THINKING BEYOND THE CHESSBOARD, AND TO THE WEB

Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Neworkrd World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("Statement and foreign policy experts have long been taught to view the world as a chessboard, analyzing the decisions of powerful states and anticipating rival states' reactions in an endless game of strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century British and Russian statesmen openly embraced this metaphor, calling their rivalry in central Asia 'the Great Game.' The theoretical basis for interstate bargaining, spelled out in 1960 by Thomas Schelling in The Strategy of Conflicts, is a game theory. Half a century later, Game of Thrones offers us a particularly gory and irresistible version of geopolitics as a deadly, subtle, and endless competition among contending kingdoms. [] The chessboard is such a dominant metaphor for seeing and understanding the world of states that Joseph Nye has described the more complicated world of post-Cold War global politics as a 'complex three-dimensional chess game.' The top board is the U.S.-dominated game of military power; the middle is the multipolar world of economic power; and the bottom is the diffuse realm of non state actors. Diplomats and foreign policy decision makers now play multiple games at once, and . . . not all of these games are chess. Still, the players remain locked in a competition to advance their nation's interest, sometime alongside those of other nations, but more often at their expense." Id. at 5-6. "Think of a standard map of the world, such as might have hung in your fifth-grade classroom, showing the borders and capitals of all the countries. That is a chessboard view. Now think of a map of the world at night, with the lit-up bursts of cities and highly concentrated regions and the dark swaths of rural areas and wilderness. Those corridors of light mark roads, cars, houses, and offices; they mark the network of human relationships where families and workers and travelers come together." "That is the web view. It is a map not of separation, marking off boundaries of sovereign power, but of connection, of the dentist and intensity of ties across boundaries. To see the international system as a web is to see a world not of states but of networks, intersecting and closely overlapping in some places and more strung out in others. It is the world not only of terrorists but of global trade, both licit and illicit; of drugs, arms, and human trafficking; of climate change and declining biodiversity; of water wars and food insecurity; of corruption, money-laundering, and tax evasion; of pandemic disease carried by air, sea, and land. In short, it is the world of many of the most pressing twenty-first century global threats. That ever-changing map is the frontier of our age." Id. at 7. "We must learn to see in stereo. Humans and other primates have binocular vision: two eyes facing forward as opposed to one eye on either side of our head, like many mammals, which provides a much wider panorama of vision. With two eyes facing forward each eye registers a slightly different version of the same object; the brain processes this differences and creates a three-dimensional image. Each eye perceive a different reality; together they create a richer and more accurate picture of the whole. If we combine the chessboard and the web perspectives, we can see states as unitary actors competing and cooperating with other states and also as sites of many different networks spreading beyond their border but incorporating their citizens corporations, civic, and criminal organization." "We must learn to see all global event in terms of both the chessboard and the web." Id. at 24.).