Chapter 12
TIGER TEAM
IT WAS THE worst day of the Biden presidency.
Shortly after nine a.m. on Thursday, August 26, 2021, President Joseph Biden walked into the Situation Room for a briefing on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. As he took his chair at the head of the table, surrounded by the top principals of his national security council, the group received unsettling news from the Afghan capital.
“The first report we got was, there’s been an explosion, some U.S. injuries, but no reported deaths,” recalls national security adviser Jake Sullivan. A suicide bomber had detonated an explosive at Abbey Gate, outside the Kabul airport.
Just as America’s longest war was finally coming to a close, chaos had erupted in Kabul. The previous year, President Trump had made an agreement with the Taliban to have all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. President Biden extended that deadline to September, but, vowing to stick to the agreement, he rebuffed requests from the military to leave a small contingent of troops on the ground for security. In July, he predicted the evacuation of Kabul would not echo the humiliating American exit from Saigon in 1975, when officials had scrambled from the U.S. embassy roof onto helicopters after an ignominious defeat in the Vietnam War.
President Biden’s prediction was shattered on August 15 when the Afghan president fled the country and his forces collapsed, ceding control of Kabul to the Taliban. The U.S. began scrambling to evacuate Americans and our Afghan allies. History may not have been repeating itself, but it certainly was rhyming.
Under fire, the president invited me to the White House for an exclusive interview on August 18, so he could take tough questions in a relatively controlled setting. We sat across from each other in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room, and I got right to it.
Stephanopoulos: Back in July, you said a Taliban takeover was highly unlikely. Was the intelligence wrong, or did you downplay it?
Biden: I think—there was no consensus. If you go back and look at the intelligence reports, they said that it’s more likely to be sometime by the end of the year…
Stephanopoulos: But you didn’t put a timeline on it when you said it was highly unlikely. You just said flat-out, “It’s highly unlikely the Taliban would take over.”
Biden: Yeah. Well, the question was whether or not it w—The idea that the Taliban would take over was premised on the notion that the—that somehow, the 300,000 troops we had trained and equipped was gonna just collapse, they were gonna give up. I don’t think anybody anticipated that…
… [L]ook, George. There is no good time to leave Afghanistan. Fifteen years ago would’ve been a problem, fifteen years from now. The basic choice is am I gonna send your sons and your daughters to war in Afghanistan in perpetuity?
Stephanopoulos: But if there’s no good time, if you know you’re gonna have to leave eventually, why not have—everything in place to make sure Americans could get out, to make sure our Afghan allies get out, so we don’t have these chaotic scenes in Kabul?
Biden: Number one, as you know, the intelligence community did not say back in June or July that, in fact, this was gonna collapse like it did. Number one.
Stephanopoulos: They thought the Taliban would take over, but not this quickly?
Biden: But not this quickly. Not even close. We had already issued several thousand passports to the—the SIVs, the people—the—the—the translators when I came into office before we had negotiated getting out at the end of s—August.
Secondly, we were in a position where what we did was took precautions. That’s why I authorized that there be 6,000 American troops to flow in to accommodate this exit, number one. And number two, provided all that aircraft in the Gulf to get people out. We pre-positioned all that, anticipated that. Now, granted, it took two days to take control of the airport. We have control of the airport now.
Stephanopoulos: Still a lotta pandemonium outside the airport.
Biden: Oh, there is. But, look, b—but no one’s being killed right now, God forgive me if I’m wrong about that, but no one’s being killed right now.
Eight days later, that was no longer true.
In the Situation Room meeting on August 26, Jake Sullivan, a Yale-educated attorney with an unflappable demeanor, was keeping the meeting on track as the room absorbed news of a suicide bomber. But he also kept one eye on General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., commander of the U.S. Central Command, who had joined via SVTS from U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Every few minutes, someone passed the general a note. He’d mute his microphone, have a brief conversation, and then update the group gathered in the Sit Room.
