Recently, a new game named Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order entered GMT Games’ P500 list. This is the fourth in a series of articles talking about different aspects of the game.

In this installment, we focus on the dimensions of the post-Cold War contest between Authoritarianism and Democracy.

From the profile page: Order & Opportunity is a 2 to 4 player game with a dedicated solitaire system about the making of the post-Cold War world order covering the first decades of the 21^st century. In the game, the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union compete over the control of the agenda and ultimately over victory points in the dimensions of economic, political, cultural, and security power projection. Order & Opportunity combines card-driven, asymmetric game play to produce a topical and thematic historical game on a global scale. The game offers a distinctive and captivating play experience at every one of its player counts.

From One Struggle to the Next

Even if a simplification, it is tempting to conceive of recent world history as a series of struggles. The Second World War is sometimes seen, in part, as a struggle between Democracy and Fascism. The Cold War, in turn, was a “twilight struggle” between Democracy and Communism.

But what about the post-Cold War period?

With the War on Terror looking large in our collective memories of the decades since the 9/11, for many one essential post-Cold War struggle is one between Democracy and Islamist terrorism.

A second central struggle of the still young post-Cold War period is turning out be that between Democracy and Authoritarianism. This takes us to the distinction between the Democratic and Authoritarian powers in Order & Opportunity.

Russia: Reassertion or Integration

Russia under Vladimir Putin feels like a central pace-setter of the mood in the post-Cold War period. Order & Opportunity starts in the early 2000s in part because it marks Putin’s ascension to power in Russia and, with that, the re-emergence of a globally more assertive Russia.

In his 2010 book, The Journey,the British Prime Minister Tony Blair observed of Russia and Vladimir Putin:

When Russia was the Soviet Union, although it had the wrong system of government and economy, it was nevertheless a power; it was treated with respect, even feared. It counted. I understood how glasnost, perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall may have liberated Russia from Communism, but it also made it seem to lose its position in the world. Yeltsin, for all his strengths, was not someone capable of regaining that position. Putin was; he is quintessentially a nationalist.

(Tony Blair, A Journey)

Later on, Blair wrote:

Vladimir and I walked through the beautiful corridors of the magnificent nineteenth-century building. In a similar situation in the UK, I would have been greeting people, shaking hands, engaging and being engaged; with Vladimir I noticed people fell back as he approached, not in fear or anything; but a little in awe and with reverence. It was a tsar-like moment and I thought: Hmm, their politics really isn’t like ours at all.

If Putin was to re-assert Russia’s position in the world, one central tasks was that of shoring up Russia’s economy. Fiona Hill, analyst, book author, and former advisor to multiple US presidents, including most recently the Trump administration, described the options open to Vladimir Putin as he took the reigns of Russia in the early 2000s. In an interview with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein Show, Hill observed that:

I would say that up until 2011 and really the aftermath of the global economic crisis, Putin was very much preoccupied with building up the Russian state, spreading the wealth, increasing prosperity for the inner circle of oligarchs and the broader circle of business people around him, for ordinary Russians.

[Putin] wanted, actually, to have Russia recognized as a viable part of the G8, as it was then, and perhaps on track to be the fifth largest economy in the world, a far cry from where it is now. And then somewhere along the line, we can probably point to a period around 2007, which is on the eve of the global economic crisis — all the debt has been purged off of the Russian state, Russia is looking pretty solvent. They’re starting to build up the military.

It seems, then, that in the early 2000s, Putin had all options open for the future of Russia. Also many in the West hope and believe that Putin will choose the route of economic development and integration with the West and the global economy generally.

Alongside the route of integration, there were and are multiple more confrontational routes available to Russia, both, in real life and in Order & Opportunity. Again, as Fiona Hill describes:

Putin then sort of makes a decision that Russia isn’t just going to sit idly by on the world stage, that it wants to — he wants to restore Russia’s great power. He makes the infamous Munich Security Conference speech [in 2007], basically saying he’s not going to put up with a unipolar world anymore, and certainly not the expansion of NATO. He’s putting the world on notice.

The 2020 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament of Great Britain observed a similar shift:

The dissolution of the USSR was a time of hope in the West. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Western thinking was, if not to integrate Russia fully, at least to ensure that it became a partner. By the mid-2000s, it was clear that this had not been successful. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 demonstrated that Russia under President Putin had moved from potential partner to established threat.

