Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.

Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.

In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.

Conservatives have invested even more heavily in denying any basis for the Trump-Russia scandal. A handful of MAGA devotees have openly endorsed Russian propaganda, but more Republicans have explained away Trump’s behavior as reflecting some motivation other than outright sympathy for Moscow: He is transactional, he is a nationalist, he admires strength and holds weakness in contempt.

And it is all true: Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.

Immediately after Zelensky left the Oval Office, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.” The clear implication is that the United States will cut off its support for the Ukrainian war effort. Trump’s allies have already tried to foist the blame for that momentous decision onto Zelensky. Trump “felt disrespected” by the Ukrainian leader’s body language and argumentative manner, White House officials told Fox News. “Zelensky was in a terrible position,” National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry acknowledged on X, “but he never should have gotten sucked into making argumentative points.” And, he added, “he should have worn a suit.”

All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

In the past few weeks, Trump has made very little effort to conceal his pro-Russian tilt. He called Zelensky a dictator, and when asked if he would say the same about Putin, refused, insisting, “I don’t use those words lightly.” (No president in American history has used words more lightly than Trump.) He said Ukraine “may be Russian someday” and blamed Ukraine for starting the war. The U.S. even joined Russia, North Korea, and a tiny bloc of Russian allies to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The less damning explanations for Trump’s pattern of pro-Russia positions have all collapsed in the face of evidence. One line of defense, hauled out by Republican hawks to explain away Trump’s consistent efforts to undermine NATO, is that Trump actually wants to prod Europe into spending more on its own defense. Like a tough football coach, he is merely berating his team to become the best version of itself.

Except when European countries declared themselves ready to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the level Trump claimed to have wanted, he upped the demand to 5 percent. More recently, he advocated for the election of the right-wing, pro-Russian, anti-NATO AfD party in Germany. That is a strange thing to do if your goal is to push allies to stand up for themselves against Russia, but a perfectly sensible position if your goal is to undermine the anti-Russia alliance.

Republican Russia-hawks hoped they could bring Trump around by getting Ukraine to sign a deal handing over a portion of its mineral wealth to the United States. Instead, Trump announced that the mineral deal was dead. This, too, would be a strange move if his motives were purely transactional, but a very understandable one if his motives were to abandon Ukraine to Putin’s tender mercies.

Even today, Trump’s bullying commenced well before Zelensky had opened his mouth. Trump greeted his counterpart on the White House driveway with condescending mockery, pointing at him and telling onlookers, “He’s all dressed up today,” like Bill Batts in Goodfellas belittling Joe Pesci’s character. (“Hey, Tommy, all dressed up!”) Zelensky’s attire—the Ukrainian president wears military attire, not a suit, to remind the world that his country is at war—has been a fixation on the right, and conservatives have seized upon it as a pretext to blame him for Trump’s anger. Oddly, they did not seem to mind that Elon Musk showed up at the White House this week in a T-shirt and baseball cap.

Might Zelensky have gotten a different outcome by taking Trump’s abuse and stream of lies with more self-abasement? Sure, it’s possible; if you reason backwards from a bad outcome, any different strategy is almost axiomatically smarter. Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.

Last Saturday, I was in Montreal for the Canada-U.S. hockey game in the 4 Nations Cup. I knew I needed to be there. A few nights later, I was at home in front of our TV for the final game, which Canada won 3–2 in overtime. I watched every moment, from before the game began to after it ended. I almost never do that. Those games, I knew, were going to say something—about Canadian players, about Canadian fans, about Canada. Maybe something about the United States too. I didn’t know what.

Sports can tell big stories. I was one of two goalies for Canada in the Canada–Soviet Union series in 1972, the first international best-against-best hockey series. Until that moment, professional players from the NHL were not eligible to compete in the amateurs-only Olympic Games or World Championships. Canada was where hockey originated, where all of the best players in the world were born and developed. To the total annoyance of Canadians, year after year the Soviet Union, not Canada, became known as “World Champions.”

The 1972 showdown was eight games: four in Canada, four in Moscow. Everyone—the Canadian players and fans, even the Soviet players and fans and the experts from both countries—knew that Canada would win decisively, likely all eight games and by big scores.

In Game 1 in Montreal, the Soviets won, 7–3. Imagine the reaction all across Canada. Then multiply that by 10.

