Kriegspiel

The world’s greatest chess players occasionally get bored by a normal game of chess. Good opening moves are too predictable, especially in the age of chess computers. Imagine investing a ton of your energy and super talent into a masterpiece of intellectual ingenuity only to find out, in a couple of computer clicks, that a few years before exactly the same move was played in a minor tournament by some obscure mediocrity! History repeats itself, and chess is no exception.

If they cannot invent a new game (in which case they can no longer call themselves chess players), why not invent a new set of rules? And so, here comes “random chess,” and then the mother of all messy jumble, known as Kriegspiel, or warplay, to use the exact English translation. The game is played by players who can see the board with nothing but their own pieces on it. Should one piece suddenly disappear, it must have been taken by the other side, that’s all they know. They have no idea of the moves made by the opponent, of the location of enemy pieces, of how many or how few of them are left. The only participant in the game who can see the whole board is the referee. His role is to instruct the players after each move whether the move is “legal,” or technically possible, in which case it stands, or “illegal,” which means that the player must try again, until he comes up with something playable, and the game can go on.

Needless to say, the new rules introduce the element of sheer unpredictability into the end result. The best player can easily fall to one of far lesser stature. Coincidentally, the main figure in the game becomes the referee, which of course is not the case in normal chess. The power of the referee is enormous, especially when he is left unaccountable and allowed to manipulate the rules of the game, which are kind of fuzzy in the first place.

Professional politicians are seldom inclined to rock the boat of politics. But the ideologues behind them are the ones who create the movement under the surface. Like great chess players, they get bored with an old status quo, especially when the end result seems to be a perpetual draw. However, be careful what you wish for. If you intend to muddy the waters, better know what you are doing before you do it!

Cold war was a normal chess game where the opponents could more or less see the whole board and know what was going on. They had little tolerance for “jokers in the deck,” because the objective was maximum clarity, not confusion. It was a game played by two, not a three-ring circus.

Then cold war came to an end, with the American side immediately and unequivocally claiming victory. Completely ignored was the quiet but distinct claim made by one of the most astute connoisseurs of world politics, the Russian scholar and chief Kremlin adviser on the United States Georgi Arbatov. His sarcastic comment that America would have been much better off with the old Soviet Communists rather than with the new Russian “Democrats” was followed by the stunning suggestion that, in fact, cold war ended with Russia defeating America by “depriving her of her enemy.”

Arbatov’s point goes far beyond popular psychiatry with its obnoxious poking into personal or national self-consciousness, whichever the case may be. What he stopped short of saying was that the enemy hadn’t really ceased to exist. He had just become invisible. Who was now friend, and who was foe--- take a wild guess! Old Russia, new Russia, old Europe, new Europe, old world, new world,-- the divide between us and them had lost its shape and form. The other side of the board went dark.

But why should anybody have listened to Arbatov when the whole Soviet Union seemed to disappear from the map, and as a result the stock market was going through the roof? Why at all should anybody have paid attention to Arbatov’s successor Sergei Rogov repeating Arbatov’s claim a decade later? What puzzles me, however, is the silence of the Western media and the experts when just a few years ago at Camp David President Putin of Russia openly boasted at a joint press conference with President Bush that Russia has the power to control America’s enemies. Here are his words verbatim:

“I have never said this in public; I am going to do it today. When counter-terrorist operation began in Afghanistan, we were approached by people who intended to fight against Americans in Afghanistan. And if by that time President Bush and I had not formed appropriate relationship, no one knows what turn the developments in Afghanistan would have taken.”

One should not wonder that, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have been repeatedly quoting this particular statement of Mr. Putin in several of my articles. This quote goes straight to the heart of the matter. Right out there, in front of the cameras and before the whole world, the consummate KGB professional Mr. Putin was actually laying down, in his distinctively peculiar cryptic language, his vision of the new world order as the ultimate game of Kriegspiel, where America was pitted against the rest of the world by… the Russians, the renowned grandmasters of the chess game, who were themselves assuming the role of the referee, no longer facing their old nemesis head on, but now by proxy.

Too bad that Bobby Fischer was never asked by Washington politicians to teach them chess. With his help, they might have been in a much better position to understand the intricacies of the “new world order” game, much more anxious to quit the muddy waters of Kriegspiel and to return to a normal game of chess.


Written in May 2005

Olympic Humiliation. October 2, 2009.

