Lunch with the Russian ambassador
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John Kiriakou offers this meeting as the practical case against the American refusal to engage adversaries.

"I had occasion to speak with the Russian ambassador to the United States several months ago. I had written a column that he had read, and one of his aides reached out, and the ambassador invited me to lunch. And he said he wanted to know one thing: even in this time of war, is there any way that the United States and Russia can cooperate on something?"

The three answers

"And I said: oh, yes. And I''ve been consistent with this."

The first was narcotics, argued from where the product goes. "Afghanistan produces 93 per cent of the world''s heroin. Almost all of that heroin goes to Russia and Iran, and Russia and Iran have the highest rates of opioid addiction in the world, five times the rate of opioid addiction that we have here in the United States. So we can absolutely cooperate on counter-narcotics, which we don''t do."

The second was proliferation: "we are just as worried as the Russians are about the prospect of terrorist groups or rogue nations acquiring fissile material, so we should be and could be cooperating on counter-proliferation."

The third was terrorism, argued from a common experience and a specific data point. "Russia has been the victim of terrorism just like the United States has been a victim of terrorism, and so we should be cooperating on counterterrorism. There was a piece in the Washington Post just today saying that Tajikistan, as small as it is, and as small a population as it has, provides more fighters to ISIS on a per capita basis than any other country in the world. We should be cooperating with the Russians on that, to stop that. And you do that by encouraging economic development and education."

The invitation, and what he went prepared to say

Kiriakou dates the lunch to shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and describes the company: he was "one of seven independent journalists who were invited to lunch with the Russian ambassador in Washington." What the ambassador wanted was ideas, specifically, how Washington and Moscow "could continue to cooperate diplomatically even during a time of war."

He says he prepared for it and was pleased with his own answer, which was to identify three fields where the interests do not diverge: "the US and Russia have identical interests in counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counternarcotics. We should never stop cooperating on those three issues."

See also

- The refusal to talk to adversaries
- Afghan heroin policy
- ISIS
- The permanent multipolar world
- Russia-Ukraine war origins
