Kiriakou’s assessment of the incoming administration opened with a disclaimer against his own optimism. Remember what they say in business school, he said: hope is not a strategy.[1]
The four hopes
Having said so, he proceeded to hope anyway, and was specific about what for.
He was hoping that Donald Trump was sincere about ending the war in Ukraine. He was hoping Trump was sincere about staying out of other countries’ business. He was hoping he was sincere about leaving Syria to its own devices. And he was hoping for some sort of agreement, eventually and somehow, with the government of Iran.[1]
Why he settled for hope
The justification he gave is not a claim about Trump’s intentions at all. It is a claim about the alternatives: otherwise, he said, he did not think the country was going to get it from some of these other players.[1]
That reasoning is the substance of the position. Kiriakou is not a Trump partisan — in the same commentary he went on to say he was mystified by the choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, described Rubio as a neoconservative in the mould of George W. Bush, and predicted no improvement whatever on Cuba or Venezuela.[2][3][4]
What he is describing is a judgment about where restraint could possibly originate. On his account of the permanent foreign policy establishment, the appetite for withdrawal does not exist inside either party’s professional ranks; if a president who campaigned against foreign wars would not deliver it, no successor drawn from the usual pool was going to.
The pattern
The formulation — an explicit warning against wishful thinking, followed immediately by a wish — recurs in Kiriakou’s political commentary. He applies the same structure to Russia policy, where he welcomed a planned call between Trump and Putin on the general ground that diplomacy is always a good thing, while flatly denying that anyone in the American government was sincere about improving relations with China.
The hope, in each case, is attached to a single reversible act by a single person, and the pessimism to the institutions that outlast him.