…fake some kind of self-reappraisal. In other words, he ‘went away and listened to all voices’ before returning from the mountain and resynthesizing his approach to global affairs.

Except its a kind of a quantum command performance in which the only way to get out of a corner you have painted yourself into is to magically go quantum reappear in multiple places.

He did it successfully on the Duran because they allowed him to control the narrative. There was really no pushback that I could see.

He took the narrative at the point he said “empathy for the other side does not mean sympathy, it means understanding the other side but still acting in your own interests”. To which the response was “yes, yes” lots of nodding and nobody asked him how understanding the Russian point of view is any different at all from respecting it: In other words, how have US interests been served in any way whatsoever by having a military presence anywhere near the Russian border? How have anybody’s interests been served in this regard? So in this sense, how is understanding Russia’s point of view (empathy) practically any different from respecting it (sympathy)?

The key point being that Russia has not been acting against US interests. By existing, Russia was simply a barrier to the ambitions of a relatively tiny (by numbers of people) but stupid elite in the US, who happen to have a controlling interest in the political system.