The Ten Rules governing how our new world really works (Rule 3: Gaming Out Chess Players)
Introduction: Machiavelli Attempts a Comeback
The mirror opposite of gaming out lunatics is the imperative for analysts of the world to accurately assess chess players—foreign policy actors playing the long game, possessing fixed strategic goals, even as they use whatever tactical means that come to hand to achieve them. Patient, low-key, but implacable, chess players do that rarest of things: They actually think ahead and are not prisoners of short-term day-to-day events, conditioning all they do in furtherance of their long-term strategy.
President Vladimir Putin is a perfect modern-day example of a chess player, as all the many devious tactics he pursues ultimately amount to a very single-minded effort to restore Russian greatness, often by blunting the West’s drives into what he sees as Russia’s sphere of influence in the countries that surround it. As such, Putin’s behaviour is eminently explicable, rational, and is easy to assess, but only if the analyst starts with the strategic end goal and works backwards.
Gaming out chess players is the next major rule in mastering understanding our new world. While very hard to spot, the reward for gaming out chess players is as great as is the difficulty in identifying them. But it is worth the intellectual bother. For if the ultimate goals of a chess player can be determined, all that they do to achieve them along the way makes eminent sense and can be foreseen.
Following on from the Crusades, the western world entered a period of cultural and political regeneration we now call the Renaissance. As is true for most eras, it was more politically chaotic, brutal and bloody than it seems in retrospect. In the confusing, uncertain milieu of early sixteenth-century northern Italy, a man arose who fit the tenor of his times.
The year 1513 found Niccolo Machiavelli in desperate straits. True, the Italian Renaissance historian, philosopher, humanist, dramatist, and writer had just about escaped execution following his deposition from a major position of authority in the Florentine Republic. But beyond all the sidelights that bedecked his glittering CV, Machiavelli’s day job was beyond question as a politician and diplomat. And while he still had his life, Machiavelli had just been unceremoniously bounced into enforced retirement at his country estate of Saint Andrea outside of Florence, following the disastrous August 1512 defeat of the Florentines at the Battle of Prato at the hands of the Medici family (erstwhile rulers of the city-state) and their Spanish allies, with the backing of Pope Julius II.
Following the cataclysmic setback, the Republic was disbanded as the Medici were returned to power, and Machiavelli was consequently put out to pasture. For a man used to being in the thick of it, this premature ending of what had been a bejewelled career rankled his very soul.
Machiavelli responded to this huge setback in a surprisingly modern way: He decided to write a book, detailing all that he had learned about politics through the great tumult of the Renaissance, an age in which alliances kaleidoscopically changed as fragile governments rose and fell with startling speed. In such a violent and unsure world, Machiavelli’s teachings in The Prince were baldly conditioned to reflect nothing more and nothing less than the acquisition and retention of power—no small feat in the chaotic northern Italian world of the sixteenth century. For him, only those with a coherent long-term strategy—and the will to follow it through tactically, whatever the cost—were likely to survive and thrive in those cutthroat days.
However, The Prince is about far more than political theory. Practically, it was an exercise in marketing, a way to keep Machiavelli’s name before the educated public of his time and more importantly get the attention of the new masters of northern Italy. In essence, The Prince amounts to a high-brow job application. It was with these very self-interested goals in mind that Machiavelli sat down to write The Prince, which has become the bible of realpolitik, supposedly detailing how the world really works, as opposed to how we might like it to.
In the end, Machiavelli utterly failed in his personal campaign to make himself a player in Italian politics again; despite the publication of The Prince, he never again managed to really escape his imposed exile and secure a major political role on the Renaissance stage. However, in The Prince, he did mange to gain something more: Immortality as a great political thinker. He particularly won the admiration of those who methodically go about securing their political goals; for these chess players, Machiavelli’s Prince has become the ur-text where all true thinking about modern-day politics begins.
There is only one problem with this conventional narrative of the supposedly great Italian thinker: In his own time and place, Machiavelli proved to be not much of a chess player at all. For when it came to evaluating who the greatest statesman/chess player of his own age was, he analytically got things entirely wrong.
Beguiled by the dark glamour of Cesare Borgia, the Bond villain of Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli saw this attractive evil charmer as the man of the moment, as all the while the real chess player of his time, Pope Julius II, set disregarded in front of his nose. The supposedly great manipulator utterly failed to make the correct political risk call in his own time, echoing our contemporary problems identifying chess players—those who possess stable, long-term strategic goals, using varied tactics to flexibly attain them.