Instantly, the stakes changed. Something deeper than hockey pride was on the line. We were the best in the world when it came to hockey; the rest of the world didn’t think about Canada that way when it came to many other things. Now we had lost. What did that say about us? About Canada? About Canadians? The next seven games would decide. These were the stakes.

We left Canada trailing two games to one, with one game tied. We lost the first game in Moscow. The series was all but over. Then we won the next two games, leaving it to one final game. In 1972, not many North Americans traveled to Europe; almost none went to Moscow. Three thousand Canadians were in that arena. They were there because, somehow, they knew they had to be there. For the last game, on a Thursday, played entirely during work and school hours all across the country, 16 million out of Canada’s population of 22 million people watched. Behind two goals to start the third period, we tied the game, then won it, and the series, with 34 seconds remaining. I felt immense excitement. I felt even more immense relief. In that series, Canadians discovered a depth of feeling for their country that they hadn’t known was there.

In 1980, I was the other person in the Olympics booth in Lake Placid, New York, when the U.S. beat the Soviets and won the gold medal. (When Al Michaels said, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!,” I said, “Unbelievable.”) At the beginning of the Olympics, for the U.S., there were no stakes. The team was made up almost entirely of college kids. The Soviets, at the time, were the best team in the world. Even after the U.S. team won some early games, their players seemed on a roll to enjoy, not to be taken seriously. Then they beat the Soviets and two days later defeated Finland to win the gold.

This was not a good time for the U.S. in the world. Among other problems and conflicts, Iran was holding 52 Americans hostage in Tehran. Weeks passed. The U.S. seemed powerless to get them back. Unbeknownst to all but a few, six of the hostages—all American diplomats—had escaped and were being hidden in the Canadian Embassy. The Canadians sheltered the diplomats for months, and eventually helped them escape. The news that the diplomats had made it safely out of Iran came just before the Lake Placid games began. Everywhere I went around the village, Americans came up to me and said, “Thank you, Canada,” as if they were otherwise friendless in the world.

In 1980, hockey was not a major sport in the U.S., and so Americans had no expectation or even hope of winning against the Soviets. What they did have at stake in 1980 was the Cold War. That they had to win. The hockey team’s victory in Lake Placid felt like part of this bigger fight. It fit the story Americans wanted to tell about themselves. And although hockey was a fairly minor sport, 45 years later, for many Americans, the “Miracle on Ice” remains their favorite patriotic sports moment.

Now to today. Now to the 4 Nations Cup. Being Canadian these past few months hasn’t been a lot of fun. The threat and now the coming reality of high tariffs on Canadian goods exported to the U.S.—and the disruptions and dislocations, known and unknown, that these tariffs will cause—is never out of mind. Even more difficult in the day-to-day is Donald Trump’s relentless and insulting commentary.  

Canada as the U.S.’s “51st state”; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau”; the U.S. using “economic force” to annex Canada, its nearest ally and inescapable geographical fact of life. It’s the kind of trolling that Trump does to everyone, to every country, whenever he wants to, because as president of the most powerful nation on Earth, he knows he can. He loves to watch the weak wobble and cringe, and those who think they’re strong discover they’re not.

Na na na na na. It sets a tone. It lets everyone know who’s boss. It’s what he’d done all his life in business. And although at a boardroom table he wasn’t always the guy with the deepest pockets, in the Oval Office of the United States of America, he knows he is. Being Donald Trump got him elected, but being president is what allows him to be Donald Trump. On November 5, nobody had as much at stake in the election’s result as he did. He needed to win to hold the world’s highest office, to avoid lawsuits and prison time. He needed to win to be him.

It's been amazing to watch world leaders of proud, historically significant countries, kings in their own domain, suck up to Donald Trump, to see billionaires and business titans, who know how the game is played—cater to political authority in public, play hardball in private—who reside proudly and smugly above and beyond politics, fold like a cheap suit. And later, when they do respond, because prime ministers, presidents, and CEOs eventually have to say something, their words sound so lame. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Trudeau said. By answering at all, you end up making any slur sound slightly, disturbingly legitimate, and you make yourself look weak.

How would Americans react if a president or prime minister of another country said the same about their president? That he’s crooked, crazy, a lunatic, a loser? That he’s the worst president in the history of the world? That their country is just another failed empire in its final death throes? That both president and country are a disgrace and everyone knows it? Probably not well.

