“One thing that the United States has been bad at in the last 20 years is allowing the diplomats to do their job.” John Kiriakou returns to the point often enough that he describes saying it “as often as possible” and writing it frequently.[1]
Where he dates the break
He places the change inside an administration he watched from the inside. “I remember when I was still at the CIA we complained all the time about the George W. Bush administration, because I had never seen an administration work so hard to not talk to our enemies.” The practice it replaced ran back decades: engagement with the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War, and then, “beginning with Nixon, engagement with both the Soviet Union and China was a mainstay of American foreign policy.”[1][2]
What it became
The part he considers most damaging is that the departure outlasted the administration that made it. “George W. Bush made a decision to not engage with our enemies, and that”s become policy for both of the major political parties here in the United States. That”s a mistake.”[2]
He closes the point by inverting an old formula: “we used to say that here in the United States our own partisan differences ended at the shore, and overseas we were always unified. Well — now we”re unified again, but in the wrong way, in a bad way. We”re unified in that we have this foreign policy where we try not to engage with the governments of countries with which we disagree. And I think that”s just a terrible mistake.” His lunch with the Russian ambassador is the illustration he attaches to it.[3]