A great power cannot allow herself to be humiliated. The greater the power, the greater the humiliation. The only reason why President Obama might have gone to Copenhagen for the October 2, 2009 selection of the 2016 Summer Olympics host city had to be a hands-down coronation. But there was no coronation. The city of Chicago instead came in dead last, which fact was reported by the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Jacques Rogge with a disturbingly perceptible glee.

It would still have been politically wrong, but at least humanly understandable, had Chicago been in a neck-and-neck competition. But that last place had to be anticipated well in advance. I am not blaming President Obama, though: in our day and age the American President comes heavily scripted, therefore, the biggest fault rests with his advisers, who literally set him up and set up America, with their ill-begotten judgment. By all prior political indications, this is the Lula time, the time for Brazil. The fact that the 2014 FIFA (Soccer) World Cup will be taking place in Brazil as well, was by no means a disqualifier for 2016, but a portent of what was to transpire on October 2, 2009. It just had to be Rio, and the White House advisers on this matter had to be aware of it.

So, why did they let our President go to Copenhagen in person, with the First Lady, with Oprah, and with all that impressive entourage? Why did they allow the sorry spectacle of our President trying to undercut the predictably victorious effort of the nationalistic Brazilian President, whom we need as an American friend and not as a bitter opponent in a personal combat which our President was bound to lose anyway?! This was not Mr. Obama, who suffered the humiliation. As a private American citizen, he could even be applauded for desperately going out on a limb for his city and country, as Ms. Winfrey can surely be so applauded. But as the holder of the office of the President of the United States of America, as the highest state symbol of the great American nation, he ought to have stayed away from this event, and those who pushed him into making this embarrassing trip of insult, injury, and defeat must be promptly and indignantly fired.

United Nations: To Be Or Not To Be? September 27, 2009

The ongoing 64th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York has been, as now customary, rich on theater, but rather thin on substance, playing into the hand of the critics of the UN as an institution, and turning up the volume on such inane suggestions as the abolishment of the UN and the establishment of something like a United Democratic Nations, which is apparently envisaged as a US-sponsored club of Western-style democracies plus all nations on good terms with the US (even if one is unsavory and grotesquely undemocratic, who would want to exclude a "friend" who will be voting on your side, when only the ballot numbers matter?)

In other words, the idea tossed around Washington these days is to create a mutual admiration society with very little influence on or relevance to what is going on out there in the real world. For, needless to say, the idea of ostracizing all unpleasant characters from my world club is not only pathetically impractical, but it also makes the world a much more dangerous place to live in. UN membership is not a reward for good behavior, but a sober recognition of the state of world affairs.

This comment is meant to be serious, and therefore, I shall say no more about the silly alternatives to the UN. Having worked as a UN official in my earlier career, I have more important things to say about the UN and about other International Organizations, none of which latter, mind you, has been set to upstage the UN.

There are quite a few international organizations around the world today, all of which either were created or are currently maintained for the purpose of mutual convenience of its members. The old British Empire was fairly successfully converted into a post-imperial British Commonwealth (although its effectiveness is somewhat diluted these days, as a result of the world’s over-saturation with other organizations, designed for similar purposes). On the other hand, De Gaulle’s famous effort to convert the old French Empire into an analogous international body, La Communauté, did not quite get off the ground, undermined by strong centrifugal forces of local nationalism. Now, why were the British successful, where the French failed? In my view, the French being the predominant power in their proposed Communauté, the others saw this as a threat to their own sovereignty, whereas the British Commonwealth of Nations included such powerhouses as Canada and Australia, not to mention the emerging (nuclear) giants India and Pakistan and others, and with such balanced distribution of power, there was no threat that a single nation would be able to dictate its imperialistic rules to the fifty-three others.

There is little to say about such regional international organizations as the Arab League, ASEAN, African Union (formerly OAU) and OAS, except that their intended design to serve as regional meeting venues has been proven useful and in the case of OAS has resisted domination by the United States to the point where the American giant has found itself virtually ostracized by the Latin American community of nations.

There is a bit more than meets the eye in other such regional conglomerates, like the SCO, co-dominated by Russia and China, or the League of the Caspian Basin States, dominated by Russia, and several others, all made conspicuous by the absence of the United States in them, and all implicitly designed to provide a counterbalance to America’s imperial ambitions.

