This is, in my opinion, the great lesson to learn from chess. Offense and defense are a duality, not a partition. You can defend a piece by making an offensive

This is, in my opinion, the great lesson to learn from chess. Offense and defense are a duality, not a partition. You can defend a piece by making an offensive threat elsewhere on the board. You can attack a piece by shoring up defenses. Offense and defense are human concepts that clearly mean something, but when you get down to brass tacks and try to define them with mathematical precision it becomes very, very difficult. And potential offense can manifest as real defense, and potential defenses can manifest as real offense, and all sorts of other such relationships can be clearly seen in higher level chess. One is also a hopelessly lost without a map if one tries to understand international relationships without this understanding. Which frankly most people babbling away about them don't, even yea verily on HN and the mainstream media outlets. Rest assured the players themselves do. Since international relationship also have a large poker element to them, and you as a normal citizen are shockingly short on information, this isn't a secret decoder ring by any means. But you're just completely lost if you don't at least understand this duality of offense and defense aspect.