Who Will Teach Donald Trump to Play Chess?
One of many myths surrounding the Trump phenomenon is that he is some kind of chess master. Interrogating Grok produces a 1968 Chess Life Magazine chess problem, submitted by a 22-year-old Donald Trump, a story indicating some Trump skill at the game, and his nascent litigiousness. But Grok admits, “the 1968 Chess Life story is a hoax. [It was} their main April Fool’s prank on April 1, 2016.”
April Fool’s Day might be Trump’s favorite holiday, other than Daddy’s Day. Trump himself pranked 50 million American voters in the last Presidential election, a feat impossible to surpass again without full implementation of the Alex Karp manifesto.
The month of May brought Americans and the rest of the world Trump’s most recent jest – pivoting from a Arabian Sea “blockade” of the already Iranian “blockaded” Strait of Hormuz to a new “Project Freedom” faux escort service for US friendly ships.
Definitions matter. The US “blockade” is only a blockade in the sense that it is an act of war – not that it is effecting any stoppage in ship travel. The Iranian “blockade” of the strait is instead a toll booth, enforceable and enforced, allowing passage of ships under publicized and consistent conditions. The real blockade is being created by the risk price calculated by ship owners and their insurance companies. This price has skyrocketed because of US/Israeli actions in the region, and yet this price is simultaneously beyond their control.
“Project Freedom” initially lasted less than 50 hours. This caprice should remind us of the fundamental reality that freedom is never a state project. Human freedom is usually the main target of the modern state, and the primary enemy of its massive bureaucracy in our technological age. Liberty must be first cherished (it is often not) and then exercised (that takes work) and finally protected like an alert hen protects her chicks, or a mother bear protects her cubs. A written constitution is never enough – societal ferocity for freedom must pre-exist and be practiced, but that is for another conversation.
Americans who follow Trump’s foreign policy may have considered “Project Freedom’s” temporary cancellation as one more jig to the White House jag. But it is more than that: this time Trump and his advisors clearly illustrated they have learned little from the past year. Exactly as Trump did on February 28th, instead of consulting and coordinating with the Gulf states and kingdoms beforehand, he publicly assumed he would use their remaining bases, radars and airspace as if it was his own property.
Instead of guiding stranded ships for humanitarian purposes in waters the US naval fleet fears to float, the “project” may be an attempt at a proto-no-fly zone closer to Iran, to facilitate a major US and Israel restart of kinetic war. Perhaps it is only a provocation or, in chess terms, a really ludicrous “announced mate.”
The reason it paused, temporarily, must have terrified Washington. Gulf state allies – for the first time ever – told Washington “No dice!” Out of anxiety, distrust, anger and a really rotten state of economic affairs, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Kuwait conducted a brief experiment in sovereignty. While quickly abandoned, a seed of sovereign thinking may have been planted, maybe long before this final war of choice by the waning US empire. Trends in sovereign wealth funds indicate many Gulf countries have long been considering whether an American president’s ass is still worth kissing.
While not appreciated in DC, sovereignty is the concept of putting your own country’s priorities first, standing firm to protect your own assets, people, and economy, and refusing to bend the knee to outside powers. It is exactly the rhetoric Trump used in three different campaigns for President, but it is also exactly the opposite of how Washington conducts Middle East foreign policy. For that, we speak only to West Jerusalem, and obey only Tel Aviv diktats, fearing Mossad assassinations and election funding droughts.
Project Freedom demonstrated that for the US future in the Middle East, the rubicon has been crossed, the die cast, there’s no turning back. On one level, we see a division among Gulf oil producers that Israel and the US have long sought to create and exploit, an inter-Arab and Central Asian conflict nurtured and incited to facilitate Greater Israel. But fundamentally, the salient feature of what Israel and US wars and perfidy have wrought is the dawning liberation of these countries from the US sphere of influence, a justified and popular rejection of 21st century western colonialism in general, and US unipolar ambitions and deceit specifically.
A new adventure in global politics has been launched, a journey perhaps reluctantly embarked but one that is logical, liberating, and popular among the people in the region. The US has, with authoritarian arrogance, nudged Middle Eastern governments into doing what most of their populations wanted all along – exercise political sovereignty and expand trade and security relationships beyond the distrusted, and now discredited, United States.
In many ways, Trump and his heavily Israeli-influenced cabinet have ended up immobilized on the board. There’s no queen’s gambit in this Iran war, but rather the accidental sacrifice of the Queen herself. In attempting to control global energy, and to help preserve an already weakening status quo of Western financial dominance, the war on Iran has exposed US military and political fragility, and ripped away the global curtain hiding where market risk resides.
The most significant US export in 2026 has not been military, industrial or agricultural products. In the past five months the biggest export has been gold. Given US inability or reluctance to quickly return gold held on behalf of her allies upon request, it is no surprise that only 10% of Americans believe there is any gold at all remaining in Fort Knox.
In the game of chess, players can strategically sacrifice in order to win, and they can also blunder. Skill and strategic competence, and good old attention to what’s moving, and what’s not moving, on the board differentiates a strategic sacrifice and a deadly blunder.
The world may be betting that the United States blunder vis a vis Iran is nearly concluded. What follows is either a gentlemanly acceptance of strategic defeat, or a United States and Israeli tantrum the likes of which we have never seen before. Trump, impatient with the game he started is now talking about making Iran “glow” and Israel is joking about their undeclared neutron bombs. May we all safely survive the antics of these exhausted and covetous old men posing as chess masters.
https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/p/who-will-teach-donald-trump-to-play