Do you know the game Jenga? It's a simple game — you have 54 hardwood blocks stacked in layers of three blocks, with each layer perpendicular to the one below it. Players take turns removing a block from a lower layer and placing it on the top layer. The loser is the first person who makes the tower fall.
Obviously, the first order strategy is to just be very deft. But there's a second-order strategy where a player doesn't just pick a block at random, but chooses a block in a way that makes the tower unstable so that the next player's move is more likely to cause a collapse.
There's a lot of talk about how Donald Trump is playing 4-dimensional, or 5-dimensional, or even 6-dimensional chess with his strategy in both domestic and foreign affairs, and I think that's a mistake. Trump isn't playing chess; he's playing Jenga — making decisions that have the most chance of causing his opponents to have their moves blow up in their faces.
It started as soon as he was inaugurated for his second term. He knows it's his last term, and he knows his opponents are just as determined not just to thwart him, but to jail him or kill him. But he had four years to plan a strategy, and several advantages coming in: a decisive election, a determination to act quickly, and, frankly, a bunch of opponents who aren't really thinking strategically.
It started with a bunch of executive orders that have, in general, been difficult for the Democrat opposition to fight — observe how many of them senior courts have eventually upheld and how often the "but TRUMP" arguments haven't actually worked out.
Of course, that's been helped by the ongoing stupidity of the opponents — unforced errors like Fani Willis hiring her boyfriend and then trying to explain why she doesn't use banks.
Has he succeeded every time? No, and a number of the ploys of his opponents have been simply delayed — which is effectively a win.
On his side, he's made a lot of really effective moves. He hasn't hired his cabinet from the usual suspects, as he did in his first term. Instead, he chose people like Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, who had scores to settle of their own when settling those scores was to his advantage. He correctly identified that Marco Rubio had the geopolitical knowledge Trump couldn't match but would take general direction and run with it. He made some controversial choices, like Pete Hegseth, but he made them clearly, establishing a general policy that his cabinet had no issues with executing.
What's most important, I think, is that he identified who the real players were. Russia, China, and Iran were the opponents; Israel and Eastern Europe were allies, and pretty quickly Argentina and El Salvador joined in, because as one great man said, they were "philosophically sympathetic to your aim."
Now we see his foreign policy is straightforward. As another great man said, his policy is "simple: we win and they lose."
Now, put down the black pills, because in the last year, Israel and the United States have broken Iran's client states in the Middle East, while making alliances with Somaliland, the UAE, and now the South Yemen separatists — neatly bracketing the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and thereby controlling the southern end of the Red Sea.
So along comes Venezuela, into which China, Russia, and Cuba have all made massive investments. And suddenly Venezuela is... not the player it once was. Both Russia and China had major investments in Venezuela's defenses, while Cuba was seriously invested in Venezuela as a source of oil and money.
China and Russia's defense support turned out not to be very useful at all — the U.S. rolled over them like there was nothing there. Russians in the field see it, and they're not happy, while Russian generals are staying on the first floor and away from open windows. And China recognized just how much 面子 "face" it's losing.
I wrote about this just the day before yesterday and observed people were saying "中国被打脸打得啪啪响" — "China got slapped in the face so hard it went slap-slap." Apparently, Li Yi (high in the CCP) felt the same way.
🇨🇳🇻🇪 Li Yi (李毅) is a high-ranking CCP political advisor and social media influencer.
— 鈴森はるか 『haruka suzumori』 🇯🇵 (@harukaawake) January 5, 2026
After he found out that his communist friend Maduro had been captured by the US, he slapped his own face and cried "They caught him from 3300 km away? I hate this world!" pic.twitter.com/5pGZtRcQPA
My point — and I do have one — is that while the rest of the world has been thinking of Trump as a buffoon, and playing their little geopolitical chess games, Trump has focused on a goal and has been playing Jenga.
It looks to me like there's no good next move for the opponents and European "friends." The next BRICS they pull will wind up in their laps.
