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