The Grander Chessboard: Geopolitics, Rent, and Global Conflict
I gave a keynote last week and called it “The Grander Chessboard.” The title is a nod to Brzezinski and his ‘Grand Chessboard’, but with the added dimension of political economy grafted onto interpretations of geopolitics. My thesis? Wars are not fought over democracy, or values, or civilisational destiny. They are fought over rent. Once you conceptualise this, the grand chessboard of geopolitics becomes understandable on a larger scale. Watch it on Rumble here: https://rumble.com/v7edtzg-the-grander-chessboard-geopolitics-rent-and-global-conflict-with-peter-smit.html I want to thank Alanna Hartzok, President of the International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade, for encouraging me to do this and present my thesis and for the historical grounding she brought to the discussion. More on the IU here: https://theiu.org/ What rent actually isEconomic rent is income that comes from owning something, not from making something. Land, minerals, strategic geography, but also currency creation, monetary flow, legal codes, intellectual property. None of it is produced. All of it is captured. Once you can see rent for what it is, the pattern behind most modern wars stops being mysterious. Wars are elite investmentsNations do not go to war for democracy or free markets. They go to war to secure the right to extract rent, and the returns on that investment flow to a small number of families and firms holding the post-conflict contracts, not to the public that paid for it in blood and taxes. Goering said as much to American army psychologist Douglas Kelley at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal: populations can always be dragged into war; you just need to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lacking patriotism. Mason Gaffney wrote about rent-seeking in its “grosser sense” essay: the straightforward seizure of rent-bearing assets by force and state capture. Smedley Butler called war a racket a century ago. Mill saw the spirit of monopoly as pure enmity. None of this is new. My attempt was to map this onto today’s flashpoints. Correlates of War dataThe academic literature on conflict gives us a shortlist of drivers: information asymmetry, greed and grievance, rent-seeking behaviour, liquid capital mobility among elites, the military-industrial complex, proxy effects, transnational ethnic networks, and elites who are financially decoupled from the population they nominally govern, propped up by external rents rather than domestic consent. That decoupling shows up again and again in the flashpoints below. Iran, Gaza, LebanonIran has spent two hundred years as a resource colony, first for Britain and Russia, its oil rents skimmed for foreign empires and local oligarchs. Mossadegh tried to nationalise that oil and return the rent to Iranian citizens in 1951. Two years later MI6 and the CIA removed him and installed the Shah and SAVAK. That single act of rent theft still shapes the sanctions regime today, while China now quietly buys most of Iran’s oil through shadow networks. A fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran sits on the fourth-largest oil reserves and second-largest gas reserves on the planet. Pentagon strategist Eldridge Colby has been open about the logic behind the current administration’s posture: cut Iranian oil, gain leverage over China, isolate Russia. Gaza and the West Bank read the same way through a Georgist lens. Land values inside Israel have been driven skyward by speculative investment, which squeezes ordinary living standards and creates a direct incentive for Israelis to seize from Palestinians. The offshore gas reserves off Gaza can only be developed once there is peace, a Roman peace of expulsion or desolation for the Palestinians. And Israel’s grip on Lebanon’s Litani River is textbook Georgist choke-point control, resource access used as leverage rather than shared as a common good. Ukraine and RussiaUkraine sits on Chernozem, black earth up to fourteen feet deep, some of the most productive farmland anywhere, plus the mineral wealth of the Donbas. Russia’s invasion is tangled up with genuine grievances over the treatment of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, and with a hard calculation about future resource revenue. But the deeper game, in my view, is not really about Ukraine at all. Western strategy is aimed at China, and Ukraine is the terrain on which Russia gets destabilised and boxed in so that Beijing loses a reliable partner and access to natural rescources. The conflict has been externally funded for well over a decade now, long enough to decouple the Ukrainian regime from a population that, like most populations, would rather not be at war. AfricaPatrice Lumumba announced in 1960 that Congo’s mineral wealth, above all its copper, would belong to Congolese citizens. Belgian mining interests and the CIA had him dead within months. Compare that with Botswana and Namibia, which managed to capture some of their resource rent and built noticeably better living standards as a result, against Libya, which had a relatively high