(Russia, Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament)

What appears have transpired then was a multi-pronged Russian approach to “irregular” “political warfare” aimed at disrupting opponents. In a series of reports on Russia’s foreign influence operations titled The Kremlin Playbook, Heather A. Conley and colleagues at the Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) argued that the strategy involved what has sometimes been referred to as “strategic corruption” and “elite capture”:

The Kremlin has developed a pattern of malign influence across Europe. … This network of political and economic connections ― an “unvirtuous” cycle of influence — thrives on corruption and the exploitation of governance gaps in key markets and institutions. Ultimately, the aim is to weaken and destroy democratic systems from within.

(The Kremlin Playbook 2, CSIS)

Ultimately, Order & Opportunity leaves it up to the players of the game, which tools they wish to make use of to pursue their strategies in the game as the Russia player.

China: From a Century of Humiliation to a Great Rejuvenation

The “Century of Humiliation” ― a period between 1839 and 1949 when China‟s government lost control over large portions of its territory at the hands of foreigners — is a key element of modern China‟s founding narrative.

(Alison A. Kaufman, China Analyst at Center for Naval Analyses, in a US-China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing in 2011)

Previously in this article series, we talked at some length about the “dislocations” caused by the excesses of economic globalization in developed economies of the global West. In China the same developments have generally recognized to have led to an immense uplift that has made China a “manufacturing giant” of the world.

In an expression of China’s “peaceful rise”, as China’s former paramount leader Hu Jintao (in office 2002-2012) labeled it, China’s foreign policy posture in the post-Cold War period long remained somewhat modest.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has began to raise questions about the side China might take in what has began to seem like a global struggle between Democracy and Authoritarianism. Even before, however, Western analysts had been nervous about the nature and impact of China’s so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that, many have believed, might generate economic and therefore political dependency of third countries on China. As an online publication from the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it:

The BRI may also win China political gains. Beijing may be able to exploit its financial largesse to influence partner country policies to align with its own interests, particularly in certain countries in Central and South Asia that lack good governance and robust rule of law.

(How Will the Belt and Road Initiative Advance China’s Interests?, Center for Strategic and International Studies)

Also, in the military dimension China has gradually grown more, if you like, extroverted. Beginning with the Chinese participation in United Nations peace-keeping efforts in Africa for the first time already in the late 80s, more recently, China established its first overseas base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in 2017. More recent examples still include resurfacing tensions around Taiwan, and, perhaps most visibly, the artificial island construction and other related activities in the South China Sea — the setting of Harold Buchanan’s recent game Flashpoint: South China Sea.

As with Russia, Order & Opportunity delegates the decision to the players as to whether an integrative or a confrontational course will be pursued by Russia and China in the game.

Polarization and Personalist Authoritarianism

In the previous insideGMT articles on Order & Opportunity we have talked about the Consequences mechanic. In the case of democracies, the thematic basis for that mechanic was the idea that, in the post-Cold War period, political and military “unilateralism” has had the decline of the rules-based world order on the one hand and global terrorist backlash on the other. In the economic realm, the excesses of economic globalization have fed populist discontent at home.

The same mechanic is in use for the authoritarian powers, but there it denotes thematically different aspects.

In the Chinese context, international relations scholars have long talked about the so-called “social volcano” effect. In the words of a scholar, “social volcano” denotes the idea that there is:

an “inequality-conflict link,” or the idea that rising inequality may lead to a “social volcano” of class conflicts, social movements, violent rebellion, or even revolution.

(Ya Wen Lei, Revisiting China’s Social Volcano)

It was believed that China’s entry into the WTO, which happened under the Clinton administration in 2001, would see China integrate into the rules-based world order which would eventually lead to a transformation of the communist state from within. This mirrors the classic, longer standing argument that free trade and increasing prosperity would encourage the development of democracy world wide. Parallel hopes were entertained about Russia, as discussed above.

Parallel to the emergence of a more assertive stance, both in Russia and China, analysts have observed an internal shift from collectivist to a more personalist form of authoritarianism. In Russia Vladimir Putin, and in China the current paramount leader Xi Jingpin (in office since 2012), have altered established practices about succession and the length of presidential terms concentrating power to themselves and a smaller group of followers.

As will be discussed in more detail in the next article, at least in Russia, the tightening personalist grip on power has been in part attributed to the fear of a so-called “color revolution”, that have occurred in a number of former Soviet states, also reaching Moscow.

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Previous Articles:

Order & Opportunity: A Perspective to the Post-Cold War Period

Order & Opportunity: Victory

Order & Opportunity: From Post-Ideological to Ideological Again