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July 23, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
25:43
'The Great Game of Politics is Not What You Think' - Tom Luongo at RPI Houston Conference

Geopolitical analyst Tom Luongo takes a hard look at the west vs east emerging world at the Ron Paul Institute's Houston Conference. Did you like the speech? Join us in Washington DC on Sept. 3rd for another GREAT event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anatomy-of-a-police-state-tickets-366089773367

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Chess Defines Geopolitics 00:09:16
Talk to our friends and neighbors, and I think we can use something that we all share, which is our anxiety about rising inflation.
We can use that as an opener, not to hit him over the head with a brick, but to slowly move the conversation.
Well, do you know why this is happening?
Do you know there's a thing called the Federal Reserve?
Do you know there's, you know, so I think this is a positive thing we can take, hopefully, away from today, is how to talk about costs in relation to our foreign policy.
But another great speaker who's going to talk about costs on a global scale is our good friend Tom Luongo, who has a blog that I highly recommend: Gold, Goats, and Guns.
I like those three things pretty much.
You'll see him on Lou Rockwell's website.
You'll see him on Zero Heads.
He springs up like mushrooms because he's got very insightful analysis and he looks at the bigger picture.
And that's why we really wanted Tom to join us and give us the bigger picture.
So please welcome Tom Luongo.
Well, good morning, everyone.
To start out with, I haven't done a public speaking gig like this since I ran for public office as a libertarian in 2002.
So if I'm a little rusty, it'll take me a minute.
So my name is Tom Luongo, and I have a problem.
I'm an avid board game guy.
An addict.
I love board games.
And geopolitics to me is a big, well, we like to model geopolitics as a game because it's one of the ways we can narratively get a grip on what's happening out there.
And the game that we tend to try and model is chess.
We all know how to play chess.
Many of us have played Monopoly.
Many of us have played C, maybe even played Risk.
But you've never sat down and played a really heavy-duty political game.
Whenever you get down, whenever you take a game that's more than two players, it all of a sudden becomes an intensely political thing.
Great game designer Richard Garfield has always said that any, once you get a third player at the table, it's now all of a sudden a political game.
It's no longer a pure game expression.
It's no longer a pure conflict between one side versus the other.
And chess is a very interesting game.
And it was created by the Iranians and perfected by the Russians, FYI.
So I always find that very interesting when I think about that, right?
The Iranians created this brilliant game, but chess is a goal-oriented behavior game.
It's a very specific type of game.
And game theory and game design is a very important thing to me because it's what allows me to do the systemic analysis of what's happening around the world.
And I've been playing games my entire life.
So when I look at chess and I look at the archiving game of chess, the goal is, of course, capture the king.
And so it's just an existential fight between two groups, black and white.
Whose king is going to get captured first?
And it's a very good metaphor for trying to figure out what's going to happen when this guy fights that guy.
But that's all it's good at.
It's not good at anything else.
So during Daniel's opening remarks today and during Scott's remarks, Daniel touched on the fact that we don't, that American Foreign Policy Establishment doesn't understand Russia.
Scott just touched on the fact that the American Foreign Policy Establishment also doesn't understand the Chinese.
So when I sit down to try and explain geopolitics and I try to look at the world and I try to create a narrative that I can communicate to the world what's going on out there.
There's all this noise.
There's all these headlines.
What does it all mean?
What is it reduced down to?
What's the big takeaway?
Because that's what we all need in order to get through our days.
Because we're all just really too busy to keep up with all this stuff on a daily basis.
We have to go out and do the world.
We have to go out and do our thing to make enough money in the world to feed our families and all the rest of it.
And we don't want to spend all day trying to parse all these disinformational, malinformational headlines that we get on a daily basis from the British tabloid press, from the American press, and from everybody else, right?
So what do we do?
We have to, we can't be too reductionist about things and distill everything down to a two-player game.
The West versus Russia, the West versus China.
Because it's not that.
The better way to look at this is the ancient Chinese game of Go.