For if ‘lunatics’ have thrown political risk analysts since time began, the other extreme—ignoring long-term, well-ordered strategies and strategists—is the mirror-image sin. Too often, we view chess players as something less, allowing the day-to-day noise of the world to obscure long-held and highly rational patterns of thought and the goals of these highly disciplined political actors. Spotting chess players early on gives a political analyst a huge advantage in gleaning what the future holds. But, as proved the case for the supposedly wily Machiavelli, identifying chess players is a daunting task.
Machiavelli Backs the Wrong Horse
Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, the third child and first son of a prosperous attorney. Relatively early on, his intellectual gifts were recognised by the city-state; in the decade between 1500-1510, he served as senior Florentine diplomatic emissary on missions to the Papacy in Rome, the French court of Louis XII, and the powerful Spanish king. Closer to home, from 1503-1506, he was responsible for raising and training Florence’s militia; he believed that the city-state must be defended by an army of its own citizens, rather than risk protection from unreliable mercenaries. A high point of his career came in 1509, when Florentine troops under his command defeated the rival city-state of Pisa.
However, his triumph proved to be short lived. With the coming of the disastrous and decisive Battle of Prato in 1512, the Florentine Republic—to which Machiavelli had given his best years of service—was no more. Following their resumption of power, in 1513 the victorious Medici family accused Machiavelli of conspiracy and had him imprisoned. During his incarceration—as was the custom of the time—he was tortured by being hanged from his wrists, a process that dislocated his shoulders. However, despite the excruciating pain, Machiavelli continued to deny his crime, and after three weeks he was released from prison and allowed to return to his country estate. But you cannot keep a good Renaissance man down. It was from here that he almost immediately began to plot his political comeback, with The Prince serving as a central part of his strategy.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that, while I am a rather well-known card-carrying member of the realist club, I find The Prince—the oft-quoted key text underpinning my school of thought—to be a highly disappointing work. The aphorisms passing for political theory in the book strike me not as scandalous, as so many others have found them, but worse, as terribly obvious, and the text itself is poorly written. It is only when the supposed grand master of chess players uses examples from his own storied time to buttress his points that the book comes vividly to life. The Prince is one of those books that is honoured in the breach, quoted extensively, but the dirty secret is that it is not really read very much. Given the genuine as opposed to the reputed quality of the work, that may be for the best.
As a result of the political chaos that raged all around him, it is little wonder that Machiavelli focused in The Prince on the immeasurable political benefits of security and stability. The whole of the work merely serves as a handbook as to how these ultimate political goals can be achieved, using various tactical strategies depending on differing political circumstances. For example, Machiavelli counsels that newly enthroned princes (and most modern-day politicians) must first stabilise their power base if they are ultimately build an enduring power structure. As we shall see, this is a point of view that has been adopted by chess players as diverse as George Washington and Julius II as a central focus of their strategy.
In true realist, chess player fashion, Machiavelli is agnostic about the tactics that must be used by a prince to stabilise power in his new realm. To put it in today’s terms, it is not a question of relying on mantras, such as ‘always use force first’ (favoured by Neo-conservatives in America) or ‘always use diplomacy first’ (a central American Wilsonian adage). Rather, Machiavelli and most realists, saying that ‘it depends on the circumstances’ consider force and diplomacy, not as ends in themselves, but merely means that are employed to further the ultimate goal of political stability.
It is due to this agnosticism about means, shocking for reasons that pass my understanding, that Machiavelli has horrified his critics for centuries. He has been vilified as teaching evil and, worse still, propounding evil policy recommendations to tyrants throughout history, enabling them to maintain their wicked positions. The phrase ‘machiavellian’ has entered English usage as a highly pejorative term, connoting one at ease with political deceit, deviousness, and amoral realpolitik, a person having few moral scruples in attaining the nirvana of political or personal success.
But this ghost story simplification makes a cartoon of what the man truly thought, dismissing the chess player’s credo that to attain the magical, maddeningly elusive strategic end of stability, the means must be varied and often harsh. And while it is true that unutterably evil men such as Stalin have been attracted to Machiavelli, so too have highly decent, moral statesmen such as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who used chess player precepts to forge the success of the fledgling American Republic. The Prince is not immoral; instead, it is the personal nature of the leader reading it—rather than the text itself—that determines whether good or evil outcomes will flow from its amoral attempt to illuminate how the world of politics really works.
