Bishop to e6.
That was the name of the 17th move in what is commonly referred to as “The Game of the Century” when, on Oct. 17, 1956, 13-year-old Bobby Fischer beat chess master Donald Byrne, 26, and turned the chess world upside down. Fischer’s move offered a sacrifice of his queen, which Byrne accepted, but then Fischer followed with a series of planned, precise attack moves ultimately leading to a checkmate.
When Fisher made that move, those familiar with chess who were stuck in conventional paradigms, common strategies and established protocols gasped in horror as they clearly realized the young prodigy had lost his mind, his nerve, or both. Others, perhaps not as learned, wondered what he might be up to without having a clue. Then there would have been the original, unorthodox thinkers of their time who may have dropped their jaws, fallen back in their seats and thought, “Oh my God, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. This is brilliant.”
Since he has taken office,
President Trump not only has metaphorically translated Fischer’s insightful, creative boldness into his foreign policy, he has done so in cascading tiles of fresh, previously unimaginable moves.
For the eight years prior to President Trump taking office, we had an American apologist in the White House. Prior to that, we had eight years of a president who was part international appeaser and part obsessed with a desert wasteland called Iraq. Neither of them were ambitious, concerned or courageous enough to address glaring problems in the world order that were eroding America’s prominence and strength.
And now here comes the America-First Donald J. Trump, taking on every single issue and adversary left alone by his predecessors to fester and strengthen.
The president has opened up multiple advances on multiple diplomatic and military fronts. So radical are the moves that it is hard to grasp that he has been in office only slightly more than 500 days.
Regarding China, since the “Nixon opening” in 1972, administration after administration has been obsessed with expanding our trading relationship with that sleeping giant of which Napoleon warned “let her sleep. For when she wakes she will move the world.” Decades later, non-communist but highly fascist, China has weaponized its economy to take advantage of Western avarice for cheaply made products. Today it owns nearly $2 trillion of U.S. debt, while our trade deficit with it was approximately $367 billion in 2017.
President Trump has had the courage to stand athwart free-trade fanatics (an aside: we never have had free trade with China) and those obsessed with appeasing the Chinese so as to not risk conflict. His initial moves on both tariffs and tone seem to have gotten their attention. With China wide awake and not going back to sleep, President Trump is asserting American power to make sure China stops moving our world.
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