A Grander Chessboard - and the real hidden motivation behind Trump's madness:
The Great Gamble: Inside Trump’s High-Risk Approach to Complex Systems that Fuels His Personal Empire
This is not chaos. It is a pattern, and there is a name for
it: escalation theory.
The Ladder
The framework goes back to Herman Kahn’s Cold War writing on
nuclear strategy, the idea of an “escalation ladder” with distinct rungs of
conflict intensity, and it still gives us the cleanest way to read what is
happening now. Escalation runs along two axes.
Horizontal escalation widens the war geographically. The
conflict does not intensify in place, it spreads to new theatres, new actors,
new fronts. What we are watching now is textbook horizontal escalation.
Pakistan and Azerbaijan sit as potential new fronts. Turkey is the big one, a
NATO member with its own regional ambitions in northern Syria and Iraq, drawn
steadily closer to direct involvement. The Houthis moving from missile strikes
to a declared naval blockade, and from targeting Israeli shipping to targeting
Saudi Arabia directly, is horizontal escalation in its purest form. Each new
front raises the number of actors who must be managed, and each actor brings
its own domestic pressures and its own reasons to escalate further.
Vertical escalation intensifies the conflict in place. It
does not add fronts, it raises the stakes on existing ones. This is what we
would see in the destruction of oil, water and gas infrastructure, in Gulf
states rendered uninhabitable, in civil war spreading into Iraq and Jordan, in
direct Israeli-Turkish confrontation, or in Chinese or Russian intervention
inside what are currently American and Israeli conflict zones. Vertical
escalation is what happens when actors run out of room to widen the war and start
reaching for higher-intensity tools instead.
Both axes terminate, in the most extreme case, at the same
place: nuclear use. That possibility, however remote it may feel from where we
sit, is what gives the entire ladder its coercive logic. Every actor on it
knows what the top rung looks like, and that knowledge shapes behaviour on
every rung below it.
The Models Exist. The Discipline Doesn’t.
None of this is improvised. The Pentagon, the intelligence
community and allied defence establishments run computer models mapping these
escalation pathways in detail, with defined triggers for each side to climb or
descend the ladder. This is the standard machinery of modern crisis management.
It exists precisely so that political leaders do not have to reason about
escalation from first principles under pressure. The infrastructure of
restraint is there. The question is whether anyone in the White House is using
it.
The evidence suggests not. Trump’s actual strategy, as far
as one can reconstruct it from his own statements and from reporting on the
administration’s internal deliberations, is to secure control of oil at three
points: Venezuela, the Gulf, and eventually Russia. After the January operation
that captured Maduro, Trump was explicit that the goal was Venezuelan oil,
telling reporters the money from seized crude “will be controlled by me,” and
his administration has since discussed long-term stewardship of PDVSA’s
production and distribution. Commentators across the political spectrum have
read this as an attempt to shore up the petrodollar system at the exact moment
BRICS+ economies, representing something approaching a third of global oil
production, are exploring alternative settlement currencies.
Viewed through this lens, Trump’s actions acquire an
internal logic. If the old architecture of American hegemony, dollar centrality
maintained through financial and institutional control, is eroding as its
economic rents diminish and its military edge narrows relative to China, then
physical control of energy supply becomes the next-best lever. Control the oil,
and you can keep the world settling in dollars regardless of what happens to
Wall Street’s soft power. Seen from inside that frame, seizing Venezuelan
crude, entrenching a hard security presence across the Gulf, and eventually
squeezing Russian output are not reckless. They are, to Trump and the people
around him, the only coherent play left on the grand chessboard. It looks less
like adventurism and more like a considered, if brutal, strategy for extending
American primacy by other means, patriotic even, from the inside.
Minimum Pressure, Maximum Control
Trump’s operating theory of victory appears to be one of
minimum pressure for maximum return: apply just enough force at just enough
points to extract economic and political control without triggering the kind of
response that would force a genuine crisis. Seize the tankers. Purge the
disloyal officials quietly rather than overtly. Let Israel absorb the
exhaustion while America husbands its precision-weapons stockpile. Each
individual action is calibrated to sit just below the threshold that would
compel serious retaliation.
The trouble with this theory is that it treats escalation as
a series of isolated, controllable transactions rather than as the interactive
process the game theorists’ own models describe. Every rung on the ladder is
contested by other actors with their own thresholds, their own domestic
politics and their own reasons to move. Iran did not choose to let the Houthis
declare a blockade against Saudi Arabia in isolation. That decision followed a
Saudi strike on Sanaa airport that broke a four-year ceasefire, which followed
the wider collapse of restraint that came with the outbreak of the US-Israel
war on Iran in February. Each move generates a countermove that was not fully
priced into the move before it.
Why the Advisers Aren’t Getting Through
The most striking feature of the current moment is not the
escalation itself. Wars escalate. It is the apparent gap between the
sophistication of the modelling available in Washington and the crudeness of
the decisions being made at the top. Professional game theorists and
crisis-management staff have, by all accounts, mapped the escalation ladder in
detail, with clear trigger points for restraint. And yet they are not getting
through.
