January 23rd, 2026
All this high-falutin’ talk about abstract concepts doesn’t address the “brass tacks” issue: what are the verbs? What does the user do? They won’t have any options like “Do this abstract thing” or “Advance the Westphalian World Order”. The actual verbs will all be policy decisions regarding countries. Here we come to the need to recruit third countries to join the user’s coalition. The US starts off with a huge coalition, but for the fact that Mr. Trump has done everything possible to destroy it. China is building a coalition based on common resentment among the less-developed nations of “the Western order”. That resentment is not really against the Westphalian system, the rule of law, or any of the other central concepts of the Westphalian system; it’s directed more at the restrictions that institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund place on these countries, restrictions that make it harder for dictators to steal the money. Still, China has been effective at stoking resentment of those nosey Western rules.
Right now there are a ton of Western international institutions: military alliances, bases in foreign countries, free trade associations, group banks, monetary unions, and so forth. China is building a competing set of institutions and attempting to entice other nations to join its institutions. Later it will pressue them to leave the Western institutions.
The basic competition in the game, then, is to try to recruit lots of countries to be on your team, and prevent them from joining China’s team. The goal is not primarily military but economic. Neither side wants to fight a war — that would be too destructive. But they can wage economic battle, using sanctions, restrictions on exports, and tariffs to weaken the opposing side. One of China’s primary goals is to replace the dollar as the primary currency of international trade with the yuan. The US gets about 1 percentage point of GDP growth every year because of the dominance of the dollar. If the yuan can supplant the dollar, that percentage point will go to China, not the US.
This means that the game will have a LOT of global variables. Not four globals, as with Le Morte d’Arthur, but dozens, because we’ll need some for every country: affinity towards US, affinity for China, imports from US, imports from China, exports to each, and a set of flags indicating which international institutions each country belongs to. I’ll have to provide a class definition at some point. Ugh, this is going to be messy.
It also means that the game must provide an encounter for each and every one of the changes that takes place. That’s good, since we want a lot of encounters, but it could easily become tedious. Accordingly, I think I’ll have to limit the number of active countries — but this could bias the game in favor of the West. If I include only the 30 richest nations, that list will be dominated by the West. Perhaps I could include the most populous nations. Perhaps I could group small countries together, such as ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) or Mercosur, the South American trade pact. I expect that I’ll be fiddling around with the member country list for a long time. Whatever I decide, I cannot include all 192 of the world’s countries.
Oh, my frontal lobe is aching...