The only major idea behind such chess playing—and it is certainly an important one—is the acquisition and retention of political power. While modern-day American Wilsonians and Neo-conservatives have more in common with the ‘lunatics’ we sketched out in our prior article—believing that a set of extra-worldly ideas should govern political action—realist chess players refute Plato, insisting that an imaginary ideal society founded on such ethereal principles is simply not a model by which a leader in the real world should attempt to guide his reign.
Chess players wearily (if not altogether happily) accept that human nature is largely immutable, and that in practice human beings are driven by passions as much as by reason. While they may bemoan this reality, crucially they do not think they can change it; such an idea is often the downfall of supposedly more ‘moral’ political creeds that are endlessly doomed to failure because of this fundamental misreading of what human beings are actually like.
No, it is not for its brave bleakness that I am critical of The Prince; actually that is the quality of the book that I most admire. It is rather that, in his own time, Machiavelli—like so many of his detractors throughout the ages—confused evil with effectiveness, seeing the charismatically dysfunctional Cesare Borgia as his ideal model prince rather than the far less morally grotesque (and far more politically successful) Pope Julius II as the true exemplar of the chess-playing creed.
For chess playing is not ultimately about pantomime villainy, but rather about effectiveness in attaining and retaining political power over the long term. Instead, Machiavelli was as much an emotional sort as the many he disparaged; enamoured of the dark side of Borgia’s glamour, he neglected to look dispassionately at the political record on the ground in Renaissance Italy. In essence, for all his bombast, the father of modern political thought proved himself a dreadful political risk analyst.
Cesare Borgia’s Overrated Bond Villain Lustre
Cesare Borgia was an Italian nobleman, politician, and one-time cardinal in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His picaresque, swashbuckling struggle for power served as a primary inspiration for The Prince; indeed, Machiavelli first planned to dedicate the book to his idol, somehow seeing in all his attractive villainy the ideal exemplar of his views. While serving on a diplomatic mission for Florence from October 1502 to January 1503, Machiavelli came to know Borgia, then at the height of his power.
His dark, if compelling, reputation made Cesare a legend of sorts, even in his own time. Contemporaneously, he was accused by his many enemies of adultery, incest, simony (selling Church offices), theft, bribery, and murder, probably being guilty of most of these lurid crimes. Even for a violent time when almost anything went, Borgia stands out as a symbol of the darker side of humanity. Coupled with his undeniable talents and charm, he cuts a compelling figure across the centuries. It is easy to see why Machiavelli fell for him—easy, but wrong.
Born in Rome in 1475 or 1476, Cesare was the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, who reigned as pontiff from 1492-1503. Alexander was the first pope to openly recognise his progeny, though they were born out of wedlock. In his ceaseless efforts to promote the position of his children (he had several) and his family, Alexander had Cesare made an improbable Cardinal at the tender age of eighteen, after his own election to the papacy.
At the same time as Cesare was made a prince of the church, his older brother, Giovanni, was made captain general of the military forces of the Papacy, an appointment his younger brother viewed with great envy and resentment. Giovanni was mysteriously assassinated in 1497; Cesare may well have killed him for multiple reasons.
Chafing at a life in the church, Cesare had always been more desirous of a career in the military. With Giovanni out of the way, such a road became open to him. Also, Giovanni and Cesare shared a long-term mistress, Sancha of Aragon, scandalously the wife of their younger brother Gioffre. With the demise of Giovanni, Cesare had at one stroke removed the major obstacle to both his professional and personal life. Following these murky events, in August 1498 he became the first person in history to resign a cardinalcy as his attention turned to earthlier forms of power.
His adoring father established Cesare as a prince in his own right, with territory carved out of the Papal States that dominated the politics of central Italy. In such a capacity, Cesare briefly reigned from 1498-1503. He was appointed commander of the papal armies in place of his deceased brother and was also sent a significant detachment of Swiss mercenaries by the king of France to secure his new possessions. Cesare made an advantageous marriage to a French princess, Charlotte d’Albret, in order to cement continuing support for his military campaigns.
However, Cesare’s reign—try as he might to change this basic political reality—remained dependent on his father’s ability as pope to dispense patronage and on his family’s shaky alliance with France, which invaded Italy in 1499. Cesare never acquired the magic elixir of local political legitimacy for his rule. His fragile hold on power thus could never be the basis for long-term stability, the lodestone of all chess players.
What he lacked in legitimacy, Cesare tried to make up for in cruelty. His military generals (or captains, as they were then called), fearing his rages, began plotting his removal. Using his considerable guile and charm, Cesare was publicly reconciled with his wayward captains, only to deceive them; turning about, he imprisoned and then executed them. Such blood-soaked actions managed to keep Cesare in power, but conversely made it clear that his hold on his newly-founded principality was highly precarious.
