I read DS Richards “The Savage Frontier: the Anglo-Afghan Wars” (more of a campaign history than most people will like, but still informative) which makes the full scope of Anglo-Afghan relations clear enough to suggest that it wasn’t a game (a term which turns the players into pawns, and dispensible). It was sometimes like a Game, in that a change in government(Conservatives v. Liberals) would change the overall policy (back and forth).

That said, I tend to do the same thing in the Middle East. How can the knowledgable locals be talked with if you don’t know Sykes-Picot, the division of British Mandate Palestine by the UN, Aramco, the Suez Crisis?

The realist prism of foreign policy thinking means that “lesser” countries treats countries as unitary entities, too much like peices on a chessboard.