Luck

Here is a question I keep returning to, because I cannot make it stop being strange. How does a man who rules a country responsible for roughly one and a half percent of the world’s economy keep bending to his will a coalition of states that outweigh him, militarily and economically, by dozens of times? Right now we are watching it happen again. A war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court refuses an ultimatum, sends a delegation of clerks to a meeting designed to talk peace to death, and somehow it is the rest of the world — Europe, the United States, even the country he is bombing — that ends up rearranging itself around his calendar. You can call this many things. Strategy is not one of them. The honest word, the word that has followed this man across three decades, is luck. ...