But Cesare was certainly more than merely an out-and-out villain (though he was surely that as well). A capable general and diplomat in an age that demanded it, his many gifts were simply not enough to keep his artificial domain together. Machiavelli, looking at Cesare through rose-coloured glasses, does make clear in The Prince that his continued, fundamental dependence on the goodwill of the papacy under the control of his father was the principal drawback of his reign.
And it was over this key political risk weakness that Cesare met his doom, proving himself anything but a first-class chess player. Alexander’s successor as pope, Pius III, died after a reign of only twenty-six days. Almost immediately, a new papal conclave was necessary. Into the void stepped Giuliano Della Rovere, who—unlike the stylish Cesare—actually knew how to get his way in the shark tank of Italian Renaissance politics. This genuine chess player was more than a match for Machiavelli’s tin idol.
Above all, Borgia was looking for a new pope who wouldn’t threaten his fragile principality. Luckily for him, given his father’s patronage network and the geographical proximity of his power base to Rome, Borgia assumed a critical role in anointing the new pontiff. However, it was over this crucial point that he fatally bungled things in a most inexpert manner.
Ahead of the papal conclave of October 1503, Della Rovere succeeded in duping Cesare into actually supporting his bid to be the new pope by offering him a much-needed bribe, assuring Borgia he could maintain command of the papal army, and solemnly vowing to continue Rome’s backing for Borgia policies in central Italy. Cesare, for once, proved as good as his word, delivering the crucial support of all 11 Spanish cardinals for Della Rovere. The conclave lasted only 10 hours—the shortest in history—before Della Rovere was almost unanimously named Pope Julius II.
But what Cesare could not see—a central point that Della Rovere perceived all too clearly—was that once his vital support had elevated Julius to the papacy, his rival’s goal of attaining power had been realised. From that new perch, maintaining power would be the new fixed strategic compass point for all of the new pope’s subsequent plans. As such, Cesare, who had proven so vital in elevating Della Rovere to the position as pope in the first place, now became an extreme liability in allowing Julius to secure his newly-won power.
So Julius did what any good chess player would have done, a fact that somehow eluded the analysis of Machiavelli himself: He pocketed the advantages of Cesare’s alliance up front, and then immediately repudiated his agreement upon his succession, becoming Borgia’s greatest enemy. Cesare never recovered from Julius’s political betrayal, losing his control over central Italy by the end of 1503.
Without papal support, Cesare’s rule on his own lasted a matter of mere months, with his lands reverting to Julius and the papacy itself, thereby securing the stability of the new pope’s reign. After this decisive betrayal, Borgia never managed to undo the damage that Julius’s treachery had done to his political chances. He eventually escaped to Spain, where he farmed himself out as a mercenary captain, meeting his demise there in battle in 1507. In the end, it is clear from this tale—in a way the clueless Machiavelli entirely missed—who the real chess player in early sixteenth century Italy actually was.
Julius Runs Rings Around Borgia
Often the wisdom of a good chess player secures other advantages for his people. This was certainly true in the case of Pope Julius II, the man to whom The Prince ought to have been dedicated by Machiavelli. In between pursuing his geo-strategic ends, Julius found time to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica, commissioning Michelangelo to paint the unutterably lovely Sistine Chapel along the way.
It is intellectually striking, following on from the failure of Cesare Borgia and the undiluted success of Pope Julius, that Machiavelli—the supposed grand theoretician—would damn him with such faint praise in The Prince, just as he stubbornly made rather wan allowances for his favourite, Borgia. Yet it was Julius, and not Cesare, who fulfilled Machiavelli’s key strategic imperative: He reinvigorated a state (in this case the papacy in terms of its temporal possessions), safeguarding its stability for the future.
Basically, lacking any sort of systemic argument for explaining why Julius rose and Borgia fell, Machiavelli falls back on the excuse given by all poor analysts: Bad luck is the reason he was so wrong. He laments the fall of Borgia, sorrowfully noting that he was overturned ‘from the extraordinary and extreme malignancy of fortune.’ Alexander VI, Cesare’s father and key patron, died in 1503 at exactly the moment Borgia himself was deathly ill and unable to effectively defend his realm.
