Back in my schooldays a favourite treat was being taken by my father to chess exhibition matches. Striding from board to board behind long wooden trestle tables, the chess masters and grandmasters would play perhaps a dozen games simultaneously. They had time to pause only briefly at each board, but they rarely lost. A (junior) master once offered me a draw. Decades later, I still recall the elation.
Simultaneous chess offers a useful metaphor for Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy. The US president might have chosen to take a cautious, sequential approach to the lengthy list of global challenges: Iraq first; then Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda; Iran next; climate change, Russia and nuclear proliferation some way down the track; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict towards the end of his term.
Read Full Article »