But what do you do? What do the decision makers in other countries do? What do average Canadians, average Panamanians and Danes, what do ordinary people anywhere do? That’s why I needed to be at that game in Montreal.

Thirty years earlier, in 1995, on the weekend before Quebec’s second referendum on independence, my family and I went to Montreal to wander the city, to try to sense what Quebeckers were feeling, but mostly just to be there. On a Saturday night, we went to a Montreal Canadiens game. We wanted to be there for the singing of “O Canada.” The next day, a reporter for an English-language newspaper wrote that it was the loudest he had ever heard the anthem sung at a game. What he didn’t notice was that 10,000 people sang their hearts out, and 10,000 people were silent.

Last Saturday in Montreal, the arena was filled with fans in red-and-white Canada jerseys. The NHL and the NHL Players Association, which had organized the event, did what organizers do. They asked the fans to be respectful of both teams during the anthems. The fans decided not to be managed. They booed “The Star-Spangled Banner” loudly. They were not booing the American players. They were booing Donald Trump. Why shouldn’t he know how they felt? Why shouldn’t Americans know? How else would they know?

Five nights later in Boston, at the final game, the fans booed “O Canada,” but not very loudly.

The game was a classic. The two best teams in the world: Canada, the heart and soul, conscience and bedrock of the game; the U.S., in its development and growth, the great story in hockey in the past 30 years. Both teams played as well as they’d ever played. Their great stars played like great stars; some other players discovered in themselves something even they didn’t know was there. The U.S. could’ve won. The team was good enough to win. Canada won because of Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, and Sidney Crosby—and for the same reason Canada won against the Soviets in 1972.

Everybody, every country, has something inside them that is fundamental. That matters so much that it’s not negotiable. That’s deeply, deeply personal. Something that, if threatened, you’d do anything to protect, and keep on doing it until it’s done, even if it seems to others to make no sense. Even if it seems stupid. This is how wars start.

For Panama, some things are fundamental. For Denmark, China, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Canada—for everyone—it’s the same. And when you get pushed too much, too far, you rediscover what that fundamental is. Poke the bear and you find out there’s more in the bear than you know, than even the bear knows.

For Canada and these other countries, you don’t poke back against Donald Trump. You don’t troll a troll. You look into yourselves and find again what makes you special, why you matter, to yourselves, to the world, and knowing that, knowing that that is you, with that as your pride and backbone, you fight back.

The U.S. has its own fights. It faces these same questions. What is fundamental to America? “Greatness”? Maybe. But greatness depends on the needs of a country and the needs of the world at a particular moment and time, and being great in the ways that are needed. These next four years will not be easy for anyone—and they will be perhaps especially difficult for the United States.

As for the 51st state crap, knock it off. It’s beneath you.

For Donald Trump, everything is a transaction. You look to make a deal, you push and shove, scratch and claw—you do whatever it takes. And if that doesn’t work, you do some more, until at some point you walk away and make another deal. It’s just business.

Only some things aren’t business. Every so often, Canadians are defiantly not-American. They will need to be much more than that in the next four years. Canadians will need to be defiantly Canadian. Canada won in 1972 and again last week because winning was about more than business. It was personal.

On Tuesday morning, I was at the United States Military Academy, in West Point, for a national-security conference. I was invited to observe several classes of cadets in a comparative-politics course. At the end of each class, their instructor, a young Special Forces major who had already seen a variety of conflicts during his short career, would give the students the chance to ask me questions about the “real world” Army. I find such interactions with cadets to be fun and engaging. After warming up, they always seem to get around to asking: What are the hot spots in the world, and where do you see us serving in support of our country during our career?

In answering, I give them my own history. Entering West Point in 1971, my class expected to serve in Vietnam. But by the time we’d graduated, five years later, America was out of that war. Most of us were instead sent to Europe, preparing for a clash between the Soviets and NATO that never arrived. After the Berlin Wall came down, we thought our nation would be at peace for years—but then the Army, which had trained for years to defend the border of Germany, found itself attacking Iraqi forces in Desert Storm. Then, after 9/11, we conducted counterterror and counterinsurgency fights in two distinctly different countries we’d never expected to go to.

The message for the cadets? As soldiers, prepare yourself for anything. Go where you’re sent, conduct operations to the best of your ability, serve your nation well, and follow your oath to defend the Constitution.