The CIS organization loosely binding twelve (currently de facto eleven) out of fifteen former Soviet Republics used to be and in some minds may still remain a portkey (to use J. K. Rowling’s clever invention) to the former Soviet glory. I do not think, however, that the CIS corresponds in any way to Russia’s present-day ambitions, and, in a way, may even be a hindrance to them, but it does offer a certain technical convenience to its members, and for such purely technical reasons will continue to subsist, although it has little chance of potential expansion, due to the restrictive qualities of its charter.

A recent attempt to form a new regional organization (of the Mediterranean States), promoted by France, has become more of a joke, thanks to the German umbrage at being excluded. Now that Germany, a non-Mediterranean state, is finally in, the organization becomes rather awkward, and even if it has a future of its own, it will never amount to much, because its raison d’être is now grotesquely obfuscated.

Now, where does the EU come into the picture? In its formal organization, it is currently the closest thing to approximate the old futile idea of a “world government,” and a close study of its history and functioning in this twenty-first century reveals why the idea was so appealing to so many, but also, what is terminally wrong with it. There is so much internal animosity within the European Union now, ironically, directed in most part from the established great European nations toward the small sneaky rascals of Eastern Europe, such as Poland, whose double-dealing on the side, with their bilateral ties to the United States, defeats the purpose of the Union’s creation as an independent world power, in the first place. It is my expectation that in a rather short “long run” the EU will be facing a serious structural crisis, whose outcome is still hard to predict, but among the alternative solutions are expulsions of undesirable members, angry cancellations of membership on the part of the members in good standing and finally, a radical revision of the EU Charter. I do not think however that a complete dissolution of the European Union will ever be in the cards, as it is a very useful organization, and the only one to provide Europe with a clear road map to full independence from NATO and the United States. Thus, for as long as the threat of an American domination of Western Europe remains, the nations of Europe will be willing to allow the EU Government to dictate some of the rules, by which they have temporarily agreed to live, and even accept a certain level of German economic and political domination within the EU, which has by now become an obvious reality.

And finally, the so much maligned by some, yet so much praised by others, the United Nations is to me the most excellent organization of all, considering that its inclusion of practically all independent world nations guarantees to each a full representation, both in the General Assembly and in the Security Council (on the rotating basis), while no single superpower is able to dominate it. The never-ending griping about the UN coming from the United States is caused by its incapacity to impose its will on the UN, but the constant calls to “kick the UN out of the USA” are patently silly and extremely harmful to the American interest, as the United Nations has the highest value in the eyes of the world’s smaller nations, and all efforts to diminish its worldwide prestige and even effectiveness in solving a variety of international problems (granted, quite limited) are viewed by all of them as a personal affront. (Having served with the UN Secretariat, I very well  and personally know what I am talking about!)

Having always admired the Constitution of the United States of America as a lofty example of idealistic, yet practicable writing, I am here posting a few excerpts from the Preamble of the United Nations Charter written undoubtedly under the influence of the former document, and expressing a similar idealism with no less fervor:

We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and…

To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small (here is the projection of Hobbes’s homo sapiens beyond the nation-state Commonwealth to the whole community of world nations, which I have previously noted already!), and…

To establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and…

To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and…

To practice tolerance and live together in peace and security, and…

To ensure, by the acceptance of principles and institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and…

To employ the international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims…

In other words, the United Nations Charter is an admirable example of Western-style writing, reflecting the best democratic values, and the task of Western Democracies is to appeal to the UN Charter's authority in bringing the United Nations into harmony with its own principal document, rather than to trash the UN, thus rendering the UN Charter impotent and irrelevant.

My last comment in this entry concerns the establishment of a world government. In some of my earlier writings, I have referred to this idea as futile, and I obviously stand by my verdict. There is no way that the centrifugal forces of world nationalism would ever allow a central world government to set the rules of the “common game.” The big nations will not allow the small ones to use their superior number to gain the upper hand, and conversely, the small nations will not allow the big nations to use their overwhelming economic, political and military power to establish a numerical minority rule over the disadvantaged, yet ever proud majority.

But the idea of world government does not lose its limited attraction and even certain practical worth just because of its general impracticability. And to ensure that some limited benefits can still be gained from this idea, there is no other international organization in existence, or even in the minds of the best wishful thinkers, better equipped for this purpose than the old, “incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial,” United Nations.

A Russian Victory. 09/17/2009.

