At a time when much of what passes for international commentary has the depth and nuance of a tweet, Geoff Raby’s Great Game On is something of a relief. The former Australian Ambassador to China keeps his politics largely to himself, but doesn’t have much time for mainstream Western (read “American” for the most part) views, which he finds simplistic.
Raby suggests one not take conventional narratives, past or present, at face value. The title, Great Game On, is, obviously, a reference to the last “Great Game” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which Great Britain and Russia contested Central Asia, or at least thought that’s what they were doing. Raby notes that despite the narratives of the time, the British Empire’s fears that Russia might make a play for India—or even Australia!—were largely figments of the imagination (although paranoia, then and now, can serve some people quite well).
Britain’s imperial strategists, politicians and the popular media believed it posed an existential challenge to British rule in India. That Russia sought to acquire British India was deemed to be true by definition. It was a revealed truth… Demonstration that this was in fact Russia’s intention was not required. Never mind if a yawning gap existed between whatever the tsar’s real intentions may have been towards India and Russia’s actual capacity to achieve them.
Russia eyed up Western China, so Britain did as well; both and vied for consulates in Kashgar. But even with the great instability in China at the time, neither was able to make anything stick for very long.
Moving on, Raby presents the Cold War as it manifested itself in Central Asia as a sort of Great Game redux; his account is a reminder (although far from the first: Raby cites Philip Snow’s China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord on several occasions) that when China is added into the story, it looks like a series of continually moving pieces rather than the Manichean struggle it has usually been portrayed as.
Britain, the other participant in the original Great Game, is now out of the picture, as is Britain’s geopolitical successor, the US, at least since the “shambolic” retreat from Afghanistan:
this was the Western powers’ last hurrah in Central Asia. The long-contested field had suddenly been left to Russia and China.
While Raby, of course, is not the first to make reference to the Great Game in relation to the present day, as he applies the lessons of historical hindsight to more recent events, he sees the repetition of framing errors in which policies were promulgated. In particular, despite the current surface amity of Sino-Russian relations, he sees interests, especially in Central Asia, that are more competitive than complementary. That China’s star in relation to Russia in general and in Central Asia in particular seems to be rising is hardly contentious, but Raby provides dollops of context: most of independent Central Asia where Chinese is now exerting influence was part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union for a century or so while Russia also has large amounts of territory that were, until the mid-19th century, part of the Qing Empire.
For those of an International Relations theory bent, he discusses both Mackinder and Spykman, and their respective “heartland” and “rimland” models:
China’s rise to pre-eminence in Eurasia conjures the ghosts of Mackinder and Spykman, who themselves sound like participants in the Great Game. In the contemporary setting, some analysts view the strong parallels between China’s BRI and Mackinder’s theory as ‘proof’ that China is pursuing a global strategy of world domination …
Raby however questions whether purely geographic models still apply (if they ever did):
competition for global primacy has become increasingly centred on technology and the cyber world.
While sensible and well-reasoned, the structure of the book—Raby will take an issue or framing and follow it through to the present day—results in a certain amount of repetition. Raby might also have eschewed the current tendency for authors to insert their own personal travel vignettes into their analysis; his penchant for high-quality smokes probably qualifies as “too much information”.
Neither however detracts from the analysis or readability. Raby makes some predictions; these may or may not turn out to be accurate, but more important is the paradigm he lays out. For those who need to make educated guesses about what will actually happen in the region, Raby provides a game board that is likely more useful than relying on the all-too-common sound bites.