Americans Play Poker, Russians Play Chess. This was a common saying during the Cold War, and there is a good deal of truth in it.

Biden plays poker, but poorly.

He tries to bluff Putin with a few thousand troops in Poland, while Putin has over 100,000 troops and the armored vehicles and artillery that go with them. If you plan to bluff, don’t let your opponent see your cards. Besides, Putin saw the unmitigated debacle of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. If you plan to bluff, don’t let your opponent see you as weak and incompetent.

Putin plays chess, and well.

He looks three or four moves ahead. He sees a pincer movement, his troops moving into Ukraine from Russia in the east, as well as from Belarus in the northwest. He sees an indecisive and impaired man in Washington, and even weaker men in Paris and Berlin. He sees the US military as weakened by wokeism and vaccine firings, and the rest of NATO not worth mentioning. The French can barely get enough tanks running for the Bastille Day parade, and the German army is described as meals-on-wheels in khaki.

One need not be a chess grand master to predict that it’s Putin’s game all the way.