Russia and NATO membership is the counterfactual John Kiriakou reaches for when asked how relations reached the state they were in by 2022. He dates the missed opportunity to his own time at the agency: “even back in the early 2000s, when we had an opportunity to establish really a new kind of relationship with Russia, where it would have been actually quite easy to cooperate on a very deep level on issues like counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, counter-proliferation.”[1]
The common interest he names first is Afghanistan, where “we both had a terrible time” and where the traffic ran in Moscow’s direction: the country “produces 93% of the world’s heroin, and most of that heroin goes to Russia and to Iran. We could have really worked together to make the world a better place.” He adds the cultural argument the period made much of, “not even mentioning the fact that Russia is a Christian country. It wanted at the time to open to the West for its own economic development.”[2]
What killed it, on his account, was the rank on offer rather than the substance.[2][3]
“We were willing, I guess, to discuss these issues on a limited basis, if we could bring the Russians in as a junior partner, as a mentee to be westernized. And they valued their independence. They weren’t interested.”
The membership approaches he treats as settled fact rather than as speculation: “we know now, as another example, that both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin talked to American presidents about joining NATO. And they got the cold shoulder. We didn’t want them in NATO.” His own view of the alliance is that the refusal cost more than it protected, “NATO is really, in my own view, NATO is irrelevant at this point. There was no reason not to bring the Russians in. At the very least, it would have been good for peace and good for economic development.”[3][4]
The two presidents named
Asked by Victor Bout in 2026 how the West had reached the impasse of the 2020s with Russia, Kiriakou named the two American presidents who had turned Russia down in person: “Boris Yeltsin asked Bill Clinton and Clinton laughed at him, and Vladimir Putin asked George W. Bush and Bush laughed at him and said it was never going to happen. It should have happened. You know, we wouldn’t be in this position maybe if the Russians were members of NATO, but the West wouldn’t take them seriously.”[5]
He runs the counterfactual straight through the intervening decades: “we kept poking Putin and poking and poking to the point where in 2015 we essentially overthrew a democratically elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine and installed a pro-American government, and finally the Russians didn’t want to take it anymore and so they crossed the border.”[6]