Political analyst Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, looks at the Trump state visit in Beijing. While Trump was losing his poker game, he should have been playing Pokémon, he explains in the Wire China.
Victor Shih:
It is not entirely wrong to think of Great Power politics as a card game, as Trump at times does. However, it is not a poker game, where hands are dealt randomly, and players both try to read the cards held by other players and, at times, bluff their way to victory.
The card game of geopolitics is in fact more akin to the Pokemon card game, where players still need to guess or collect intelligence on a competitor’s hand, but have much more discretion than in poker to expend resources and make tradeoffs in order to build the best position they can relative to their competitors.
The evidence on display in Beijing last week was that China has done this expertly — while the Trump administration still needs to realize that they are not even playing the right card game.
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