That night, in my hotel room, I watched the president stand next to the Israeli prime minister and suggest where the next generation of U.S. soldiers might go. Most Americans were surprised by Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be “taking over Gaza”—that we would clear unexploded ordnance, “level the site,” deploy U.S. troops if necessary, and turn the area into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

After the press conference, I watched analysts, human-rights activists, and Middle Eastern officials condemn the proposed displacement of Palestinians, with some seeing in the proposal a violation of international law.

As stunned as I was by Trump’s announcement, my first thought was: If the military were told to deploy, how in the heck would it do this mission? As a commander, I had been assigned some tough missions. And I remembered reading that when General George C. Marshall made Dwight D. Eisenhower the commander of the European invasion force in World War II, he gave him the succinct written order to “enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine.” Eisenhower wrote that he was immediately overwhelmed by the scope and scale of that mission, the resources that it would require, and the operational environment—enemy, allies, terrain—the troops would face. But he started his planning, and eventually executed the D-Day landings. If the U.S. could pull that off, how much more difficult would it be for it to take over Gaza and turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East?

Answering that question requires translating Trump’s general directive into the specifics of implementation. First, consider the dimensions of the Gaza Strip. At approximately 141 square miles, it’s six times the size of Manhattan. Just razing half-destroyed structures, ridding the area of rubble, and erecting new buildings would present a daunting engineering challenge. One engineer I spoke with that night estimated that the cost would be $30 billion to $80 billion. That broadly aligns with the United Nations Development Program’s estimate of $30 billion to $40 billion.

The UN also estimates that the war has left more than 50 million tons of rubble in Gaza, and claims that clearing that debris could take more than 15 years. Given that more than 170,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed during the Israeli military’s months-long operations, replacing them would require thousands of civil, structural, electrical, and environmental engineers coordinating their various disciplines, and could take decades.

Who would do this work? One cable pundit suggested using the United States Army Corps of Engineers. That organization has only about 35,000 civilian and 700 military personnel, and is already stretched thin by its domestic responsibilities. Deploying even a portion of the Army Corps would require a considerable commitment, and extensive support for the force within the area of its operation. Such an endeavor would likely necessitate extensive coordination with international partners and private organizations to manage the substantive building effort.

What the military calls the operational environment, or OE, is something that any commander or manager must assess before committing forces to an area. The Gaza/Israel OE is fraught with dangers that would affect and impede the already-challenging rubble-removal and construction efforts. The intelligence needed to counter the activity of terrorist groups comes from a variety of agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. All of these are undergoing personnel scrubs by DOGE, which is interrupting the flow of information that would help identify, prevent, and respond to threats. Dismissing senior counterterrorism leaders at the FBI, or encouraging large numbers of CIA officers to leave the agency, will weaken international intelligence sharing, risk increasing terror activity, and heighten international-security risks.

Almost-uniform international opposition would further complicate the challenge. Palestinian leaders were quick to denounce the demand that more than 2 million Gazans leave their home. Our European allies—on whom we depend for support in the area—met Trump’s comments with skepticism and criticism. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that forced displacement would be “tantamount to ethnic cleansing.” And the proposal also aroused domestic opposition, including from some of Trump’s closest political allies.

When Eisenhower was told to storm the European continent, he could count on the support of the American people, our allies, and our intelligence services—and could draw on enormous resources made available for the task. If the Gaza mission were to be handed to the military today, it would enjoy none of those advantages.

I purposely have not provided what the military calls a troop-to-task requirement, or an analysis of the number of soldiers that would be needed to accomplish the mission. And if troops did go to Gaza as part of this operation, as the president said might be needed, some of them would likely never return—just as thousands didn’t return from storming the beaches during World War II. Before the current administration goes any further, it should take stock of that reality.

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Bill Burns has spent much of his nearly four-decade career in government arguing about words. As he was packing up his office this week at CIA headquarters, the language of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which he had toiled over for the past 15 months, was at the top of his mind. If the parties agreed to the deal, as he was cautiously confident they would, Israeli hostages in Gaza would go free and Palestinians would receive vital humanitarian aid.

