There’s an old saying in poker: If you’re in a three-sided game and you don’t know who the sucker is, you’re the sucker. This refers to the fact that two players in a poker game can implicitly coordinate their efforts to clean out the third party (the “sucker”). Once that is accomplished, the two players will turn on each other, but at least they have a bigger pile of chips. This simple insight also applies to global geopolitics. The only three countries in the world that really matter are Russia, China and the U.S. (Sorry, U.K., France and Japan… you’re in the second tier). As strategists from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton understood, the U.S. needs to be in a de facto alliance with either Russia or China to box in the other superpower. In the 1980s, the U.S. boosted China to pressure the old Soviet Union. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen Square (1989), the U.S. worked closely with Russia to sideline China. In the early 2000s, the play was to coordinate with China again to box in Russia (after the rise of Putin). Obama lost sight of this principle after 2008 by failing to realize that China was a much greater threat than Russia and by burning diplomatic bridges to Russia after U.S. interference in Ukraine backfired. Now the game is being played skillfully by Russia and China, with the U.S. as the odd man out or “sucker.” Trump tried to rectify this by improving relations with Russia, but this was blown up by China lovers in the U.S. intelligence community such as John Brennan and globalist tycoons such as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. As reported in this article, the China-Russia axis is now front-page news, and Trump’s hands are tied with regard to Russia because of the fake “collusion” allegations and the Mueller investigation. Until we put “Russiagate” behind us, the U.S. will remain the loser in this three-handed game. Institutional investors can schedule a proof of concept with the world’s first predictive data analytics firm combining human and artificial intelligence with complexity science. Check out Jim Rickard’s company at Meraglim Holdings to learn more.