President Obama’s decision to scrap (shelf, postpone, suspend, freeze… make up your own word) the ABM system in Eastern Europe (in Poland and the Czech Republic, to be exact), is indeed a Russian victory, just as our conservatives clamor, but for a different reason than what they are stating. It is ludicrous to insinuate that this move is some kind of cave-in to Russian pressure, or a cynical betrayal of American interest for the sake of “resetting” the American-Russian relationship, as promised by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to her Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. (Re the photograph: as a matter of fact, which finger is being used here to reset Russian-American relations?!)

All this is nonsense. American interest did not suffer by virtue of the proposed non-deployment. All along, this ABM project had been a political maneuver, devoid of any military significance. And, of course, it was always directed against Russia, being incongruously useless against Iran.

To begin with, this ABM system, as proposed three years ago, simply does not work, as stated on numerous occasions by responsible and authoritative American experts. (I encourage those readers who are unaware of this fact to do the necessary homework.) In effect, it is a conglomeration of overpriced good-for-nothing hardware and software, which failed most performance tests, while those which it did pass are said to have been rigged (absent decoy target balloons, increased balloon size, etc.).

I am convinced that when this system was first offered by the Bush Administration, it was meant only as an important symbolic gesture. It is inconceivable that the system would ever have been deployed, as both our friends and foes knew only too well that it would not work in real life.

So, where is the Russian victory here? It is all in the appearances, as every politician knows that perceptions are far more important than reality. The Russians did pretend to take this thing seriously, and never stopped complaining about it, so that today they can claim victory with a straight face , when, in truth, this is nothing more than President Obama’s concession to common sense, which had been lacking from the decision of his predecessor.

9/11/2009

Eight years ago America’s enemies perpetrated a horrendous crime, taking the lives of thousands of innocent people and destroying a magnificent New York landmark, the World Trade Center. Lost lives are tragically irreplaceable, but no one at the time doubted that, whether it should take two or three or even as long as five years, our lost landmark was eventually to be gloriously rebuilt in the shortest possible time to an even greater splendor than before, defying our enemies and reaffirming the triumphant American spirit.

Eight long years and billions of dollars in patriotic public donations later, to the glee of our enemies, there is still a gaping hole in the ground, and nothing of what was promised has been rebuilt. Could it have been the misplaced patriotic zeal of our leaders, who saw fit to pursue “American interest” thousands of miles away from home, “there”, rather than “here”, at home? Or could it be the greed of our obscenely rich bagmen, who will probably take another decade or more, bickering about maximizing their private profits in what all along ought to have been a national public undertaking, and not a private venture?
…Eight long years later, the tragic sight in upper Manhattan is no longer so much a condemnation of our enemies, that it once was and still is, as it is now an inglorious monument to our common American shame of neglect and inaction.

THE OTHER DAY...

The other day, on September 7, 2009, to be exact, I was intrigued to find an interview conducted by one of the world's most respectable media outlets, Germany's Spiegel Online International,  with Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko, posted on Spiegel's website. It was a fairly intelligent interview, but I was disappointed not to find perhaps the most pertinent question that could and should have been asked of the Ukrainian President, particularly so close to the seventieth anniversary of the official start of World War II in Europe (unofficially it started not with Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, but with his illegal takeover of Czechoslovakia completed in March 1939.) How come that some of the most reprehensible figures in the history of Ukraine, such as Bogdan Khmielnitzky, the perpetrator of the great Jewish Holocaust of the 17th century, and the more recent Nazi collaborators and co-authors of the WWII Holocaust Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych have been declared Ukraine's national heroes by Mr. Yushchenko's Presidential decrees? A related question could also be asked of him, how would Mr. Yushchenko explain the refusal of Russia's chief rabbi to accept a Ukrainian medal of honor, citing Ukrainian anti-semitism?
I don't have a problem with the German media here, knowing that the Germans, like all of Western Europe, consider Mr. Yushchenko a pest, particularly after his admitted sabotage last winter of the deliveries of Russian gas to Europe (transported over Ukrainian territory), in which all Europe suffered: when you do not like someone you may find it difficult to ask tough questions mistakenly but understandably concerned that these may be misconstrued as your negative bias. But frankly, I am surprised that the American media has so far failed to ask these important questions on its own. After all, Mr. Yushchenko is one of Washington's biggest friends. Shouldn't he be made accountable for such things, and do we the public not deserve at least an explanation of what this all means?
Going even further, practically all of our Eastern European buddies have been accused by European Jewish communities of virulent anti-Semitism, some had even served in their young years in the Nazi SS, and never really repented! Today old Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Nazis are celebrated as national heroes both in their homelands and... in Washington DC! Perhaps, we might paraphrase an old cold war phrase about foreign SOB's, to say: Yes, they are antiSemites, but they are  our anti-Semites!
But there is also another, much wiser saying: Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are. 

