Yin and Yang. Where white dominates, black arises, and vice versa. Within the great victory lies the seed of defeat, and within defeat glimmers the sign of victory.
These thoughts won't leave me when I think about the past months of the year 2026. The success of the Trump administration in Venezuela convinced it that everything was possible, that no one could withstand the US anymore. From now on, one could take whatever one wanted. Iran, then Cuba, Greenland followed naturally, and the list could be extended at will.
Success is always deceptive, for what is more logical than repeating what worked before? If you always do the same thing, you always get the same result (to paraphrase Einstein), right? That is why France in the Second World War used the same tactics as in the First, which led to disaster. For Germany had just learned from its defeat that it had to do things differently. But the victory over France made the Nazis overconfident, and so Hitler sent his soldiers into a disastrous war against Russia.
Today, it threatens to end the same way for the US in Iran. The small success in Venezuela became a trap because people let the poison of hubris run its course.
That defeat carries a core of victory within it presupposes that honest conclusions are drawn and lessons are learned, and that is very difficult for many people. It is indeed very tempting to place the blame for failure on someone else. Dictators and leaders of their kind are skilled at this: their plan was perfect, but it was botched by incompetent, cowardly and stupid subordinates. The solution, then, is to fire them, or worse, and carry on in the same way. Once in the yin, the darkness, you can only reach the light if you can cast off the ballast of hubris and tunnel vision.
I therefore expect that heads will still roll in Washington.
Although it is not all Trump's fault. It is also the fault of the Americans.