“It was kind of like, based on his look, how bad is this?” Sullivan recalls. About thirty minutes into the meeting, the general received a note that made his face fall. “We have KIA,” he told the president—killed in action. There were, in fact, many dead, including U.S. Marines. With every note the general received, and every update he conveyed to the Sit Room, the number of casualties kept rising.
“Each one was like a punch to the gut,” secretary of state Antony Blinken told me. “And the weight in the room just got heavier and heavier.” By the time the final numbers were known, the toll was nearly 200 dead, including thirteen U.S. servicemembers, with scores more people injured.
“Everyone has a job to do, but you could just feel that weight,” Blinken says. “And of course, I think it’s fair to say that no one carries that burden more than the president.” Biden left the room subdued, after authorizing the military to respond as necessary.
PRESIDENT BIDEN HAD been in office for just over seven months when terror exploded at Abbey Gate. But he brought years of Sit Room experience to the job, having served two terms as vice president under Barack Obama, who used the complex often.
“He spent a huge amount of time there over the years,” Blinken told me. “He was in that room certainly as much as any other person, either leading meetings or being a critical part of the principal-level meetings or National Security Council meetings.” Biden had his own ideas, honed through experience, of how best to use the room. But his first task was reclaiming a semblance of order and process following the chaos of the Trump administration.
“We inherited a policy process that had either been systematically broken or completely neglected,” NSC spokesperson Emily Horne told me. “Foreign policy for the last four years had largely been made by tweet or other form of presidential dicta.” It was, she recalls, “very important to get that rigor and that discipline back, to surface the best options for the president.”
Unlike Trump, Biden is extremely comfortable in the Sit Room. Like President George H. W. Bush, he enjoys simply popping by. “Biden in the first six months came down to the Situation Room—and not for briefings, just came down to see us—ten, twenty times more than Trump did the whole time he was president,” Mike Stiegler recalls. “He would just walk in the door.”
He is a “frequent consumer in the Situation Room,” chief of staff Ron Klain told me. “He likes to hear from people in the field directly.” In the same way that President Kennedy preferred to receive raw intel rather than someone else’s summary of it, President Biden “wants to hear directly from our commanders out in the field, and not just get a bunch of stuff that gets chopped up and put in a book for him,” Klain says. He wants to hear all points of view, even those—in fact, especially those—at odds with his own.
While serving as vice president, Biden famously acted as devil’s advocate in the Sit Room. During the final discussions of whether to launch the Abbottabad raid in 2011, he raised points in opposition to it, providing cover for President Obama to make any decision. Tony Blinken, who was then serving as Biden’s national security adviser, remembers him doing this during discussions about whether to authorize a troop surge in Afghanistan. “Vice president [Biden] was the one person who was constantly pushing and pressing every one of his colleagues on their premises and assumptions,” Blinken told me. “That was done very much in complicity with President Obama, [who] could sit back and not show his hand.”
Blinken calls this “one of the best processes I’ve ever been a part of, precisely because the whole purpose of the Situation Room is to convene a multiplicity of views, of all the different stakeholders. It’s like the blind mice on the elephant, or Rashomon: depending on where you sit, you’re going to have a different perspective.”
I asked Jake Sullivan whether anyone plays devil’s advocate for President Biden. “It’s hard to generate that role at a principals table,” he replied. “Either you have a principal who operates that way or you don’t. And you can’t generate it artificially.” That said, Sullivan himself often takes on that function. “I am naturally inclined to the role of pressing on the weaknesses or blind spots in any argument,” he told me. “So if it falls to anyone, it probably falls to me.”
But even the most rigorous and inclusive process can’t eliminate blind spots. President Biden was right to argue that there was “no good time” to exit Afghanistan, and his administration was hamstrung by the Trump administration’s pledge to exit without a plan for how to do so. It’s also true, however, that Biden’s team shares the blame for a catastrophic withdrawal. The intelligence about the Afghan military was wrong. The military pullout was too quick, and the evacuation plans were too slow. Even the State Department’s own “after action” report cited “insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios.”
