It's easy to appear cunning when your adversaries are totally incompetent. Putin is a small-minded little man with a very unimpressive intellect. Fortunately for him, however, western leaders have been consistently self-deluding, naive, and wedded to an absurd level of reality-denial. With such opponents even a mindless creature like Trump could seem vaguely clever occasionally. For 15 years prescient observers have been ringing alarm bells over the West's perpetual appeasement of Putin's ambitions and for 15 years western leaders have remained hiding under the table. Now, when it's far too late, their spineless inefectual buffoonery is revealed for all to see, while Putin blunders and stumbles his way back to the days of the USSR.