We are told that world politics is a chess game. Grandmasters move pieces across a board, sacrificing pawns to protect kings, calculating six moves ahead. It is rational. It is elegant. It is, above all, knowable.
This is a lie.
After walking through the resource wars of Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, Ukraine, Russia and China, and after one reader finally lost patience and called a certain former president a “greedy twat”, a different metaphor emerged. Not chess. Not even regular poker.
This is what we landed on: “God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.” ~ Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
Welcome to the real game.
The transactional truth
Look at what is actually happening, country by country, and the pattern becomes embarrassing in its consistency.
Ukraine
Take Ukraine. Continued American support is no longer being framed as charity. It is framed as an investment that must show a return. The headline demand was the equivalent of half a trillion dollars in rare earths, and at one point a fifty per cent stake in Ukraine’s mineral resources to “get the money back”. After a tense Oval Office meeting and months of grinding negotiation, a deal was finally signed on 30 April and ratified by Ukraine’s parliament on 8 May 2025.
Past aid was not converted to debt, but the agreement created a joint investment fund: a long-term strategic economic partnership that the White House now describes, with a straight face, as a “tacit security guarantee”. Grain is the quieter half of the same calculation. American officials have made it explicit that restoring Ukraine’s ability to export wheat through the Black Sea is part of the peace framework, because an “economically viable” Ukraine stops being a drain on the US balance sheet.
Naval drones have pushed back the Russian fleet enough to keep Odesa open, but exports remain well below pre-war levels. The deeper strategic logic, repeated in private by administration figures, is that Ukraine is a distraction from the real opponent, which is China, and the way out is to lock in a resource deal, push Europe to pay the rest of the bill, and pivot.
Venezuela
Venezuela follows a different logic but rhymes? The country sits on the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, but the oil is heavy, sour, and stranded behind two decades of sanctions and infrastructure collapse. The interest there is not in some future supply chain. It is in unlocking assets that already exist, swapping sanctions relief or regime accommodation for investor access. The deal is not “give us your future”; it is “let us back into your past”.
Greenland
Greenland is probably the inverse. Almost nothing is being extracted today, and that is precisely the point. The interest is a trifecta.
First, breaking China’s effective monopoly on rare earth refining, which sits somewhere between seventy and ninety per cent of the global market.
Second, the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule, which is the frontline radar station for detecting Russian missile launches across the pole.
Third, the Arctic shipping lanes opening up as the ice retreats. Yet eighty per cent of Greenland is buried under an ice sheet up to two miles thick, the island has effectively no roads, ports or grid outside Nuuk, and in 2021 it banned uranium mining outright, killing the Kvanefjeld project that would have produced rare earths as a by-product.
Even on optimistic timelines, meaningful commercial rare earth production is a decade away. Greenland is therefore not a quick fix. It is a fifty-year bet on technology, supply chains, and Arctic security, dressed up as a real estate offer.
Iran
Iran then, is the leverage play. The headline objective is the dismantling of the nuclear programme: a twenty-year suspension of enrichment, the destruction of facilities, and the removal of the highly enriched uranium stockpile. Everything else, including the blockade and the public musing about seizing oil, is pressure aimed at that one outcome.
The naval blockade currently focused on Kharg Island, which handles roughly ninety per cent of Iranian crude exports, has reportedly trapped sixty-nine million barrels of unsold oil worth over six billion dollars. The rial has crashed to record lows, and Iranian onshore storage is running out.
The administration’s own description, “Economic Fury”, tells you the intent. The threat to “take the oil” is real enough to be briefed as a military option, including special forces missions against the uranium stockpile and a partial seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, but it is held back by two things: the political reality that Americans do not want another long ground commitment, and the simple fact that the blockade is, for now, working.
Russia
Russia is the war economy in its purest form. Resources are simultaneously the strength, the weapon, and the vulnerability. With the world’s largest natural gas reserves and third-largest oil production, with top-five positions in coal, metals, fertiliser, and grain, Russia funds roughly thirty to forty per cent of its federal budget directly from hydrocarbon exports.
As long as the oil and gas keep flowing, the war can continue. Europe is gone as a customer, but China buys the discounted energy, India buys the crude, and the Global South buys the wheat.
The weakness is that sanctions cut off Western drilling kit, fracking technology, and LNG expertise, while the pivot to Asia depends on pipelines like Power of Siberia 2 that take years to build, and the budget needs oil prices in the seventy to eighty dollar range to keep the war affordable.
Putin’s wager is brutally simple, and he has more or less said it out loud: he does not need to win quickly, he needs to outlast. Every European winter, every American election, every fresh debate over aid is part of the bet that Western patience will collapse before Russian revenue does.
China
China is the most interesting player at the table, if only because it is barely playing the same game. While the United States sanctions Russia, China does the opposite. It buys Russian crude at thirty to forty per cent below world prices, refines it, and sells the products on while European industry pays full freight.
