The CIA director met with Sergey Naryshkin, head of Russia's external intelligence service SVR, in Turkey in November 2022 to deliver a message about nuclear weapons consequences, and the meeting included Chinese diplomatic support for the message that Xi Jinping did not want nuclear weapons used in Ukraine.

Putin's aggression in Crimea in 2014 helped create a sense of Ukrainian national purpose that strengthened Ukrainian determination to resist in 2022, paradoxically making Putin's own strategy self-defeating.

The pace of innovation is such that just keeping up with it, let alone getting ahead of it, is a huge challenge that is as important as anything else, and perhaps more important than any other priority the agency has.

The risk of strategic declassification is overuse and losing sources, particularly human intelligence, which requires careful judgment and presidential instinct about appropriate scope of disclosure.

Unless the CIA builds better relationships with the private sector technology companies, there is no way the intelligence community will be able to compete effectively with China in technological innovation and capabilities.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) was demolished, but its work of building the kind of position in the Western Hemisphere that is seen as a shared benefit by regional leaders makes a big strategic difference.

Wars are much easier to start than to finish, especially when there is only a hazy idea of the finish line, as evidenced by the difficulty now faced in the Iran war despite initial military success.

The CIA developed more flexible career paths to keep talented officers even if they spend only 8-9 years before going to the private sector, allowing them to return with private sector experience and benefits, recognizing that not all valuable officers want 30-year careers.

The Trump administration deserves credit for focusing more attention on the Western Hemisphere as a natural strategic home base for the United States, though care must be taken not to shoehorn policy entirely through the prism of counter-narcotics and should include development assistance.

Creeping annexation in the West Bank has accelerated to a gallop in terms of settler violence and land seizures, indicating a worsening trajectory for Palestinian statehood prospects.

The Marshall Plan and the PEPFAR program under George W. Bush exemplify the power of the United States' example in blending hard and soft power, with PEPFAR saving tens of millions of people from HIV/AIDS.

Gaza's situation seems frozen with Gaza physically divided between an area the IDF controls and an area where most of Gaza's population is and where Hamas is re-emerging.

Burns has long believed the Iranian regime is on a one-way street toward eventual collapse due to being deeply unpopular at home and having an unsustainable broader strategy, but worries that the war may have slowed rather than accelerated that eventual collapse.

For Putin, feeling genuine economic pressure and experiencing quite significant battlefield losses of over a million killed and wounded, the Iran war has provided a lifeline at a moment when it was beginning to feel pressure.

Kicking the can down the road on Taiwan for half a century may not win a Nobel Peace Prize, but it's actually the best of the available choices.

Burns has always thought that sooner or later Russians are going to chafe at being the junior partner of China, just as they chafed at being the junior partner of the United States after the Cold War, but that is a ways down the road and for the foreseeable future, the China-Russia partnership should be assumed to remain strong.