Chess and Geopolitics

Typically I find that those who like to view the world through a prism of the unevenness of geography have very little time for chess, with its flat board and what game theorists and economists might call its “perfect information”. However I wouldn’t be the first person to write about this subject. Former RAND analyst John Arquilla’s short-but-informative essay for Foreign Policy magazine “How Chess Explains the World (And predicts the rise and fall of nations)” was published in 2013 and I’d like to develop some of his ideas here further.