It supplies dual-use goods, civilian drones, chips, and machine tools that conveniently end up serving the Russian war effort, while staying clean enough on paper to keep its access to Western markets. Its public message is calibrated to the room: we are stable, we trade with everyone, we do not start wars, invest with us.
Beneath that, the long resource play is relentless. Chinese firms have repeatedly tried to buy into Greenlandic rare earths, blocked so far by Copenhagen and Washington but never deterred. They effectively control most of Congolese cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, large slices of Zambian copper, and Guinean iron ore.
Pipelines from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan feed the energy grid, and Beijing is quietly positioning itself to inherit Russian energy infrastructure if Putin’s regime ever cracks. Where Washington plays a single hand and demands payment by the end of the night, Beijing is buying the casino.
When you strip away the flags, the speeches, and the moral posturing, every interaction begins to look like a deal. Allies are partners in a mutually beneficial transaction. Enemies are counterparties refusing your terms. This is what international relations theorists call realism, and the core belief is unsentimental: states act in their own self-interest, morality belongs to citizens, and survival belongs to governments.
One American president simply stopped pretending otherwise and played the game openly. Whether that counts as honesty or nihilism depends entirely on your own values.
Why “chess” is the wrong metaphor
The chess metaphor assumes that all the pieces are visible, all the rules are known, both players agree on the objective, and the board is static. Geopolitics has none of these properties. In the real world the pieces lie. The rules change mid-game. Some players are playing a completely different game on the same board. And a few are quietly stealing pieces when no one is looking.
A better metaphor, short of the Good Omens one, is multi-player no-limit poker. Poker, because bluffing, reading opponents, and knowing when to fold are central. No-limit, because you can go all-in, whether that means nuclear war, total sanctions, or invasion. Multi-player, because it is not the United States versus Russia: it is Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels, Delhi, Tehran, Riyadh, Ankara, Jerusalem, and dozens more sitting at the same table. With hidden cards, because every player has a hand of historical grievances, traumas, and identities that sometimes override rational calculation.
Trump plays the poker game openly and transactionally. Putin plays like a man who has lost everything before and will burn the house down rather than lose again. Xi plays the longest game of all, betting on patience while others self-destruct.
Europe shows up clutching a rulebook that no one else has read, asking, with genuine puzzlement, whether everyone wouldn’t rather be playing bridge. And the rest of the world, the so-called Global South, gradually realises that the cards are blank, the room is dark, and the big players are using marked decks.
They are not at the table playing the game. They are the stakes.
But is it just a game?
This is where the poker metaphor, like the chess metaphor before it, finally breaks.
If geopolitics were just a game, then domestic politics would not matter. They do. Leaders are constrained by voters, parties, and ideologies, and a purely transactional account ignores the fact that Americans, Ukrainians, and Iranians hold values that sometimes override pure self-interest.
If geopolitics were just a game, history and identity would be negotiable. They are not. Try telling a Polish leader that handing a security guarantee to Russia is “just business”. Try telling a Chinese nationalist that Taiwan is “just a chip factory”. Identity, trauma, and pride do not appear on a balance sheet.
If it were just a game, trust and reputation would be irrelevant, when in fact they are the slowest and most valuable assets any state holds. If the United States abandons Ukraine after taking its minerals, Taiwan and Israel and the Gulf states all quietly recalculate the value of an American guarantee.
Reputation takes decades to build and seconds to destroy. And if it were just a game, non-state actors would play by its rules. Terrorists, hackers, drug cartels, and rogue commanders do not. They do not want a deal. They want destruction or chaos. You cannot trade with them.
So no, it is not just a game. But the parts that are a game are much larger and uglier than most textbooks admit.
The Dealer smiles
Which brings us back to Pratchett and Gaiman.
What if the transactional level is simply the highest instrumental level we can perceive? What if the real game is something else entirely? Entropy versus order, physics playing itself out through human bodies. Memetic evolution, ideas using nations as their battlefields. Consciousness waking up to itself, history as a long and painful classroom.
Or nothing at all: just chaos, and we are pattern-seeking apes telling ourselves stories around a fire.
The Dealer smiles because we will never know.
The only sane response
You have three choices when you realise the room is dark, the cards are blank, and the Dealer will not explain the rules. The first is despair: nothing matters, so curl up and stop playing. The second is nihilistic glee: if no rules exist, then I will write them, become the bully, become the cheat. The third, and the most human, is defiant meaning-making: the Dealer keeps her secrets, but I will play my own game inside hers.
The third option is Viktor Frankl writing Man’s Search for Meaning in a concentration camp. It is a Ukrainian farmer planting sunflowers in a minefield. It is reading an article about resource geopolitics and choosing to understand rather than to look away. The Dealer smiles. But so can we.
Shuffling the blank cards
We began this conversation with outrage, a muttered profanity at a screen. We ended it with a smile and a quote from a comic fantasy novel. That is not an accident. The only way to play an ineffable game with blank cards for infinite stakes is to refuse to take it more seriously than it deserves, while taking it seriously enough to matter.
So shuffle the deck. Sit down at the table. Smile back at the Dealer. And play our own game.