Foreign policy experts have long been taught to see the world as a chessboard, analyzing the decisions of great powers and anticipating rival states’ reactions in a continual game of strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century British statesmen openly embraced this metaphor, calling their contest with Russia in Central Asia “the Great Game.” Today, the tv show Game of Thrones offers a particularly
gory and irresistible version of geopolitics as a continual competition among contending kingdoms.
Think of a standard map of the world, showing the borders and capitals of the world’s 190-odd countries. That is the chessboard view. Now think of a map of the world at night, with the lit-up bursts of cities and the dark swaths of wilderness. Those corridors of light mark roads, cars, houses, and offices; they mark the networks of human relationships, where families and workers and travelers come together. That is the web view. It is a map not of separation, marking off boundaries of sovereign power, but of connection.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER is President and CEO of New America. This essay is adapted
from her forthcoming book, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a
Networked World (Yale University Press, 2017). Follow her on Twitter @SlaughterAM.
This article appeared in the Foreign Affairs 2016 November/December edition. It is republished here with permission.
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Copyright © 2016 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.