In recent years, as international tensions have escalated, Western geopolitical analysis seems to have become stuck in a linguistic cliché that is as widespread as it is dangerous: the ‘global chessboard’. Encapsulated in this single terminological definition is the structural reason why the West is increasingly struggling to maintain its hegemonic grip on the international system.

To speak of a chessboard implies a binary, black-and-white worldview, a reassuring but obsolete concept. It presupposes a logic of head-on collision, of Clausewitzian origin, where the players battle it out to achieve a clear-cut and final checkmate.

But contemporary reality is post-bipolar, fluid and dominated by infinite nuances

We keep moving the chess pieces around, ignoring that the People’s Republic of China, the main and most dangerous competitor to Western-US hegemony, plays another game on the same table as us. Beijing, as Kissinger argued in his On China, does not play chess. Another strategic board game has shaped their doctrine, and that is Go, or Wéiqí, as they call it in China, where they do not seek a direct duel, but win through encirclement, flexibility and long-term attrition.

Our current deficit is not one of military strength. It is a deep ontological asymmetry. We are stubbornly trying to play chess, condemned to suffer a game whose rules we have not yet understood.

The Asphyxiation Strategy and the Grey Zone

Washington looks at Taiwan and thinks of the King on the South China Sea chessboard. He castles. It fortifies it, preparing to repel a D-Day-style amphibious frontal assault.

But Beijing is playing a different game: its primary objective is not to conquer the island tomorrow by brute force, but to wear down its perimeter over time, until Taipei’s defence becomes totally irrelevant.

It is the strategy of asphyxiation, below the threshold of conventional conflict, where international law, of Western origin and therefore based on chess, the rules of chess lose their meaning until they fade into a ‘grey zone’.

Just look at the positioning of the stones on the Pacific goban. As the best Go tactics teach us, Chinese pressure does not immediately point to the centre, but constantly bites at the margins: smaller islands and outposts such as Penghu, Matsu, Dongyin and the Pratas have become the fault line where Beijing tests Taiwan’s nerves, forcing it to react and drain resources continuously.

In parallel, the Dragon works to blind the target. The repeated damage to Taiwan’s limited and vital network of submarine cables shows the fragility of the island. China is developing underwater drones equipped with diamond saws to cut through this infrastructure at a depth of 3,500 metres, disguising them as tools for civil use. The recent suspicious cases in Dongyin and Matsu are proof of this.

And to sterilise the potential US reaction? The Chinese Army is studying swarms of marine drones to silently deploy mines in the Pacific near the territorial waters of Japan and the Philippines. The goal is denial of access (A2/AD): block the US fleet in ports, cut off assistance routes and let Taiwan fall, alone, to asphyxiation.

The Geometry of Space: Spykman and the Two Eyes

In the age-old game of Go, the long-term survival of a group of stones depends on its ability to create two ‘eyes’, i.e. untouchable inner gaps that the adversary cannot invade. Translated to the global level, this spatial logic represents the exact strategic transposition of the Rimland theory formulated by Nicholas Spykman: whoever succeeds in controlling, uniting and armouring the amphibious marginal bands, asphyxiates the opponent and wins the game.

Currently, Beijing’s policy in the South China Sea masterfully embodies this geometry of space. The militarisation of atolls and archipelagos such as the Spratlys and Paracelsus serves the methodical construction of a vital ‘eye’, turning these waters into an unsinkable defensive bastion. This safe space is meant to break the US encirclement of the ‘first island chain’ and create a strategic escape route to the deep Pacific.

In making this move, China exploits to its advantage the Loss of Strength Gradient, the rigid geostrategic law that military power inexorably loses effectiveness and sustainability as the distance from its original base increases. As Beijing consolidates its ‘eyes’ by operating in its foreign neighbourhood, it forces the Americans to project their strength across the vastness of the ocean, wearing down its logistics and psyche even before direct confrontation.

The Silent Hegemon and Internal Balancing

The real short-circuit in Western diplomacy stems from waiting for a war that the adversary refuses to fight. Trapped in a rigid chess logic, we assess the risk according to the rules of frontal confrontation and blatant violation of sovereignty, waiting on Taiwan for a conventional casus belli that may never come.

Beijing, on the contrary, disrupts this pattern by surgically applying the Internal Balancing theorised by Kenneth Waltz: in a restricted competitive system, Go becomes the very essence of equilibrium. China circumvents open confrontation by accumulating slow and inexorable positional advantages.

This strategy points straight to what Hedley Bull defines as hegemony or primacy: the informal establishment of a sphere of influence in which local dominance is not imposed by military rule (the Clausewitzian approach), but is ‘freely granted’ by neighbours. It is a silent hegemony. China does not want to declare ‘checkmate’ by invading the island, but weaves a patient web of encirclement so that Taipei’s assimilation simply becomes the only logical way out due to the manifest impossibility of resistance.

The Crossroads of the West and the Failure of Congagement

US strategy towards Beijing has so far been characterised by ambivalent congestion, a hesitant hybrid of military containment and economic inclusion. It was thought that incorporating China into the global market would tame it, but in an anarchic international arena, relative advantages count: Beijing has exploited interdependence to place its stones on critical sectors, turning our value chains into asymmetrical vulnerabilities.

The failure of this approach is structural: you cannot impose the rules of chess on a board of Go. The West now faces an inevitable crossroads.

The first option is to agree to learn to play Go, challenging Beijing on its own ground: attrition, strategic reorganisation of choke points and control of interdependence networks. The second option is to impose a systemic break, overturning the table and forcing the opponent to return to kinetic confrontation or collapse.

It is in this exact boundary that Donald Trump’s seemingly dastardly moves are decoded. The interventions in Venezuela and Iran represent the brutal application of a strategic hybrid: Washington is attacking energy choke points vital to China’s survival (Go option), but is doing so with muscular forcing that risks splitting the global system (Chess option).

There is no third way. Either we stop watching the game as if it were a reassuring global chessboard, or we will be surrounded before we even realise that the rules have changed.