of Hong Kong to the British. Very affected by a first and bloody war with the Japanese, in 1911 the enemy king, the Chinese emperor, fell due to a revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, head of the Kuomintang party, which represented nationalist political and economic sectors opposed to the empire, establishing a republic.
The long march
But an ambitious military dictator and nationalist, Chiang Kai-shek took over the party, seizing much of the country's territory. Although anticommunist, he had the support of the small Chinese communist party founded in 1921, which joined the Kuomintang at the request of the Comintern, the communist international, which wanted the installation of a popular front led by Chiang, not by the dangerous and almost unknown Mao Tse-Tung who had "translated" Marx into Chinese.
This alliance lasted until 1927, when the board was shaken and the chips were shaken by a bloody civil war between the two former allies, with Chiang, at first well backed by Russians and Americans, the absolute winner, causing heavy casualties to his enemy. However, some time later the Japanese invaded China before the outbreak of World War II creating a new rival.
Meanwhile, what remained of the thinned-out communist troops led by Mao Tse-tung, after his defeat with Chiang, began a long march with their leader that cunningly crossed the enemy ranks and their pawns and horses (the latter snorting with tired) and settled on the other end of the board.
Numerous peasants (new malnourished peons who became staunch fighters in their squares, more solid than the imperial terracotta army) joined their ranks and the new army faced simultaneously, on two boards, the enemies from without and from within. . In one of them he contributed to the defeat and expulsion of the Japanese. In the other he got rid of Chiang Kai-shek who had to flee with the remnants of his army to the island of Taiwan, he did not even become a king on the board, he was barely fit for a bishop. The Chinese Revolution and the Soviet Union
The triumphant Mao Tse-tung, became the new king of that game and proclaimed the People's Republic in 1949 to the astonishment of the spectators who had not foreseen it, not even the Russians who were reluctant with him and now rushed a little late to support him. As late as 1945, on the eve of Japan's surrender, the Kremlin signed a 30-year alliance treaty with Chiang in the belief that Chiang would easily defeat Mao's army.
The Chinese revolution was different from the Soviet one, because of the predominance of the peasantry over the working class and because of its nationalist character. There was the origin of the discrepancies with Moscow, at first a problematic and dangerous ally and after the breakup between the two, its greatest enemy, in the new game started on the chessboard.
Between 1945 and 1989, the Soviet Union was a group of different republics, which over the years became runaway horses, held with steel reins by the Kremlin in the framework of the Cold War.
The Russians had three borders:
1. One marked territorially by the Soviet army at the end of World War II, which partly coincided with the old tsarist empire.
2. Another, broader, originated in the October Revolution and the existence of an international communist movement, which also depended on Moscow, although Stalin contradicted it by proclaiming socialism in a single country, his own.
3. The third and most extensive territorially was with China.
Mao's two failures
This mosaic of different tiles was to be, as it turned out, extremely weak and would collapse on its own. The Berlin Wall ended up being made of clay. China, on the other hand, was always a huge and unitary country, with a large population and determined leaders, which managed to get rid of its various occupants by its own means. A panda bear that seemed asleep and suddenly woke up starting its own path.
The growing conflict between the Chinese and the Soviet Union provoked a swift rapprochement between Beijing and the United States. The geopolitics of the world turned 180 degrees, it went from one bipolar to another tripolar.
The historical Chinese leader came from two successive falls on the chessboard due to his intention of wanting to jump incorrectly for the game several squares with his chips: first was the failure of the Great Leap Forward, with the creation of popular communes that would integrate agriculture and industry, but they did not have a sufficient material base and caused famines and victims.
He had to go back to his initial locker and stay there for several years. But he resumed the game with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, bringing in young peons, who also avoided pigeonholes, the Red Guards. Mao was going against his own establishment, which put various pieces on the board to stop his march.
