When I was growing up, I liked nothing more than playing board games. My favorite was Risk: The Game of Global Domination. What kid doesn’t want to conquer the world? It was a great feeling to vanquish your opponents and emerge as “king of the world.” The problem comes when U.S. foreign policy begins to resemble Risk.
In the board game, you must conquer a country every turn, with the goal of controlling an entire continent. After you conquer a continent, your opponents will do their best to break it up. The easiest continent to conquer and hold is Australia. It’s my favorite stronghold because it is easy to defend.
South America is also easy to defend. North America and Europe are more problematic and Asia is almost impossible to hold. Players are constantly at war over the countries that are keys to a continent.
For example, Greenland is considered part of North America, even though it’s owned by a European country. It is very common for Greenland to attack its neighbor, Iceland, to gain access to Europe. There is constant conflict between these two territories.
The same is true at the other end of North America, where Kamchatka is next door to Alaska. This kind of proximity leads to conflict. Some of the real-world trouble spots are also battlegrounds in Risk. For example, Middle East, with its strategic adjacency to Africa is always changing hands. Ukraine is another trouble spot. It comprises the western border of Europe and is prone to being attacked.
Central America, which includes Panama, is the gateway to North America and is ripe for invasion. There are also areas of conflict that bear no resemblance to the real world. Brazil and North Africa are constantly at war.
Risk does not allow players to conquer bodies of water. So we can’t own a piece of the ocean or claim various seas. That is why it seems unreal that we’re talking about renaming bodies of water. Even Risk is not that ruthless.
Not that I take any of the outlandish proposals seriously. Greenland may only have a population of 55,000 but Denmark is not going to abandon it to North America. There is also no way Panama will give back the canal we dug through their country.
To avoid this nonsense, I have joined many Americans in completely tuning out politics. I first did this in 2016, when it turned out the political experts didn’t know what they were talking about. I immediately switched from political radio to classical music and haven’t switched back.
Now I’ve taken it a step further and no longer read the news on my phone. I also avoid the TV news. My only news sources are the Sun-Times and the Forest Park Review. This head-in-the-sand approach has brought me serenity.
It has also given me more time for healthy activities, like reading, listening to music and working out at the health club. I try to avoid discussing politics but my kids are still tuned in to the news. We don’t agree on much but we can joke about our opposing viewpoints. We’re not going to allow politics to divide our family.
I don’t know how many of you are also living in blissful ignorance. For me, it’s necessary for keeping my sanity. I don’t usually even write about our national politics, but when our foreign policy resembles a game of Risk, I feel compelled to speak out.
I will continue to ignore politics until there is an international crisis that can’t be ignored. “We interrupt our broadcast: North Africa has just declared war on Brazil!”
