krebscycle

When I told one of my children that I was sure he would finish his homework, both of us, as native speakers of English, understood that I was suggesting a course of action, not declaring a belief. But this subtlety is perhaps too much for General Michael Hayden:

“Here our Secretary of State is saying this is not the Cold War, it’s win-win and it’s not zero sum. But for Vladimir Putin it is zero sum. That’s what we need to understand.”

Daily Beast.

So we have two alternatives: either John Kerry is a naive dolt who believed Vlad Putin to be a nice honorable gentleman, or he was trying to push Putin and others in Russia and the USA in a direction favorable to the USA’s long term interests. General Hayden, who has the distinctions of having headed NSA when 9/11 was missed and of pushing the program to subcontract out NSA services – the program that eventually employed Ed Snowden- seems to believe that the first alternative is correct.  But even the journalist who quotes Hayden notes: “Of course, U.S.-Russian relations have overlapped in some areas of mutual interest."  For example, it is very much in the interest of the United States to continue to work with Russia on nuclear arms reduction and locking down nuclear weapons in far-flung parts of the old Soviet Union that might otherwise be picked up by some terrorist force or ambitious strong-man. And Putin’s Russia also wins from this, both by keeping weapons out of the hands of their own enemies and because the arrangement brings in hard currency. So its actually not zero sum for Putin, contrary to Hayden. And the Secretary of State would not further the interests of the United States by public assertion that the US could not work with Putin, he would and did further it by pushing for cooperation where possible.

Is this so hard? If we only negotiated and engaged in diplomacy with people of transparent good will, the State Department could be shrunk quite a bit. Saying "I am sure we can do business and it will help both of us” is not necessarily a confession of naivete. This is a commonplace of how humans interact. Confrontational language is often unproductive, no matter what you really think of the other side.

So we’re kind of left with another conundrum: did Michael Hayden not figure this out, or is he just talking his own book – pushing his own political view or career? Hayden is a principal in the Chertoff Group. Remember Michael Chertoff the Czar of Color Coded Terror Alerts at Homeland Security under GWBush? Chertoff was one of the people who bungled Katrina and then he sold expensive worthless detection devices to TSA – the agency he had just managed. Maybe Hayden is just selling himself as a valuable consultant – I don’t know.

There is actually some interesting material in that article – but the odd theory that the US Secretary of State, the top diplomat, is totally naive, is a good example of confirmation bias.