Sullivan and his entire Situation Room team were determined not to let that happen twice. Weeks after the Abbey Gate disaster, the process would be tested again, this time by Vladimir Putin.
By 2021, Vladimir Putin had come a long way from being the man whose behavior convinced Condoleezza Rice just after the September 11 attacks that “the Cold War really is over.” The national security officials I interviewed debate whether Putin changed or simply revealed his true character. But Rice pegs the mid-2000s, around the time Russia went to war with Georgia, as the turning point. I had the chance to interview Putin ahead of the 2014 Sochi Olympics and asked him for his message to Americans who viewed Russia as an “unfriendly adversary.”i While he stressed that the U.S. and Russia have been allies during “sharp turns in world history, [such as] the first and second world wars,” he also acknowledged present-day differences.
Those differences have obviously grown dramatically over the last decade. Just a month after my interview, Russia invaded Crimea. Then came Putin’s interference to help Donald Trump win the 2016 U.S. election. Henry Kissinger told me that Putin has become a “character out of Dostoevsky”—a ruler inspired by a mystic vision of a Russian empire surrounded by enemies.
President Biden’s take was less erudite and more blunt, a view hardened by years of up-close observation. When I interviewed the president in March 2021, I asked him about a private meeting he had with Putin in 2011:
Stephanopoulos: You said you know he doesn’t have a soul.
Biden: I did say that to him, yes. And—and his response was, “We understand one another.” I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that—that’s how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, “I looked in his eyes and saw his soul.” I said, “Looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.” And [he] looked back and he said, “We understand each other.”
Stephanopoulos: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer?
Biden: Uh-huh. I do.
That “killer” comment sent his aides scrambling. But Biden didn’t take it back. And he clearly believed that there were no limits to what Putin would do to achieve his agenda. In the fall of 2021, U.S. intelligence began picking up clues to how true that was.
“WHEN WE FIRST got the extraordinary intelligence that we had about what the Russians were actually planning,” Blinken recalls, it was “not just the visible fact that they were massing troops on the border, which everyone could see, but this incredibly detailed information about what they were thinking.” Blinken alerted Volodymyr Zelensky, but the Ukrainian president downplayed the warning. Russian troops had massed near the border in the spring without invading. Zelensky was reluctant to believe that Putin would actually go through with it.
It was easy to understand why. “We could all see well in advance what a huge problem [the invasion] was going to be for Russia,” recalls Blinken. “It didn’t really compute logically, by our frame of logic, that he would do this.” And of course, the credibility of U.S. intelligence had been badly tarnished by the 2003 Iraq WMD debacle. Why should Zelensky trust it?
The Biden White House, however, believed the intel was solid. So in the fall of 2021, two members of the administration put together a plan that was hatched and executed in the Situation Room.
In late October, “a colleague and I together wrote a memo to Jake [Sullivan] saying ‘The intel’s coming in… We don’t know if it’s going to happen, but we know if it happens, the consequences would be tremendous for U.S. national security,’” NSC director of strategic planning Alex Bick told me. The memo, penned by Bick and acting senior director of strategic planning Rebecca Lissner, recommended that the administration create a formalized planning exercise. The purpose: to game out all possible scenarios and major policy questions stemming from a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan was a major driver in Bick’s thinking.
There had been insufficient contingency planning for the Afghan withdrawal. The administration was extremely prepared for the expected scenario, in which the Afghan government remained in control. But it hadn’t planned for a situation that required an in extremis evacuation. That failure was a powerful motivation.
Bick and Lissner’s memo spurred the creation of a Tiger Team. The term, coined in the 1960s, refers to a group of experts mobilized to solve a specific problem; the most famous example is the team assembled in 1970 to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to earth after an oxygen tank exploded on their spacecraft. In late November, Bick began assembling a Tiger Team to address the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The goal, he says, was “to try to think through what might happen—all of the questions that we would need to answer. And then to begin to develop a playbook, kind of a ‘break-glass’ playbook, which could be deployed if the Russians decided to go to war.”