Go is the game that defines geopolitics.
And worse than Go is the fact that geopolitics actually isn't a two-player game of Go.
It's a seven-player game of Go.
Now, I want you to wrap your brain.
If you've never heard of the, if you don't even know what Go is, I'm going to take just a minute or two to explain so that for the people in the audience who don't understand what Go is, Go is the original area control game.
If chess is the ultimate game of goal-oriented behavior, I want to achieve this specific thing, how am I going to go about doing so?
Go is the game of soft power.
Go is the game of where black places a token over here and goes, yeah, I'm going to place an aircraft carrier off the coast of Taiwan.
Well, I'm going to respond by putting missile systems in Poland.
Well, I'm going to pay Bill Wang to build up ArcaGo's capital to have it explode one day and blow up J.P. Morgan's hedge book.
Well, I'm going to do this over here.
Well, I'm going to not increase, I'm OPEC, and I'm not going to increase oil production.
But the problem with looking at this is that when Go is played properly with people who understand how the game is played, and you have two people with vastly different experiences, and by the way, I'm a miserable chess player, and I'm a miserable Go player.
And the reason is that I don't have the time or the patience to actually devote my life to the lessons that these games can teach you.
But they are games that can teach you a tremendous amount about human behavior and about the world, if you are willing to literally devote your life to it.
And I know many, those of you who play chess, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
So, Go is that game of trying to place assets in play and keep them in play.
And it's a very simple game, right?
It's just a grid of horizontal and vertical lines and black and white stones that you place at the vertices of the spaces on the board.
And here's the main rule, ready?
That asset gets to stay in play.
That stone gets to stay in play as long as you can trace a degree of freedom, an open connection to the board, or to another stone of the same color.
The minute those stones, those white stones, for example, get surrounded by black stones, all the white stones get captured and go away.
Now, if you don't think that that's what geopolitics is all about, that's what we're doing on a daily basis.
Every one of these headlines you see, every specific piece of information that Daniel talked about, Scott's talked about, and I'm sure that Lou and Dr. Paul will talk about, are going to be moments of that.
To me, these are all just stones hitting the table every day.
And I'm trying to make sense of the pattern of what that actually means.
Because Go is this wonderful game of fractal information, where you can get sucked into a knife fight.
And this is like people like Victoria Newland and Anthony Blinken and John Bolton, they get sucked into these idiotic conflicts over these little tiny things, thinking they're so terribly important.
And all they are is this little teeny portion of the board.
And you're fighting intensely and killing people, thousands of people around the world.
For what purpose?
Oh, well, I needed to take that little piece of territory and create a permanent structure that allows you to hold on to that little thing there, because their need for control is so unbelievably ingrained into their being that that's what they do.
But then you take a step back.
You're like, well, that doesn't mean anything, because you're getting surrounded by all these other things in the process.
And that whole formation is going to get wiped off the board 20 moves from now.
And then it's going to pull back even farther.
And so the whole purpose of the game of Go is to slowly but surely place soft power tokens all the way around the board to create a fractal pattern that eventually resolves very quickly into, well, I've controlled this portion of the board, you control that portion of the board, I've got this, we're fighting over these five stones in the middle, and I'm going to win by five.
The master player versus the novice player puts 25 or 30 stones on the table and goes, oh, that's the moment where you're going to lose.
So, and you're going to lose because this stone is in the wrong place.
And that means that at the end of this, if we fight it all the way out, I'm going to win by about seven.
In reality, he's going to win by about 30 because this is a very Asian game about saving face for your opponent.
Right?
Again, we don't understand China.
But we can learn a lot about a culture's ideas from the games they play and the games that they've developed.
Geopolitics as a Game of Go 00:03:44
Go as a 4,000-year-old game.
So I've been saying for over a decade since I first started writing for Newsmax a decade ago that geopolitics is a game of Go where the Americans and the West don't understand how to play this game.
