Tranque

Image generated by ChatGPT Author’s note: I learned that ChatGPT does not know about dominoes. No matter how hard I tried, it was unable to place a player to each edge of the table and it could not match the tiles and show the correct number of dominoes!!! There is hope for us humans.

Dominoes is the Puerto Rican chess. We play in teams, with the two team members sitting across from each other in a square table. At the beginning the 28 tiles are distributed, seven to each player. Normally you play counterclockwise, so each player follows an opposing team player. Teams win a game when one of their players runs out of tiles first. The winners earn all outstanding tiles total. The team that reaches a preset number of points first wins the match. Good team members play to favor the member that leads in the order of play. To do so you must count and remember the tiles that have been played and by whom and, using that information, make a well-founded guess of who has which tiles in their hand. Good, rational, players can truly control the game and develop winning strategies.

There is one nerve racking move in dominoes – the “tranque”. Since tiles are aligned linearly, there are only two locations you can play. Imagine you have the 5/6 tile and that is the last of the 6s. If the play options at each end of the alignment are 5 and 6, the player can choose to put their tile in the six-end and continue the game, or they can put it in the 5-end resulting on both ends with 6s and no sixes left to play. The game is over, and the winner will be the team with the least number of points in their hands; winner takes all.

We are living a global game of dominoes between the Wannabe Tyrants team (Netanyahu and Trump) and the Terrorists team (The government of Iran and Hamas). After a lot of moves directed to the Hamas opponent, at the expense of tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza, Netanyahu, the smartest, experienced and most devious of the Wannabe Tyrants team, makes an unexpected move by shifting attention to the player to his right – Iran. Netanyahu knows his game; the only way he can achieve his goals is by having a decisive win by forcing Trump to execute a “tranque” – ending the game with a potentially winning tile – direct involvement by bombing nuclear sites in Iran.

Trump was put in a very difficult position – the tail was wagging the dog. Not bombing would continue the conflict and a war between Iran and Israel. Bombing had the potential of stopping the war and defeating the Terrorists once and for all. The key, though, is the word potential. There was no assurance of the outcome, and it was a risky movement that could result in losing the game if the reading of the tiles were wrong. For example, anything less than absolute destruction of nuclear sites or absolute verifiable surrender just kicks the can down the road – not very far down. It would have been best if during his first administration Trump had kept the Iran “nuclear deal”, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, negotiated by the Obama administration, with the agreement of China, Russia and European countries, which would have delayed the Iranian capabilities to build a nuclear weapon for 10 years, with a renegotiation in 2025. Nothing took the place of the JCPA, resulting in accelerated enrichment of uranium.

Trump was not just put in a difficult position. He was in an impossible position precipitated by his foxy partner. I admit that, in Trump’s shoes, I would be compelled to act as he did (although I would have consulted Congress), but I would be seething at my partner for forcing my hand. Now that the nuclear sites have been bombed, the counting of tiles begins to see which team wins the game. Anything less than a match winning result will be a loss to the USA, Israel and the rest of the world. We will all be living in an even more unpredictable and deadly world.