“And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new.”
Once again, Stefan Zweig has it spot-on. He understands the strategic complexity of a game in which just repeating known moves doesn’t necessarily result in victory. The puzzle changes with each move you make — and your opponent’s response. This understanding is central to his novella The Royal Game, and it has significant bearing to our current political moment: Zweig’s characters bear an uncanny resemblance to geopolitical actors.
The story takes place on a ship travelling from New York to Buenos Aires in the Thirties. One of the passengers is the reigning world chess champion. He is described as uncouth, semi-illiterate, the opposite of intellectual; he’s a transactional type who is only interested in money, but endowed with the singular talent of being able to win chess games by just looking at what’s happening on the board. His opposite character is a cultured intellectual, Dr B, in many ways the better chess player. Unfortunately, Dr B has never played against a real opponent. He taught himself to play while in solitary confinement, from a book. Having memorised all the games detailed in the manual, he then attempted to play them in his head. When two play against each other, Dr B is tormented by the world champion, with his irritating, unpredictable moves. He’s not playing according to the formulas Dr B committed to memory. Inevitably, Dr B folds.
What is Zweig trying to tell us? That to triumph at chess requires anticipation. It is not merely about logic. There are people who try to play intellectually, who have a capacity to memorise entire games and then try to repeat them. But then there are intuitive geniuses like Zweig’s antihero, who hasn’t memorised anything: he just knows how to exploit his opponent’s mental weaknesses. Remind you of anyone?
I have heard Donald Trump being described as post-literate. He has no understanding of European history, and confuses all-important details, like who started the war in Ukraine. Nor does he really care when he gets things wrong. When he expressed regret at his statement that the EU was founded “to screw the US”, he was only apologising for what he described as a “bad word”. It is a complete waste of time trying to fact-check what he says. What we should be doing instead is trying to anticipate his next move.
But we Europeans seem to have an institutional incapacity to think two steps ahead. As a result, we aren’t asking the important questions: such as what capabilities does Ukraine need to win the war? Where are the bottlenecks, and how can we fix them? What are the end-game scenarios? What would be an acceptable second-best outcome? What does it mean to win, or to lose?
Instead of strategic game, we Europeans have principles. We want Russia to be evicted from all occupied lands. Some of Europe would like to see regime change enacted. But as the passive tense in these statements suggests, we want someone else to do it for us. We need someone else to do it; not being strategic, we haven’t invested in defence.
This also means that no one has an intelligent response to the question of what would happen if Putin, when pushed into a corner, were to opt for nuclear escalation? This was, after all, a scenario deemed credible by the CIA back in 2022. He would almost certainly not begin with an all-out nuclear strike. But what if he were to detonate an underwater nuclear bomb in the Baltic Sea, close to the shore of a Nato member state? The Baltic Sea is very shallow. A nuclear explosion could give rise to a tsunami. The radioactive isotopes released from a nuclear explosion could contaminate coastal regions. There would be airborne radioactive fallout.
This is only one of many grey-zone escalation scenarios to which we have no answers. At a loss, what our leaders do instead is repeat the mantra that they will do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine defeat Russia. The fashionable expression was famously employed by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank. He used it as a credible threat against speculators. But what worked so well in finance does not play so well in war. When you fight a war, you are subject to all manner of constraints, physical, human, financial and political. That’s what it means to be in a democracy: it dictates that we quite simply cannot do whatever it takes.
But what we do instead, as non-strategic players, is deploy some ostentatious symbolism. When Volodymyr Zelensky walked around the table at last week’s European Council, every European leader got up to embrace him. They wanted to produce a counterpoint to that sofa scene in the Oval Office. But pointless posturing is not a strategy. I have yet to see any strategic purpose behind anything any of the Europeans, including Starmer, have done in the past two weeks. Everything they have done, including Friedrich Merz’s decision to exempt defence spending from Germany’s constitutional fiscal rules, has been as a result of Trump’s first move. They aren’t anticipating his second.
“Pointless posturing is not a strategy”
Trump, by contrast, is an intuitive, transactional strategist. He looked at Zelensky and concluded that the Ukrainian president was not ready for peace. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, then doubled down on this by saying: “I understand that many people believe that a peaceful solution or a ceasefire is a good idea, but we risk that peace in Ukraine is actually more dangerous than the war that is ongoing now.”
Washington’s suspicions thus confirmed, the President promptly responded by withdrawing military aid from Ukraine, switching off the US satellites and halting intelligence sharing. The Europeans keep on expressing shock and dismay at every Trump move. But if you look at the situation purely from a strategic standpoint, his actions should hardly come as a surprise. He certainly knows what he wants to happen next.
And he has a lot more room to escalate this stand-off. He could withdraw intelligence support for Nato. He could withdraw US troops from Eastern Europe. He could recuse himself from the commitment to Nato’s Article 5 collective defence clause, on the grounds that the US has warned the Europeans not to engage in a proxy war against Russia. He could start withdrawing troops from Western Europe, too. He could warn US citizens against travelling to Europe and sound the alarm for investors. Has any European leader thought about how to respond to any one of these potential escalation steps? Or will it just be more photo ops with Zelensky?
Nor is Trump only just playing chess on the battlefield. He’s doing it in economic policy, too. On 2 April, the US will impose reciprocal tariffs on all trading partners. He could, and probably will, do more. Trump talked about 25% tariffs on most EU goods. If the Europeans retaliate, as they threatened, and if he responds in kind, what will the Europeans do then? Retaliate again? This is not a game they can win.
In chess, tit-for-tat is a terrible strategy when you play against an opponent who is prepared. The same goes for geopolitics. Forget the nonsense that there are no winners in trade wars. If you are the one with the large trade surplus — the EU’s surplus with the US is over $200bn — then you are going to be the bigger loser. A strategic response would be to take Trump’s trade tariffs on the chin, and to address the underlying problem of structural trade surpluses that make you vulnerable to such blackmail in the first place. But the Europeans have forgotten the art of thinking beyond the first move.
The extraordinary thing is we invented strategic diplomacy. Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian. The Austrian-French duo of Klemens von Metternich and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand were the masters of political strategy in the early 19th century. Around the same time, Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military historian, wrote his famous book On War, a masterpiece on strategic warfare.
So where have all our great European strategic thinkers gone? Certainly they are not in politics. Nor are they, I should add, in journalism. Instead, we now talk endlessly about relationships. The whole of the EU is a relationship project. We talk about the UK wanting to reset its relationship with the EU. We talk about the transatlantic relationship. Nobody is talking about strategic interests. But, then, if you believe in win-win games, as Europeans do, who needs strategy?
Zweig wrote The Royal Game in 1941, not long before he committed suicide, and the Nazis reigned supreme. He could see exactly what a lack of strategy had done to Europe. His chess story represented what was playing out in global politics as opposing forces clashed: the ancient order outsmarted by the new. Today, it’s happening again, and Europe is in check.