And the Russians and the Chinese are playing Go, and they're putting tokens in play and they don't care about what happens right here in this little moment in Syria and we have to like, you know, protect the Albukumai border crossing to keep the Iranians from bringing in resupply to the Syrians in Italy.
But like, what are you getting involved in that for?
We're going to make a commodity-based SDR that the Eurasian Economic Union is going to use as the trade settlement currency for all of Central Asia.
And we've been building that for the last 10 years.
Or in December 2016, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, puts together a coalition of diplomats to go to Afghanistan to sit down in Kabul and get all the Taliban heads together to lay the groundwork for the reversal of Afghanistan, of the Taliban, after the Americans leave, saying in December of 2016, they put Pakistan in charge of the talks.
Leaving the Indians out, because at that moment in time, the Indians were on our side.
And so the Indians were angry about this.
But Sergei Lavrov led a coalition, and the Pakistanis started the talks and laid the groundwork for the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan.
Five years ago, I knew this was going to happen.
Because they started, they laid those stones and they put those assets in place and they created a formation that on a Go board Can't be taken off the board.
The Russians have built an economic fortress around their balance sheet that is impregnable.
Because, well, I watched the Russians run their thing, and as a good Austro-libertarian, I'm like, oh, look at that.
They have no debt.
Trade surplus, selling commodity goods to the world.
Like, we're going to get rid of all our dollar-denominated debt, and we're going to make ourselves impervious to sanctions.
Because the West is spending all this time trying to put assets in play that will give them the ability to declare other people persona non grata in the one area of the world that we still have tremendous control over, even though slowly but surely the Russians and the Chinese and others have been slowly degrading what looked like fortress areas of the board that they controlled and that were impregnable.
But in a seven-player game of Go, where the Chinese are the red tokens and the Indians are the purple tokens and the Saudi Arabians are the yellow tokens, all of a sudden, what are impregnable fortresses in a two-player game, because it's you go, I go, you go, I go.
Now it's you go, he goes, he goes, then he goes, and then he goes, all of a sudden, none of those formations are permanent.
All of a sudden, none of those formations, those pillars of power, that Davos or the European Union or the White House or whomever you're talking about, 10 Downing Street, the British Crown, pick your personal conspiracy group of choice, Club of Rome, this UNESCO, George Soros, doesn't matter, pick them all.
Like, all of their power structures are slowly degrading because these other players have been allowed a seat at the table, putting their assets in play, creating soft alliances with each other, because once you're into a three to five or six player game, now all of a sudden it's, hey, you know, if you don't attack my stuff over here, I want to attack your stuff over there.
Inflection Point Diplomacy 00:04:18
Yeah, we can do that for how long?
Five turns?
Yeah, okay, that's cool.
I've been in games of diplomacy where I've lost friendships for years because I set things like that up and then went into the back room and stabbed everybody in the back and won the game.
And then I had people just like look at me going, dude, like that was cold.
Yeah, but the goal of the game was to win, right?
I thought that was the whole goal of it.
Well, when you look at geopolitics and you realize we're able to do that as men under a low-stakes environment, and this is why games are important, because they give us the opportunity to get all that aggression out without actually really hurting anybody, without any real actual honesty about human costs.
The problem is we have people who think that they are invaluable to the world who are willing to do that with your lives, my life, my daughter's life, your children's lives, your grandchildren's lives.
And so that's the world we live in today, and they honestly believe that the world would not function without them.
And this is why they spend all this time wasting our time running around forcing us to put stones on the table to defend and get involved in these idiotic knife fights that are a waste of our time.
I wish that I didn't do what I do for a living.
I had to go out and get a real job producing real, something of real lasting value.
I'd rather be a goat farmer than do what I do.
And I think many of us in this room feel that way because we know that it's honestly a waste of our human capital to do this, but we have to figure out ways of disseminating the information to allow somebody else to go out and continue to build civilization in the face of those who want to tear it down.
So where are we today?
Scott's talked about the inflection point.
Daniel's talked about the inflection point.
I was listening to their talks going, I hope they don't cover all of my material.
