The Dealer smiles: why geopolitics is poker in the dark
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. ...