“In many ways, this [negotiation] was the hardest” of his long career, Burns told me in one of two recent conversations—harder even than the secret talks with Iran that he helped lead and that eventually produced the 2015 agreement placing restrictions on the country’s nuclear program. For starters, Hamas’s military leaders were hiding in Gaza, making communications with them cumbersome. The parties debated for months over the presence of Israeli military forces on the Gaza side of the border with Egypt, a stretch through which Israel said Hamas was smuggling weapons. “And this had such an intensely human dimension to it,” Burns said, speaking of the Israeli hostages as well as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes have been turned to rubble in Israel’s campaign against Hamas. Burns told me that he had worked to ensure that these people were not mere “brackets in text” of an official peace plan.

Words matter, but looking back on his time as the head of the world’s most important spy agency, Burns also had numbers on his mind. By his own count, he had made 84 trips overseas during his four years as director of the CIA. Even for a peripatetic former diplomat, that’s a busy travel schedule. For the chief of an intelligence agency, it’s extraordinary.

[William J. Burns: The blob meets the heartland]

Burns has brought an unusual synthesis of diplomacy and spycraft to the role of CIA chief.  You can tell the story of sequential crises that beset the Biden administration by his itinerary. Burns went to Moscow in November 2021 to tell President Vladimir Putin that the United States knew he was preparing to invade Ukraine. More than once, President Joe Biden has tasked Burns with delivering forceful messages to the Kremlin, because Burns knows the country, and its leader, better than anyone else in the Cabinet. On his tenth trip to Ukraine—one of 14 in total—President Volodymyr Zelensky joked that Burns now qualified for a free upgrade on the train from Poland, which shuttles world leaders and VIPs across the border because air travel is too dangerous.

Burns made 19 trips to participate in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the majority of them to the Middle East, working with his colleagues from Israel, Qatar, and Egypt.

In May 2023 he went to Beijing, the highest-level visit by a Biden-administration official since the U.S. military had shot down a Chinese spy balloon that floated across the continental United States three months earlier. He went back last year to meet his counterpart, the minister of state security, and open a channel of communication between rival powers that seem at times to be drifting toward military confrontation.  

The Biden administration is stocked with former generals, diplomats, and strategists. And yet Burns often got the hardest assignments, the ones with big potential rewards but that were more likely to end in disappointment, or at least ambiguity. This is not the CIA director’s traditional portfolio. But in Burns—a 33-year veteran of the Foreign Service, only the second career diplomat to become deputy secretary of state, a former ambassador to Russia and Jordan—Biden got a spymaster with an unusual set of skills. So he used him.

Burns seemed as surprised as anyone when Biden chose him for the job. “Honestly, when the president called me, I almost fell off my chair,” Burns told me. He would be the first career diplomat to serve as CIA director, but that was hardly disqualifying. Plenty of his predecessors had never worked in intelligence but were reasonably successful in the role: Leon Panetta and Mike Pompeo come to mind. Burns had been considered for the top job in the State Department; he had retired from the Foreign Service in 2014. But the more he thought about running the CIA, the more it made sense.

“Diplomats and intelligence officers, in all those years I spent overseas, worked together more closely than any other two parts of the U.S. government,” Burns said. Intelligence and espionage are built on human relationships, establishing trust, and maintaining credibility. So is diplomacy. Most of Burns’s travel was devoted to CIA business, visiting stations overseas and meeting with personnel. But a sizable portion of the 1 million miles that Burns says he logged on the road as director was in the service of building new relationships with world leaders and using the ones he had already established. Thirty-plus years in diplomacy tend to fatten the Rolodex, and as several of his close aides told me, “Bill knows everybody.”  

Under Burns’s watch, the CIA’s record wasn’t spotless. Critics, including some recently retired intelligence officers, have said that a top-heavy bureaucracy has at times produced sclerotic analysis that lacks depth and timeliness. Although the CIA and other agencies accurately forecast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they overestimated the invading military’s ability to swiftly conquer the country. Among CIA employees, Burns is widely admired and, early in his term, earned plaudits for ensuring that officers afflicted by the so-called Havana syndrome received adequate medical care, which they hadn’t had under his predecessor. But some of those victims were deeply disappointed that Burns, who’d initially suspected that Russia was to blame for the malady, ultimately sided with analysts who said it was not the handiwork of a foreign power.  

Still, he will be remembered as a successful director, and not just for how he did the basic job of leading the CIA. He also opened doors with other leaders, cleared up miscommunications, and delivered hard messages to difficult people. The White House found this arrangement especially helpful, not least because it’s sometimes easier to send a spy to do a diplomat’s business.

