Does Trump fear Russia?

espionage, and it is becoming increasingly hard to know who and what to believe.

At issue right now is a dossier on Trump that may or may not be true. It was supposedly compiled from Russian sources by a former British spy, accepted as credible by US intelligence agencies, summarised in briefings to Trump and outgoing President Obama, and then leaked to the press.

Published on buzzfeed.com and reported on by CNN, the dossier contains compromising information about Trump.

Public interest in the matter is likely to focus on events in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013, when Trump allegedly hired prostitutes to perform lewd acts on a bed in the presidential suite where Obama and his wife Michelle had stayed previously.

The incident can be interpreted as revealing Trump’s attitude to the Obamas, as much as anything else. The report is unsubstantiated and unverifiable.

If it is false, Trump was right to get angry at his extraordinary first press conference since winning the election.

If it is true, Trump is right to feel paranoid both about those in his inner-circle who might spill the beans on such a thing, and those in the intelligence community who would leak the details.

Of more concern is the suggestion that Trump’s desire for better relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin is based not so much on admiration, but on fear. In addition to ‘‘post-truth’’ and ‘‘fake news’’, we now have learned a new term in the political lexicon – ‘‘kompromat’’, the Russian word for financially or sexually compromising material to use against a rival or adversary.

The bigger picture is the geopolitical implications of Trump’s presidency. Before Trump, people spoke of a ‘‘new Cold War’’ between the West and Russia.

But conditions have changed since the last Cold War, and Russia is not the former Soviet Union. It does not have the strength to take on the United States, Europe and their allies combined, and promoting or influencing Trump and his isolationist tendencies has to be seen in that context.

The dossier is 35 pages long. It contains so many damning allegations and so many leads for further investigation that this story is likely to run for a while yet.

Making sense of it all in this post-truth era, amid all the fake news and attention-diverting ‘‘kompromat’’, may take even longer.