And really, it became obvious to me that we are at that moment.
Because the way I see the board right now, metaphorically speaking, is that a game of a two-player game goes should end.
Eventually, we'll produce stable structures that if the other players play into the other person's areas, it'll capture the stones, and it'll just perpetuate itself, and all you're doing is raising everybody's score, but you're not changing the outcome of the game.
Black's going to win, or white's going to win, or whatever.
In that big seven-player game I'm talking about, this can go on forever.
Geopolitics doesn't end.
The king is never captured.
The territory is never fully ever locked down because the world doesn't end.
There's that great line at the end of Alan Moore's Watchman when Ozmandius looks at Dr. Manhattan, who he's just beaten God, and he says, in the end, in the end, I did the right thing, didn't I, John?
John Osterman, Dr. Manhattan.
And Dr. Manhattan, the man who can literally see all of time as a tapestry, says, no, Adrian, nothing ever ends.
This is the problem of the Hubris of the people that we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
I wanted to give a high-level talk today because I knew that other people would do a much better job of digging into the details.
I wanted to remind everybody that the best way to look at this is you have to, I mean, I'm shaking doing this talk this morning because I'm so unbelievably worried for the future.
I believe we've reached that point where the game board is a morass of all of these different tokens of different colors.
And if the next person puts that stone on the table, that it's going to start breaking down all the metastable structures and the whole board is going to just implode.
And it's going to create a cascade effect that is catastrophic.
Unless, and as I said earlier, I've had many a board gaming experience over the last 40 years, literally playing some of the greatest political board games ever made, where I've looked at the board, everybody's, and I go, you, you, and you, back room now, we need to talk.
We all go into the back room, huddle, talking machine.
So, you know, if this guy does this and I do that, we can get together and we can form a soft alliance and we can win.
If not, he's going to win in two turns and we have to stop him.
Global South's Betrayal 00:08:24
Well, the Global South, the green stones of the Iranians, the purple stones of the Indians, the yellow stones of the Saudi Arabians, are no longer acting as independents.
They're no longer being bribed by the West to act independently to screw up the plans of the red Chinese and the black Russians by the white hats of the West.
And I chosen my colors very carefully.
And they're looking at the situation as it stands right now.
And they're saying, you know what?
All we have to do is say, no, all those different colored stones, they're all black.
Now reassess the board and then go back to the first rule of go.
Stones get to stay on the board as long as they are not completely surrounded by stones of another color.
And all those white stones and all those power, all those pillars of power that Davos thinks they have and that Brussels thinks they have and that George Soros thinks he has and the Federal Reserve thinks it has and blah, blah, blah, blah, and they're all looking at it going, uh-oh, because all those stones just left the board.
And you're left with unassailable formations and captured territory.
And this is what Daniel pointed out and what Scott both pointed out.
The people, unfortunately, who have designed this system and led us to this moment, some of whom are the vandals of the Biden administration, I don't believe at all that these people are incompetent.
I think they're hyper-competent at being vandals who have a, in their mind, a right and are entitled to rule the world.
You listen to their speeches at Davos this year.
It was very clear.
I've never seen George Soros give a talk and look so scared.
Did anybody else notice this?
I did.
I've watched a lot of George Soros' speeches.
They make me sick to my stomach.
It's like showing up for jury duty and having to stand around and be surrounded by authoritarians all day.
It literally makes me ill, physically.
Watching George Soros makes me physically ill.
But this year, there was a little bit of hope because he was scared.
Because he could see what's going to happen.
And if we don't go along with their PR campaign, which is what the first hundred days of this war, was nothing more than a PR campaign to bring the West, the Germans, the Americans, the Brits, into the great plucky Ukrainian narrative to fight the evil Russians.
And that PR campaign has failed.
And they know it.
And they sacrificed thousands of Ukrainian lives, so thousands of brave men and women in the Ukrainian armed forces to put Zelensky on tour like he's, I don't know, freaking Shakira.
