1. Trump needs to win the elections, and to do that, he needs good news.
2. Putin knows this, so he blackmails Trump with bad news.
3. Trump is trying to buy good news from Putin, but Putin is charging too high a price.
4. In other words, Putin has trapped Trump in a bad-news dilemma: don’t buy – bad; buy at too high a price – also bad. The logical response would be to grab Putin by the collar and shake him hard, because America certainly has the power to do so. But Putin plays poker well, while Trump is good only at golf – and even then, mostly on his own course.
5. So Putin received a message from Washington, but he didn’t appreciate it. Now it is his move, and judging by everything we are seeing, he is prepared to raise the stakes on the European playing field. Importantly, Europe has many vulnerabilities and little readiness. This is where the rules of Go come into play: one strategically placed stone can threaten an opponent in several directions at once.
6. Once again, we see how a country can possess the most powerful armed forces on the planet and simultaneously suffer from strategic weakness that allows Iran, North Korea, and russia to outmaneuver it. At the same time, the United States is weakening its relationships with allies – Europe, Canada, South Korea, and others.
7. Dictatorships do not defeat democracies because dictators face no limits on how much evil they can commit, nor simply because dictators are not constrained by electoral timelines. Democracies lose because they do not know what they want.
8. That is why democracies need institutions whose time horizons extend beyond political terms in office – so they do not forget what they ultimately want.
Author: Valeriy Pekar
— @rshereme Aug 30, 2026
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