Machiavelli slavishly accepts Borgia’s own account of his fall from grace, going so far as to recount in The Prince a personal conversation the two had regarding Borgia’s fate. ‘But he (Borgia) told me himself on the day on which Julius II was created (pope) that he had foreseen and provided for everything else that could happen on his father’s death, but had never anticipated that when his father died he too should be at death’s door.’
This terribly convenient excuse—wholly omitting Borgia’s disastrously being taken in by the wily Julius during the just-concluded conclave—is buttressed by Machiavelli’s assertion that we basically have to take his analytical word for things, still today a sure sign an analyst doesn’t have much of a factual argument. Incredibly, despite Borgia’s fall and Julius’s rise, Machiavelli, supposedly the doyen of chess players, comes to the ridiculous conclusion that ‘taken all these actions of the Duke (Borgia) together, I can still find no fault with him.’
As for Machiavelli’s judgment of Julius, at best it consists of grudging praise, leavened with the reverse side of the pallid argument he just made about Borgia: If Cesare was supremely unlucky, Julius, in turn, was smiled upon by the gods. While Machiavelli does admit that Julius, ‘more than any of his predecessors showed what a pope could effect with money and arms,’ his halting praise ends there. In The Prince, Machiavelli makes clear that he finds Julius impetuous and supremely lucky. He explains away Julius’s chess-playing success, noting that ‘the shortness of his life did not allow him to experience reverses.’ In fact, Julius reigned for nine years.
Machiavelli goes on, finding further fault with Julius’s seemingly sterling record as a statesman. ‘But if the times had overtaken him, rendering a cautious line of conduct necessary, his ruin must have ensued, since he never could have departed from those methods to which nature inclined him.’ So Julius was lucky because his one-note bold nature suited his adventurous times; otherwise he would have met with disaster. Frankly, such sour grapes don’t pass the laugh test as an argument.
Why was Machiavelli so down on Julius? The answer is simple. It was Julius who lent crucial support to Machiavelli’s key Medici and Spanish enemies, leading to their triumph at the Battle of Prato in August 1512 and the personal ruination of Machiavelli himself with the downfall of the Florentine Republic. Machiavelli rightly saw Julius as the author of his own demise. His gripe with Julius is about as far away from chess playing as it is possible to be: A very personal and emotional grudge got in the way of Machiavelli analysing his world correctly.
The supreme irony is that it was Machiavelli—the man who did more than any other in stressing the need for cold logic triumphing over more transient human feelings—who proved himself analytically incapable of being the chess player he urged the world’s princes to be.
The Prince With Julius as Hero
So let us here re-write the ending of The Prince, this time using Julius II as the proper hero of the piece.
Julius was born Giuliano Della Rovere around 1443. Like Cesare Borgia, his path to power was speeded along by close familial contacts to the papacy. Della Rovere was the much-loved nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, who took him under his wing as he rose through the Vatican ranks. Again eerily paralleling Borgia’s career, Della Rovere’s big break came when his uncle assumed the papacy in 1471 and he was made a bishop. Quickly ascending to the rank of cardinal, Della Rovere become Sixtus’s de facto Prime Minister, accruing great political influence in the Vatican. As such, between 1480-1484, Della Rovere made the diplomatic rounds, serving in the crucial position of papal legate to France.
Following the death of his uncle, Della Rovere assumed that he would succeed him. However, he was beaten out by Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, Cesare’s father, who assumed the title of Alexander VI. Della Rovere, incredulous at his humiliating defeat, never forgave Alexander, accusing him of wining the papacy through the corrupt practice of simony—selling church offices in order to get elected by the College of Cardinals.
Della Rovere was certainly not a very good loser; following Alexander’s succession, he fled to the safety of great power France—were he was well-regarded—to plot his next move. Della Rovere urged King Charles VIII to march on Rome, overthrowing the newly-elected Alexander. Charles invaded Italy, but Della Rovere’s machinations were thwarted when Charles was bought off by the equally conniving Alexander. However, with the death of his rival in 1503, Della Rovere sensed that his moment had come at last.
Rightly alarmed that the prospect of Della Rovere assuming the papacy, Cesare Borgia managed to temporarily block his family’s great rival, with the election of Pope Pius III. However, Pius only lasted twenty-six days, one of the shortest reigns in papal history. It was at this critical juncture that Della Rovere—in true chess-player fashion—deceived the supposedly worldly Cesare and ran rings around him diplomatically, securing the papal throne by means of bribery, both in terms of money and future promises. With Cesare’s crucial support, the conclave was one of the shortest in history, with Della Rovere winning on only the second ballot, taking all but two of the cardinals’ votes. He ascended to the papal throne as Julius II at the end of 1503.
