Are we playing checkers while China plays go?

There’s the (apocryphal?) Cold War era story of Kissinger saying that the Russians grew up playing chess while the American grew up playing poker. Each provided the other with a certain cultural framework with which to approach politics.

I’m not sure about this analysis beyond its initial appearance of wisdom, and perhaps it’s social value as a piece of intellectual banter. Not to say I’m completely dismissive of it. After all, intellectual culture, roles played, expectations and internal politics all play a part in any single nation’s geopolitics.

Which is to say that the USSRs world view were probably affected by chess but maybe not that much. How much did chess thinking matter when it came to Stalin’s purges? The camps? Was some zero sum thinking prevalent? Some tendency to assume perfect information?

On the American side some assumption about bluster bluffing and simply charging forth without perfect information would seem to play a part, but is that always true? Pretension to perfect information could certainly be a hindsight flaw of our geopolitical history, couldn’t it?

Hell, even the analysis is tainted by culture, it’s hard to get anywhere. Such are the muddy waters of geopolitics even in hindsight.