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Wednesday, Sep 21, 2022 - 20:31 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Before The Cold Comes In

QEII's funeral - supposedly one of the most-watched television events ever - had barely been done with, when a Team Red boss hurried off to set the next card in action. Putin had inexplicably been the first world leader to offer his sincere congratulations to the new King despite not being on the guest list, and possibly also offered a few tips on acquiring tables of adequate size. In contrast, the representative of the U.K.'s closest ally didn't even manage to be on time, but one supposes this an irrelevant hiccup, with the faceless referees - and oft-hapless participants - barely managing to hide their impatience at returning to The Greatest Game.

Ukraine had of course just cobbled together a counterattack about Kherson, but while trumpeted as a huge success in Team Blue media, a cursory glance at the map suggests this statement to be somewhat exaggerated, with Team Red still in possession of the Donbass, Crimea, and perhaps most significantly the bulk of Ukraine's former southern seafront. Still, this progress was enough for Ukraine to turn down a Mexican proposal for peace, with the reasoning that a ceasefire would merely buy Russia time to regroup, more on which soon.

Star antagonist Putin would be jetting about notwithstanding his military setbacks, and would follow up a virtual huddle (as reported in August), with an in-person one with Xi - at the latest Shanghai Pact (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The duo's discussion on Ukraine and Taiwan would come alongside membership applications from Iran and Turkey (the latter also a NATO member, recall) among others, with much of South-East Asia seemingly tilting towards Team Red, excepting Singapore as the lone holdout actually sanctioning Russia. While this is probably the right thing to do, it's really not very clear as to whether it's "worth it"...

Certainly, despite hopeful narratives from the Team Blue media, there's next to no sign of the developing China-Russia alliance weakening, even as Beijing continues to play their broken record on "forming small cliques" ironically concurrent with their Shanghai Pact recruitment (though, in fairness, it's been total jiao wei from both Teams). It's difficult to interpret the developments as anything other than the formation of an explicit anti-West Cold War II bloc, from how they're openly declaring a more-just New World Order, that will break U.S. encirclement (also covered back in May) and financial Dominance - a credible threat from their Control of significant swathes of various global manufacturing ecosystems.


Turn 12, Action Round 1 (Team Red)


(Original sources: Twilight Struggle Card Generator,
tsgreek.wordpress.com, cnbc.com)


Some four months after it was called here, POTUS has also declared the end of the Pandemic Game; while he's taking some flak for the pronouncement even within his own circles, all the more with Science itself retiring in December, I'd like to think that the word of a U.S. President means something - in this case, a full transition to Round Four of The Greatest Game.

And rightly so, given an actual Russian mobilization just being declared by Putin. The address, originally scheduled for Tuesday evening, had been delayed overnight, raising speculation about whether he had come down with the actual not-Wuhan flu, amongst other possibilities. While the Team Blue response has been to uniformly brand this development as an admission of Russian failure and ultimately doomed, it remains that raising 300,000 reservists would about triple their known ground deployment. There remains heavy fog of war over factors such as equipment and morale, but it has to be recognized that this has always been how the Ruskies have prosecuted their wars: by clambering over their own fallen.

Indeed, as analyzed in our first post on the war from the first of March, Russia had always been "in for a penny, in for a pound" (both depreciating steeply, by the way) on this matter. With this, the Cold War II Rubicon (lit. [Team] Red River) appears to have been conclusively crossed, what with the increased troop commitment likely upping the stakes on acceptable Ukrainian territorial concessions for hostilities to end, already coupled with an implicit warning that they're not bluffing on a nuclear response, in defence of Russian territory. Given that the imminent referendums in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson seem designed to annex these regions, the message becomes: we're keeping everything we take - or everybody gets some.

Kremlin Flu goes to the Space Race, as Team Red sacrifices some tempo, to draw on their tactical reserves. The roll is a six, but a 1 to 4 is needed, and the roll fails. Tech's probably not Russia's strong suit in this edition of Twilight Struggle, but when you've got four thousand nukes, who needs microchips?



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Next: The Rules Start Getting Broken


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