Having secured power through first-rate intrigues, Julius now set about fulfilling the second chess-playing maxim: Retaining his power by strengthening his position, with political stability following on from this. Julius went about this in true chess-player fashion—methodically and over a long period of time. However, Julius never for a minute lost sight of his ultimate strategic goal: Ridding himself of the temporal powers in Italy that shackled his political authority, threatening to overwhelm him.
First, now that Cesare had outlasted his usefulness, Julius withdrew his political support from him in true machiavellian fashion, seeing to it that the Borgias would find it impossible to retain their political control over the Papal States of central Italy. Julius rightly reasoned that to fail to eradicate Cesare’s principality would have left the Vatican surrounded by Borgia possessions and himself at Cesare’s limited mercy.
Julius initiated a highly successful public relations campaign against the Borgias; let’s face it, he had a lot to work with. Julius thundered on about his dead rival Alexander, damning him with the searing judgment that he had desecrated the Holy Church as no one before him had done. Under pain of excommunication, Julius forbade anyone to speak or even think about Alexander again, though how he planned to actually enforce such a ban is open to question.
What is for certain is that Julius did not just defeat the Borgias—he eradicated them as any possible political threat to him. It is a telling sign of the Borgia’s political extinction that the Vatican apartments in which Alexander lived were not reopened, owing to Julius’s fearful curse, until the nineteenth century.
Second, having stabilised the Papal States surrounding the Holy See, Julius now brought peace to Rome itself. He managed to unify the often-fractious city, reconciling the powerful and constantly bickering Orsini and Colonna families. With this diplomatic coup, coupled with the un-doing of the Borgias, Julius’s domestic political position was now secure.
But Julius wanted to do more than merely safeguard what had been bequeathed to him with his election to the papacy; he was not nicknamed ‘The Warrior Pope’ for nothing. Looking northwards, Julius saw the Republic of Venice as his next target, gauging that its overthrow as the dominant local political actor in northern Italy was possible.
Over the next few years, the chess-playing pope doggedly set about that strategic task, always keeping his military campaigns highly localised, avoiding the fatal tendency to over-reach. Using all his diplomatic guile in allying himself with outside great powers France and the Holy Roman Empire, Julius ousted Venice from control of Faenza and Rimini before fighting the republic in 1506 over Perugia and Bologna. With the decisive Battle of Agnadello on May 14, 1509, Venice lost most of its other Italian possessions, paving the way for Julius to fill the strategic void.
However, in succeeding in his immediate aim of ousting Venice as the dominant northern Italian power, Julius had encouraged powerful outside forces such as his erstwhile ally France to become entangled in Italian domestic politics. As such, and quite logically if treacherously, Julius switched sides, joining a chastened Venice in now taking on the over-mighty French.
Julius’s final, calculating chess move was his effort to expel the French from Italy, a strategy that would have left him the dominant political force in both the northern and central portions of the peninsula. Allying with Venice, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain, Julius was successful in driving the French across the Alps. However, before he could profit from this last brilliant masterstroke, Julius died of fever in 1513. He left the Vatican immeasurably stronger, but without having succeeded in expelling all foreign forces from domestic Italian politics.
That, Niccolo, is what a real chess player looks like.
The Analytical Treasure That Comes From Identifying Chess Players
Julius fits the chess player profile in a final way, one that makes the job of a political risk analyst infinitely harder. As so often has been the case throughout history, chess players manage to cloak their dogged, disciplined strategies, hiding them in plain sight from a world that does not generally follow such fixed principles and cannot easily conceive of how others might be able to hold to a clear, fixed strategic line.
Beyond this intellectual incomprehension, chess players are devilishly hard to detect, as the din of the everyday world, the political noise we all have to contend with, so often obscures their longer-term machinations. For Julius this was particularly true. He could so easily hide his chess-playing stratagems, cloaking them in the considerable tumult and chaos that characterised Renaissance Italy. In our own time, we have the choice of reading literally hundreds of foreign policy articles on any given day, coupled with a media’s attention span that resembles a fruit fly’s, creating a perpetual short-term news cycle whose endless churn provides a perfect hiding place for those rare political actors with more fixed, longer-term policy strategies.
But despite the difficulty in spotting them, it is well worth the time to game out chess players, perhaps the rarest creatures in global politics. For once they are analytically spotted, the fixed, rational patterns that chess players live by means that a true understanding of them is possible, as well as a far better understanding of the world in which they live.