standard of living under Gaddafi and then, after 2011, open slave markets and state collapse. Captain Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso is the live example right now of a leader redirecting resource rent into schools and hospitals rather than letting it leak abroad. The pattern holds wherever you look. Capture the rent for the public, and outcomes improve. Lose it, and conflict and poverty follow. Venezuela and GreenlandWashington’s interest in Venezuelan oil looks like a rehearsal for the coming confrontation with Iran, then China. Trump’s fixation on Greenland is the same logic played out further north, securing resources ahead of a decade-long contest with China. Companies are already scouting drilling prospects there, which may well be the opening move in prising Greenland loose from Denmark. Different geography, same chessboard. The West itselfWhen the Soviet Union collapsed, it removed the one discipline that had forced Western elites to keep up appearances: welfare states, union wages, public infrastructure, all maintained partly to look superior to the USSR. Once that pressure vanished, so did the restraint. Michael Hudson has traced how financial power now runs through real estate, natural resource rents, and monopoly rents rather than productive investment. Mariana Mazzucato put it precisely: value-extracting activities came to masquerade as value-creating activities, until rent got confused with profit. Add stagnating wages, elites (AI money, Musk-scale wealth) increasingly decoupled from the domestic economy, political systems captured on both sides of the aisle so there is no genuine choice, rising ethnic tension without any shared prosperity to dampen it, and transnational elites who benefit from amplifying the fractures. The West’s own rentier economy is quietly generating the conditions for its own instability and fall. The remedyThe Georgist case is not complicated. Tax rent instead of labour. Rent cannot be passed on the way a tax on wages or production can. Taxing it kills speculation, rewards actual production, and builds an honest economy on the foundations laid by the physiocrats, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Henry George. Tax all rent properly and you remove the financial incentive for war itself, because neither domestic elites nor external actors can profit from conflict once the rent is captured publicly. Strangle the unearned rent, and you strangle the money that fuels the madness. Older than GeorgeAlanna brought something to this conversation I want to record properly. She pointed to the Native American scholar John Mohawk, who traced the roots of the West’s problems not to Columbus but to the British enclosures, and she recited the old enclosures poem: the law hangs the man or woman who steals a goose from off the commons, but lets the greater rascal loose that steals the commons from the goose. I’d add Thomas Spence to that lineage. In the late 1700s in Newcastle, Spence was jailed for pamphlets arguing that every parish should collect land rent as community revenue and redistribute it for public good. He was making George’s argument a century before George made it. Alanna calls Georgism a perennial wisdom teaching, the intuitive human sense that the earth is a birthright held in common, with land value tax simply the policy mechanism for honouring that ethic. I tend to call it smart socialism: it delivers the outcome socialism promises without the implementation problems that sank it. How I got hereI did not arrive at Georgism through economics. I arrived through ecology. Years of fieldwork taught me that old English commons consistently carried more biodiversity than private land or even government, or charity-owned nature reserves. I watched conservation fundraising simply inflate land prices; sub-marginal land in Britain has risen roughly 150-fold since the 1970s, largely on the back of nature investment, a trend now documented in my recent British Wildlife Journal article and here.
You cannot save nature, however much money you raise, because the landlord will always extract it from you in the end. Rewilding does not need heavy human management. It needs large herbivores, a full ecological system, at the right densities and the humility to leave the rest alone. Land economics is the piece the conservation movement consistently ignores, and it attracts the wrath of the landowner mafia who control so much of political discourse and government policy. It is Georgism that is the structural fix to this problem at scale. The message underneath all of it is the same one Thomas Spence was jailed for two centuries ago: Use the unearned income as shared wealth, the rent of the commons, and leave people their earned income. Take the tax off wages and off the work people actually do, remove the incentive to lie, cheat and steal and to send out sons to die in foreign lands More on the IU’s work at: https://theiu.org/ Proff Mason Gaffney inspired this work in his original 1988 lecture https://www.progress.org/wiki/gaffney-rent-seeking-global-conflict/ My other essays on Geopolitics:
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