Somebody on substack was noting that Putin is a far better player of international chess than our leaders. I agreed and added this comment, which I really should have written here first.
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Putin has a head start. Russians understand us better than we understand them. Russians also understand us better than we understand US.
We’re blinded by an Enlightenment haze of delusion about “democracy” and “rights”. Russia never passed through this infantilizing phase, they just stuck with plain Machiavellian realism.
Polistra's Mill 