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

In this third article we’ll look at how to turn the post-ideological control of the media and other agendas, or Agenda Points, into a lasting legacy of Victory Points.

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.

Post-Ideological Politics and Economic Globalization

In the first insideGMT article on Order & Opportunity we talked about Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. While Fukuyama’s declaration may have been premature, the end of the Cold War did mean the end of the ideological rivalry between Communism and Democracy, and gave shape to the post-Cold War period, at least initially, as a post-ideological period.

In the second article, we considered the manner in which Order & Opportunity makes an argument about the nature of post-ideological politics in terms of the distinction between Agenda and Victory Points. In this third article, we look at some aspects in terms of which important ideological contrasts have returned in the post-Cold War period ― that is, we look at some of the ways it is possible to lose Victory Points in Order & Opportunity.

Let’s begin with an observation from the German journalist and correspondent for the New York Times, Anna Sauerbrey. She argued in her recent book that the post-Cold War, post-ideological politics and its makers have a peculiar, as if ahistorical, character:

As a matter of fact indeed, this generation, that grew up with the “end of history” of Francis Fukuyama, does not seem to be affected by the central historical events of their life time in any enduring way … [This generation is] pragmatic, history-less, free from economic and ideological system conflicts of the Cold War, grown up after the “end of history”. If you look at this generation through the lens of the events of its history, it does not afford any strong “interrelation”, no strong generational “narrative”.

(Anna Sauerbrey, Machtwechsel: Wie eine neue Politikgeneration das Land Verändert, my translation)

Sauerbrey’s thesis seems confirmed if we think about some of the leading politicians of the post-Cold War period ― like president Bill Clinton (in office 1993-2001), the British prime minister Tony Blair (in office 1997-2007), or the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder (in office 1998-2005). Each of them is associated with a certain post-ideological approach to politics, commonly referred to as the “third way”. Tony Blair wrote in his memoir:

It defined not simply our approach to economic policy, but an approach to governing: it was not born from traditional left/right ideology; it drew people to the intelligent, radical centre ground; it spoke of our determination from the outset to protect and enhance our economic opportunity as a nation.

(Tony Blair, A Journey)

Bill Clinton expressed a parallel post-ideological and somehow economy-focused stance saying:

Let’s ditch the stale certainty of ideology and bring our values, ideas, experiences, and dreams to a real debate about the future.

(Bill Clinton, Back to Work)

In a recent article in the Foreign Affairs, the writer and editor Rana Foroohar spoke of the role of the Clinton administration in “removing the guardrails” from the global economy:

The notion that trade should be a handmaid to domestic policy interests fell out of favor during the Clinton administration, when the United States struck a series of trade deals and pushed for China’s entry into the WTO. That latter development was a seismic shift that removed the guardrails from the global economy.

(Rana Foroohar, After Neoliberalism: All Economics Is Local)

Be that as it may, it seems fair to say, each of the “third way” politicians came from a position from the left in the political spectrum combined with a centrist, if not a right-wing approach to economy. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel (in office 2005-2021) became known for a parallel pragmatic approach that was right-wing on economy but left-wing, for example, on migration.

Historically the “third way” coincides with an intense period of economic globalization and the kind of “dislocations” within developed economies as noted by the International Monetary Fund  that we discussed in the first insideGMT article on Order & Opportunity.

Also popular culture of the young post-Cold War period began to register these “dislocations”.

For example, in the popular television drama series The Wire of the 2000s created by the writer David Simon, the disgruntled harbor worked at the Baltimore docks, Frank Sobotka, summarized the issue as follows:

You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.

(Frank Sobotka, The Wire)

Also, once again, Bob Dylan had his finger on the pulse of the era as he sang on his 2006 album Modern Times:

There’s an evening’s haze settling over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s getting shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

(Bob Dylan, Workingman’s Blues #2 from the album Modern Times)

The economic “dislocations” are one of the ways in which, in the recent years, the post-ideological politics of the post-Cold War period have come to face a “reality check” in terms of increasing inequalities and popular discontents domestically in the West. If the immediate post-Cold War period perhaps was a period of post-ideological “innocence”, the indications are that we are heading “back to the rough ground”.

Back to the Rough Ground

If the Agenda Points represent multiple dimensions of the fleeting “simulacrum” of domestic and global politics, the VPs by contrast represent certain underlying and more tangible “rough ground” of international and domestic politics. Here is a rundown of some selected aspects contained in the game.

