Sun Tzu says you must give your enemies a golden bridge to retreat. Thus, in order to find the shortest path to end the current Ukraine-Russia conflict, we have to give Putin a suitable end game. But to offer a dictator a compromise, we have to be brutally honest with how we opened the door to attack in the first place. It wasn't Ukraine, but it was Germany's decision to move forward with the Nord Stream pipeline that may have led us to this crisis.

Nobody in their right mind would allow Russia to eventually supply 80% of Europe's energy. Germany had been warned, but it seems former Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder had fallen into Putin's pocket long ago. And the prospect of cheap Russian oil directly fed into Germany under the Baltic Sea seemed an offer no one could refuse.

Nonetheless, the German public which was sold on Nord Stream may have forgotten that they weren't doing business with a gas company that separated commerce from politics. It was dealing with a dictator calling the shots from the Kremlin. And as such, realpolitik is necessary for political analysis - not modern concepts of interdependence and mutual self-interest.