Geopolitics 101

Let me start this blog with the following geopolitical riddle: The proof is in the pudding, but not in the recipe. Apply this to the missile defense complex #3, planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. There is apparently very little expectation that this complex will ever materialize. The Russians are not even accepting it as an American bargaining chip. (Let us dispose of the fig leaf about Iran being part of the equation!) The local populations are 2:1 against it. Some knowledgable Americans say that the hardware for this complex is virtually non-existent, and what is, is non-effective. So, where's the pudding, and, generally speaking, what is going on?
My entry #2 is a deliberate travel back in time, only to find that all this time the time has stood still. The following article of mine published by the Baltimore Sun back in December 2006, is unfortunately still quite current. The plan I forcefully criticized three years ago is still on the books, despite the political change in Washington since I wrote it. Therefore, I have to put it forward once again. Any feedback on this terribly important subject will be much appreciated.

Fitting ICBMs With Conventional Weapons Risks Catastrophe.

Twenty-five years ago a Reagan Administration official asked my opinion on whether America was facing a clear and present danger from Russia. I said no.
Despite the heated rhetoric on both sides, the Russians never intended to initiate an attack on the West, their strategic objective being to split Europe from the U.S.
On the other hand, their fear of being attacked was countered, even in the face of President Ronald Reagan’s hostility, by their faith in America’s common sense. Why should the richest nation on earth invite horrific devastation upon herself without a logically compelling reason? Today, I am no longer that optimist.
Washington’s unwarranted presumption of global nuclear superiority ¾ the mainstay of this Administration’s National Security Strategy from the beginning ¾ has taken an alarming twist. And the Russians, still capable of destroying America with a nuclear strike, are seriously worried. Too little attention has been given so far to a plan the administration is considering. It calls for certain strategic delivery systems, previously solely designated for nuclear war, to be put to use with conventional warheads. About $50 million has been allocated to three studies of placing conventional weapons on submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Who cares that there is no technology to tell which kind of warhead has been launched? Russia will have to trust Washington that it is not the target of a first-strike nuclear attack. This idea comes in the wake of an article earlier this year in Foreign Affairs, titled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Supremacy,” that contains these statements:
“The current and future U.S. nuclear force… seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.”
“It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.”
“If U.S. submarines were to fire missiles from areas in the Pacific, Russian leaders probably would not know of the attack until the warheads detonated.”
If Russian leaders have read these statements and taken them as an expression of administration policy, they may have reached some unpleasant conclusions.
Washington’s intention to legitimize the use of first-strike strategic delivery systems, expecting no retaliatory move by Russia, provoked Col. Victor Litovkin to write for the Russian news agency Novosti and reflecting Moscow’s official view: Any nuclear power will be sorely tempted to launch a retaliatory strike after detecting incoming strategic ballistic missiles. A retaliatory nuclear strike seems to be the only way to stop an all-out ballistic-missile attack involving nuclear and conventional warheads.
Disingenuously, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, meeting in August with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Ivanov, suggested that Russia could do the same thing.
“Russia has some misgivings about such preliminary plans,” Mr. Ivanov replied. “I am not ready to say that Russia agrees to join this initiative.”
This gobbledygook in no way implies indecision on Russia’s part. Rather, it reflects the traditional Soviet-style presumption that any unambiguous rejection of U.S. terms by Russia may be misconstrued as a sign of fear and weakness. Mr. Rumsfeld, however, interpreted these words in line with Washington’s wishful thinking, telling a news conference that the Russian Defense Minister would probably phone him from Moscow and call the American proposal a good idea.
No such luck. Should Washington unilaterally proceed with this insane plan, and eventually, an ICBM launch is made, whether intended against Iran or anybody else, a Russian retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States will follow, triggering the unthinkable.
America is facing a clear and present danger compared to which the worst nightmares of the war on terror will pale. It’s time to start paying attention.
Alexander Artem Sakharov is a former fellow of the Institute of USA & Canada Studies in Moscow.

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