The military strategic posture describes a given global power’s perception of military and related challenges and their ability to strategically posture themselves to address and deter those challenges. Multiple reports from leading think tanks such as the RAND corporation or the Center for Strategic and International Studies have noted “the sheer complexity of the competition and its many different dimensions” in the post-Cold War period (CSIS Updated Report: Chinese Strategy and Military Forces in 2021). Irregular, including cyber strategies and various civil as well as military means have been developed by “challenger” states and other actors in contexts otherwise characterized by the unipolarity of traditional, kinetic force superiority of the United States and its allies.

Groups of unidentified armed men began appearing throughout the region [of Ukraine], often in coordination with local pro-Russian militias. Both the Ukrainian government and most Western intelligence sources claimed that the “little green men” were Russian operatives.

(US Army Special Operations Command, Little Green Men: A Primer on Modern Russian Unconventional Warfare, Ukraine 2013-2014)

In Order & Opportunity, much of this is abstractly present in various event card effects associated with particular sides in the game ― such as the Russian use of the Wagner mercenaries in theaters from Ukraine, to Africa, and South America. In the Military Strategic Posture phase following the conclusion of a set number of rounds of play, the challengers may seek to inflict a VP loss on the US-European alliance and/or NATO. This passage from 2018 in the New York Times describes the beginning of one such “challenge” that, however, ultimately turned into a heavy defeat of the Russian and Syrian forces:

The artillery barrage was so intense that the American commandos dived into foxholes for protection, emerging covered in flying dirt and debris to fire back at a column of tanks advancing under the heavy shelling. It was the opening salvo in a nearly four-hour assault in February by around 500 pro-Syrian government forces — including Russian mercenaries — that threatened to inflame already-simmering tensions between Washington and Moscow.

(News article in the New York Times)

War of Ideas. Parallel to the area control game over influence, a war of ideas between the democracies and authoritarians is being waged in terms of the governance types of the map spaces ranging from democratic, via transitory, to authoritarian. The mechanic can be thought of as an amalgamation of the mechanics of the governance types and the world posture as found in Volko Ruhnke’s Labyrinth: War on Terror.

The “challenger” states can choose to use increased tensions to put stress on regional governments and governance systems. Democracies, in turn, can support various Civil Society based movements and institutions to foster accountability and good governance.

What is new, however, is the transformation of corruption into an instrument of national strategy. In recent years, a number of countries — China and Russia, in particular — have found ways to take the kind of corruption that was previously a mere feature of their own political systems and transform it into a weapon on the global stage. Countries have done this before, but never on the scale seen today.

(Philip Zelikow, Eric Edelman, Kristofer Harrison, Celeste Ward Gventer in the Foreign Affairs)

The catch is that many actions, even if undertaken from benevolent motives, also cause Tension. At stake are VPs awarded during the so-called War of Ideas Checks.

Checks. The third way to lose VPs is by failing Terror Threat, Polarization, or Debt checks. We have talked about the checks in the previous articles on Order & Opportunity. Briefly, each player records their own Terror Threat and Polarization levels. These levels increase as a result of Consequences following from heavy-handed actions and “unilateralism”. Debt, on the other hand, is simply recorded on the resources track as negative resources ― it is possible to spend up to four resources going “into debt”. This idea was born while playtesting the upcoming GMT Games game Cross Bronx Expressway that has a similar mechanic. Thematically, “sovereign debt” is a salient aspect of modern economies. In 2008, the economic analyst of the Cato Institute James A. Dorn wrote:

What worries Congress is that China, the world’s largest communist country, now holds nearly 20 percent of the total foreign-held Treasury debt (more than $400 billion) and is acquiring more than 50 percent of net new issues. In addition, foreign investors held $1.2 trillion in U.S. agency debt and government-sponsored enterprise securities at the end of 2006, more than double the amount held in 2001. China is now the largest holder of that debt with 23 percent of the total in 2006.

(James A. Dorn The Debt Threat)

In Order & Opportunity, each check is a simple die roll based check: in order not to fail, the player must roll higher than their Terror Threat, Polarization, or Debt level, respectively. It is possible to spend resources for a die roll modifier (except with Debt). Failing a check results in the loss of a prestigious VP.

In the next article we will look at various dimensions of the contest between Democracy and Authoritarianism as conceived in Order & Opportunity.

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Previous Articles:

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

Order & Opportunity: Victory