Although under his command China had risen from its absolute poverty and possessed a new national dignity, he had to definitively distance himself from power and from his own locker. As a legacy, in a secret move that he had prepared with his faithful Chou En-lai and the astute US Secretary of State Henry Kissigner, he began a rapprochement with the United States, meeting twice with Richard Nixon, a self-conscious man who carried with him an immense weight of the Watergate building, the Vietnam War and anti-communist campaigns, which also produced many victims, and he wanted to take that step.
Checkmate the USSR
The United States jumped its knights over the Russian pieces and joined the Chinese pawns. Those who watched the game understood that two distant sets of pieces had been brought together to combat a third set that threatened China directly, due to its proximity, and the United States due to the presumed military threat of the then Soviet empire, its main enemy of the War. cold.
With a weak president whom they called “the cheater”, Washington gave a checkmate to the USSR, whose imperial course was definitively broken in 1989, leaving its pieces thinned out and without any defense, being easily eaten on the board. Only Chinese and Americans remained in it. Karpov and the Russian grandmasters were clutching their heads in desperation. It didn't help that they were world chess champions. They had lost the main game.
Two years after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping, and other leaders of the bureaucracy that he was unable to overthrow, with a pragmatic vision that sought to overcome what they considered voluntarist mistakes of the past, concentrated on taking advantage of that rapprochement, initiated by the old leader for strategic reasons. Now they have turned them into cheap ones, freely exchanging pieces with the Americans for a handful of dollars, the low cost of their laborers.
Thus they opened the doors of their country to trade and foreign capital. They had the conviction of ensuring a more prominent place in the world, based on the products of an industrialization that absorbed foreign capital, allowing it to enter their pigeonholes and became a great power not only economically but also politically and militarily. Unlike the Russians, they did not destroy the state and turned it into the main driver of their advance, giving more freedom to the economic forces of the market, but always under their direction.
Chinese pragmatism
To synthesize the new game between Chinese and North Americans, distinguishing their characteristics, it must be said that the former have even greater advantages over the latter than the latter had over England. A vast population, which far exceeds the North American and a large amount of natural resources more solid than that of the Russians.
Now with a pragmatism that did not abandon Mao's nationalism, but his Marxist and voluntaristic premises and approached a philosophy closer to human appetites. Chinese society did not have abundant resources to meet its needs, as utopian communism claimed. They were not enough to feed a vast population and industrialize the country. It was necessary to recover capitalist experiences based on the desires of men, which the idealist Mao rejected, because for him progress should start from the collective consciousness of the people and not from their personal ambitions.
The future was uncertain. Was it a simple capitalist restoration or was it similar to the Soviet NEP, and then march to a more consolidated socialism? The question will not be resolved (or has it already been resolved?) by words but by deeds. The new winds entered through the fully open windows and doors and the country began a stage of economic progress, but also of greater corruption and growing inequalities without democratizing the political system. Games at the same time on several boards
His leadership is very cunning, first he had to know the weakness of the new friend and help him solve his problems. They took his money, hoarding it in their reserves and buying Treasury bonds. They facilitated investments in their country to learn more about its know-how and then be able to use it in their favor. They have their adversaries cornered in a corner where the weakness of dependency can be transformed into hegemony. Its technology is surpassing the American one.
They play at the same time on several boards. To their great foreign trade and investments abroad (the Americans are already stepping on the tail for the first place in this last item) they are also adding the gigantic internal market that they still need to develop with millions of Chinese waiting to have their own products and join the game. But they don't stay still. They plan to build the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) inscribed in the Chinese Constitution that will serve to finance a set of railways, land and sea routes between China and Europe through Central Asia. There are Chinese chess players everywhere.
As warriors they were more conquered than conquerors, although they later turned the tables. As businessmen and diplomats they were more successful. They have the great advantage that their time is longer than that of others. They seem slower, but when decisions are made they have the advantage of being implemented quickly. They still maintain the philosophy of their ancestors, which guides them in a sinuous world, whose signals they decipher like the great masters of chess, many moves before their opponent makes his last move, the one that means knocking down his own king.
Perhaps Laura Jane Richardson wanted to warn us about all this or it's just my intolerable imagination.
* Economist and historian.
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