Playing the wrong games

This whole article is very much worth reading. I'll only excerpt one of the key analogies, which I find to be pretty on-the-mark:

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board.

In order to think strategically, you have to be able to see the board from the vantage point of your opponent, too. Why is it Americans have a hard time realizing our moves in Eurasia since the fall of the Soviet Union can logically be perceived as an effort to undermine and permanently isolate Russia? Why is it so hard to see how our selective intervention policies abroad may have spurred others to acquire nuclear weapons before we try to change their regimes?

I'm not one to typically blame America for the world's ills (bad decisions are a universal curse, after all). But on balance, we're doing at least as much to upset the global apple cart as we are to steady it these days. It's high time we start minding our own business and leaving others alone. Maybe then we'd have the moral authority to lecture others to do likewise.