The likeliest explanation is not that the advice is bad. It
is that Trump and the people immediately around him believe they are operating
on a different plane entirely, a “grander chessboard” logic in which
conventional escalation management is a tool for lesser strategists managing
lesser stakes. This is a familiar pathology in the history of great-power
decision-making. The leader who believes his instinct outperforms the
institutional model is rarely right, and the cost of being wrong compounds with
every rung climbed. America is already losing ground on the small escalation
questions, in Iraq, in the Red Sea, in the Kurdish borderlands, while operating
under the conviction that it is winning the larger game. That is not a sign of
strategic genius. It is a description of how great powers lose control of wars
they believe they are managing.
The Opponent Already Knows the Play
The final irony is the most dangerous one. Trump is gambling
everything on a strategy built around oil and dollar hegemony, and that
strategy is not secret. It has been reported in detail, discussed openly by his
own officials, and analysed exhaustively by everyone from Gulf state planners
to the BRICS+ finance ministries. His opponents are not guessing at his
intentions. They have read the same Wall Street Journal reporting everyone else
has.
An opponent who knows your strategy in advance can plan
around it, absorb its early moves, and choose the terrain on which to make you
pay for it. That is precisely the position Iran, the Houthis and their backers
now occupy. Each new American move, another tanker seizure, another purge,
another resupply of Israeli stockpiles, is read and answered by actors who
already understand where the strategy is heading. The escalation ladder was
designed as a tool for avoiding catastrophe through mutual legibility. It works
only when both sides use it to find the exits. When one side climbs it as a
matter of doctrine and the other reads the doctrine in advance, the ladder
stops being a safety mechanism and becomes something closer to a countdown.
The Other Motive
There is a second factor running underneath all of this, and
it is not geopolitical theory. It is money, and it is personal.
The dollar hegemony argument explains Trump’s strategy at
the level of the state. It does not explain who is actually getting rich while
that strategy plays out. Those are different questions, and the second one is
the one that gets asked less often.
Look at what has already surfaced from the Venezuela
operation alone. The administration’s first sale of seized Venezuelan crude,
worth around half a billion dollars, went to two trading houses, Vitol and
Trafigura, both with prior convictions for bribery in oil markets elsewhere. A
senior Vitol trader, John Addison, had donated six million dollars to Trump’s
campaign and reportedly sat in on a White House meeting on the very deal his
firm went on to win. Congressional Democrats have since sent multiple rounds of
letters demanding the administration disclose what financial interests its own
officials hold in the companies now profiting from Venezuelan oil. Those
letters have gone largely unanswered. This is not a hidden pattern. It is
published, documented, and sitting in the Congressional record, and it still
barely registers against the scale of the war itself.
This is the part that gets lost when we talk only about
strategic doctrine, about petrodollars and BRICS and the grand chessboard. Yes,
there is a genuine hegemonic motive, the patriotic case for controlling energy
flows to preserve dollar centrality. But sitting behind every conflict, every
seized tanker, every contract awarded without competitive tender, there is also
a much older and much simpler motive. Somebody close to the decision is making
a killing.
This is not the legal corruption that political economists
usually mean when they talk about MIC-style capture, the routine, sanctioned
traffic between defence contractors and the state that everyone accepts as how
the system works. This is the real thing. Individuals with direct access to the
war-making decision, profiting directly from the war. The two motives are not
competing explanations. They run together. The hegemonic strategy provides the
cover, the patriotic justification, the story that makes the war legible as
statecraft. The personal enrichment is what actually gets people out of bed to
fight for the policy behind closed doors.
Removing the Profit Removes the War
If war and conflict are driven, in part, by the ability of
individuals to privatise the profits of controlling land and natural resources,
then the solution is not another oversight committee or another round of
sanctions disclosure. It is to remove the profit itself.
This is the core insight of classical political economy that
mainstream economics has wilfully suppressed: the rent from land and natural
resources, oil included, is not created by the person who happens to control
it. It is created by nature, by geology, by the collective demand of the whole
economy for that resource. When a state, a monarch, a trading house or a
president’s donor captures that rent privately, they are not being rewarded for
producing anything. They are extracting an unearned windfall that belongs, by
rights, to the public that gave it its value.
Socialise that rent, tax the monopoly value of land and
natural resources at its source and return it to the public purse, and you
remove the prize that makes wars over oil worth waging. There is no fortune to
be made from seizing a Venezuelan oil field if the resource rent is captured by
the public rather than pocketed by whichever trading house has the right donor
on its books. There is no incentive to engineer a war for access to a strait or
a pipeline if the rent from controlling it cannot be privatised in the first
place. You do not need to persuade the next Trump, or the next Vitol trader, to
behave better. You simply take away the thing they are fighting over.
This is a negative feedback loop built into the structure of
the economy itself, and it does more work than protest, more than any social
movement, more than the sharpest academic paper on escalation dynamics. Those
interventions try to change minds after the incentive to go to war already
exists. A resource rent captured for the public removes the incentive before it
forms.
It is also why this argument, the Georgist argument, is one
of the least discussed strands of economics in mainstream discourse, despite
over a century of intellectual pedigree behind it. It is not obscure because it
is wrong. It is obscure because it is the one economic theory that goes
directly at the mechanism by which billionaires, oligarchs and dictators fund
themselves. Strangle the unearned rent, and you strangle the money that fuels
the madness. That is not a comfortable idea for anyone currently profiting from
the arrangement as it stands, which is precisely why so few of them want to
talk about it.
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