How pathetic is that, that we live in this world.
And so now, right now, and you can see it since this invasion of Ukraine began.
And it's an invasion.
I make no bones about it.
The Russians are, the Russians are not in the moral right here.
War is never moral.
It's never right.
But it's either that or they capture the king.
They lose the board.
And the very evil Euro Globo commies at the World Economic Forum and the White House and the neocons and all these evil people, they're going to run the table on us.
And they're going to flip the entire board white in their minds.
Or are we going to let them happen?
That happened.
So the Global South has all been, they've been yelled at.
Don't go in the back room.
Don't talk to each other.
You go talk to each other, we're going to sanction you.
We're going to take you out of Swift.
We're going to do this to you.
Oh, by the way, if anybody doesn't understand this, Erdogan in Turkey, he has a special player power that nobody else has.
On his turn, he gets to place either a Blackstone or a Whitestone, depending on whether it's any given Thursday.
That guy is awesome.
From a game theory perspective, Erdogan is like one of the greatest games players of all time.
He's a lunatic and a freak, and he's horrible as a human being.
I'm like horrified, but the game player in me is going, dude, well done.
Like, it's seriously, you play the game well.
I have to, you know, golf clap here.
It is what it is.
And we can see that moment in everybody saying the same thing.
Don't go in the back room.
Don't cut the deal.
Because if you do, we're going to do this to you.
And no one is finally scared of going in the back room.
Because they understand that if they don't do this now, they're going to lose everything.
The European Union just put out their sixth package of sanctions the other day.
Great fanfare.
We are going to cut off 90% of our imports of Russian oil by the end of the year or by 2024 or by, I don't know, 2030 or whatever it is.
It doesn't really matter.
At the same time, you could find a headline saying the Biden administration called up Mohammed bin Salmon, the crown prince in Saudi Arabia, and said, you need to pump more oil.
Like, really?
How dumb are the Arabs?
They can't hear this?
Like, we hate oil and we want the world to get off of oil by 2030.
But we also want you to sell us more oil so we can take the Russian oil off the market.
Like, no.
How about no?
And how about no?
And how about a whole lot of no?
Well, they haven't done it.
And that's the thing.
And they're not going to do it.
Because OPEC is stronger now than it ever has been.
And do you know why OPEC is stronger now than it ever has been?
Because the Russians over the last eight years have solidified their control over OPEC by giving everybody what they want and explaining to them that if you don't band together now, these people are going to destroy you.
It's kind of like Lawrence of Arabia in reverse.
Right?
Uniting the Arab tribes to fight the British, not fight for the British.
It's fascinating.
I love watching this play out.
And I hope that, but the thing that bothers me more than anything else is that that conference in the back room is happening right now.
It's going on.
The Russians have engaged in brilliant levels of diplomacy.
We don't have diplomacy.
We have anti-diplomacy.
We have Michael McFaul literally says, we lie.
Like the first rule of diplomacy is diplomats don't lie.
Once that meeting happens and all those stones go from yellow and green and red and blue and whatever to black and all those formations fall apart and the global financial crisis starts here in the West, which is on the table.
What's the response from the people who think they're entitled to rule the world?
It's not pretty.
These people honestly believe it's time to take the colonies back.
I've been saying for years that China's not the enemy.
The Russians aren't the enemy.
Europe is the enemy to the United States.
They selected Joe Biden and put these vandals in charge.
They selected the Greens to run Germany.
They select Mario Draghi, the former head of the ECB, to run a technocratic caretaker government in Italy.
They're the ones that tried to overthrow Viktor Orban in Hungary.
They're the ones that started, that fomented a failed color revolution in Belarus, Kazakhstan, this place, that place, everywhere else.
These are the people.
They're right in front of you.
They're staring you in the face every day telling you what they're going to do.
And they want their colonies back.
They want the U.S. back.
They never wanted to lose the U.S. in the first place.
So what are they willing to do?
They'll flip the game board.
And that should scare everybody in this room.
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