Burns went to Afghanistan in August 2021, shortly after the fall of Kabul, to meet the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Sending a senior diplomat, perhaps the secretary of state, might have signaled that the Biden administration was conferring official recognition on the militant group, which had seized the capital days earlier and ordered the Americans to leave the country. This was one of several instances where the Biden administration took advantage of Burns’s diplomatic acumen without actually employing him as a diplomat.  

Burns was also there to do CIA business. The United States was racing to evacuate its citizens and Afghan allies, including those who had worked with the military and the agency, amid the collapse of the Afghan government. Burns had been to Afghanistan four months earlier, when the government was just barely holding on against the Taliban, and he knew that once the United States withdrew, it would have little influence over the country’s new rulers. In April, he had warned members of Congress that a pullout would pose “significant risk” to U.S. interests, and that intelligence agencies would have a harder time monitoring terrorist groups that might reemerge in America’s absence. Intelligence analysts, including at the CIA, said the government could collapse quickly, within months or even a few weeks of a U.S. withdrawal. But no intelligence agency accurately foresaw how rapidly it would dissolve, or that the country’s leader would flee.

Burns’s talks with the Taliban helped provide the necessary “top cover to get our people out of Afghanistan,” a CIA paramilitary officer who has worked closely with the director told me. He credited Burns with helping to marshal the bureaucracy back in Washington, so that the agency’s Afghan partners and their families could obtain U.S. visas and get seats on military aircraft. Biden has called the withdrawal from Afghanistan “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” It was also a chaotic and dangerous mess in which the CIA, working alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan forces, had to secretly evacuate U.S. citizens, Afghans, and other foreign nationals using an agency compound known as Eagle Base—hardly the orderly departure that administration officials wanted.

The U.S. withdrawal marked a violent end to the longest war in the nation’s history. Thirteen troops were among the more than 180 people who died in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. As disastrous as it was, the fall of Kabul gave Burns the chance to demonstrate his commitment to the CIA’s people and its mission.

[George Packer: Biden’s betrayal of Afghans will live in infamy]

The paramilitary officer called Burns’s efforts in Washington and support of operations on the ground “morally courageous.” Embracing the agency’s employees and demonstrating solidarity with them made Burns a popular and successful leader despite his outsider status. His predecessors who failed to endear themselves in this way (Porter Goss and David Petraeus come to mind) found their time at Langley rocky and brief.  

Three months after Burns’s trip to Kabul, the president again sent Burns on a sensitive mission that required the finesse of a diplomat and the discretion of a spy. Burns went to Moscow with a message for Putin, who had retreated to the seaside resort of Sochi amid a spike in coronavirus infections in the capital. From a phone in the Kremlin, Burns listened to the Russian leader recite his usual bill of grievances—an expansionist NATO threatened Russian security; Zelensky was the illegitimate leader of a non-country.

Burns, the administration’s de facto Putin whisperer, had heard it all before and understood that the Russian leader’s paranoid obsession with Ukraine was real and unshakable. But this time he had a message of his own: If you invade, you will pay an enormous price. Burns left a letter from Biden affirming that there would be consequences.

In the run-up to the February 2022 invasion, Burns and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, helped coordinate an unusual process of declassifying intelligence about Russian military activities and intentions, in order to preempt the false narratives that Burns knew Putin would try to spin—including that Russia was attacking Ukraine in self-defense.

Once the war began, some administration officials believed that Kyiv might fall within three days, a judgment that proved to deeply misunderstand Ukraine’s will to fight. U.S. officials thought that Zelenksy might have to govern in exile, if he could make it out of the capital alive. CIA officers, who had spent years helping Ukraine build its own modern intelligence system, wanted to stay at their posts. Burns backed them up, and persuaded the White House. The CIA is the only U.S. government organization whose personnel were on the ground in Ukraine before the war and never left. Agency officers there have played central roles in the United States’ assistance to Ukraine.

Russia stumbled in the first year of the war. For a time Ukraine seemed poised to repel the invasion. But as Burns leaves office, Putin is gaining ground, slowly and at extraordinary cost. At least 700,000 Russian troops have died or been wounded since the invasion, more than 10 times the Soviet casualties during a decade of war in Afghanistan, Burns said.

Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day. But to do that, Putin would have to be willing to negotiate. And Burns doesn’t think he is. “He’s put all his chips on the table,” Burns said. “He believed then, and he believes to this day, that he cannot afford to lose. So it’s a huge mistake for anybody to underestimate that.”  

When two countries are at odds, their leaders often find it easier for the spies to talk, and not the diplomats or the heads of state. Wars have arguably been averted that way. “Even in the worst of the Cold War with the Soviets, when I was a young diplomat, you did have all sorts of channels” to communicate frankly, Burns said, including through intelligence agencies. “I think some of those now have been reestablished or created with the Chinese.”

China has been Burns’s long-term strategic focus as CIA director, even as he has spent time on Ukraine—and in it—and shuttling around the Middle East. And paying more attention to China has meant paying more attention to technology. From the beginning of his tenure, Burns put special emphasis on both how the agency used technology and the areas where China and other adversaries could pull ahead of the United States, such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. “I do believe this is one of those plastic moments that come along two or three times a century, where there’s some fundamental changes on the international landscape,” Burns told me. “In this case, it is the reality that we’re no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block.”

In the fall of 2021, the CIA established a new China Mission Center, to focus exclusively on gathering intelligence about the country and countering its pervasive spying on the United States. The center is the only one of its kind at the CIA, devoted to a single country. China-related work now consumes about 20 percent of the agency’s budget, a threefold increase from the start of his tenure, Burns said.

[William J. Burns: The United States needs a new foreign policy]

China’s advances in technology—many of them thanks to years of hacking and stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies—have allowed Beijing to create a virtual surveillance state. Those conditions have complicated the CIA’s efforts to recruit spies inside the country and keep their work for the United States a secret. In the past decade, the agency lost most of its agents in the country after they were discovered by Chinese authorities.

While the United States tries to spy on one of the hardest targets, Burns has also tried to reopen a dialogue with Beijing, including via his counterpart, Chen Yixin, the security minister. (The head of the China Mission Center, a career CIA officer fluent in Mandarin, accompanied Burns on one of his trips to Beijing.)

Burns is accustomed to having conversations that his political bosses can’t. But he said he was mindful that, as the head of an intelligence agency, he was not the one making foreign policy. “My job is to support policy makers, not become one.” But, he noted, if the president asked for his opinion, “I’ll tell him.”

And he did. One longtime aide who has known Burns since his time at the State Department reminded me that he and Biden “go way back,” and that the two men have shared a bond over their Irish Catholic upbringing. In Burns’s 2019 memoir—called, unsurprisingly, The Back Channel—he calls Biden “bighearted” and “a significant and thoughtful voice at the table” when Biden was the vice president and Burns was No. 2 at the State Department.

Burns stayed in his lane as Biden’s CIA director. But the president handed him one hard diplomatic problem after another, leading many observers to wonder when Biden would make things official and nominate Burns for secretary of state. That probably would have happened in a second Biden term or a Kamala Harris administration. But Burns will have to settle for the unique hybrid position he created: Call him the diplomatic spy.

The model may or may not be replicable. Or even advisable. Diplomats are expected to operate with a degree of transparency that doesn’t apply to spies. Reporters do not travel with the CIA director as they do with the secretary of state. In many of the Middle Eastern countries Burns knows well, intelligence chiefs conduct foreign relations not just out of a need for secrecy, but because they maintain their own power centers, even independently of the governments they serve. Burns saw diplomats and spies work closely together throughout his career, but he said their jobs shouldn’t be confused. “Having experience on the other side of the table helped,” he told me, “but I’ve been very careful to immerse myself in this agency and move away from my old world.”

On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas finally reached the cease-fire agreement that Burns and his foreign colleagues had helped design. He was reluctant to celebrate the achievement, at least outwardly. There were no champagne corks popping or high fives, he told me. Burns has seen deals fall apart before, and this one has entered only its first phase.

By its nature, intelligence work is secret, which usually makes it thankless. “People here don’t expect to get public praise or acknowledgment,” Burns said. Nevertheless, the cease-fire he helped devise is the high note on which he might end his long career in public service.

The deal was hard-fought and hammered out in secret, and its future remains uncertain. In that respect, it was typical intelligence work.

“I’ll miss that,” Burns said. “There’s no substitute for that kind of satisfaction.”