The Tiger Team included one representative each from the departments of state, defense, homeland security and energy, the office of the director of national intelligence and USAID. This gave it a cross-section of expertise as well as a diversity of views. Each person was empowered to “be creative and speak for the agency without having to go back on a day-to-day basis to get everything blessed,” says Bick. “I did a lot of work in advance to make sure either the deputy or the chief of staff within the agency was aware of and endorsed the person who was on the team.”
The team initially met three times a week in the Situation Room, though that soon increased to daily. Even when not there, they stayed in constant contact. This was, Bick recalls, “outside the normal policy process, not duplicative, genuinely collaborative and genuinely creative. Those are not easy things to do in the bureaucracies.”
Throughout December, the Tiger Team hashed out its detailed break-glass playbook. “Let’s say they invade. What happens in the first twenty-four hours, the next twenty-four hours, the next twenty-four hours?” says Jake Sullivan. The playbook covered every topic: “on sanctions, on military assistance, on coordination with allies, on preparing for contingencies like cyberattacks or escalation of various kinds,” he recalls. Chastened by the Kabul disaster, Sullivan says he zeroed in on the question “When the invasion happens, what will we wish we had done that we haven’t done? Let’s do it now.”
“We went back and forth… trying to understand whether to plan against the most likely scenario, or plan against the worst-case scenario,” Bick told me. The group decided on worst-case, he says, because “it’s easier to walk in from a fully elaborated plan than it is to, on the fly, expand and deal with a much more complicated and more difficult situation than you initially anticipated.”
I asked Emily Horne what those worst-case scenarios were.
“I don’t want to get too specific on things that ultimately did not happen, because we feel quite fortunate that they did not happen,” she told me. “It was a stressful exercise to think about… what’s the messaging response in the event of something truly terrible—I should say, more terrible than what has already happened to Ukraine.”
Horne clearly didn’t want to reveal more. But I pressed her a bit, saying that if I were in her shoes, I’d have been worried about events like a decapitation strike on Kyiv of the Ukrainian leadership, an assassination attempt on Zelensky, or even a low-yield nuclear strike.
“I think you’re very much in the right frame of mind,” Horne replied. “Yes.”
Failure was not an option. Too much was at stake: Ukrainian sovereignty. Global geopolitical stability. The threat of a ground war expanding into other parts of Europe. The possibility of nuclear conflict.
Given these stakes, and the complications of planning for multiple scenarios, President Biden laid down three parameters. “The first is, ensure a sovereign, independent, viable Ukraine,” Sullivan told me. “Number two is, maintain NATO unity. And number three is, avoid World War III”—or, as Horne remembers it, “don’t get sucked into a war. No U.S. ground troops.” Having these parameters helped, Horne recalls, “because when you have infinite options, it actually can lead to decision paralysis. So when you have things that are explicitly walled off by the commander in chief… it does help you hone in on what your priorities are.”
With diplomatic efforts to defuse the situation going nowhere, and skepticism rife that Putin would actually invade, President Biden ordered the intelligence pointing to a Russian attack to be declassified and shared, in hope of jolting Zelensky, our allies, and the media into realizing what was coming. The move would steal the element of surprise from Putin, while hampering his ability to create a pretext for an attack.
On December 7, Biden spoke with Putin via SVTS in the JFK conference room. He warned the Russian leader that there would be serious consequences, economic and otherwise, of invading Ukraine. Biden’s plan was to lay everything out on the table, but although the leaders spoke for two hours, Putin kept his cards close to the vest. The situation began to resemble a slow-motion car crash: You could see the impact coming but couldn’t do anything to stop it.
The Tiger Team ramped up its preparations, testing the playbook with a series of tabletops—essentially role-playing exercises, where participants gamed out responses to every possible scenario. “It’s really very unusual in foreign affairs and national security to have such advance warning before something truly history-making happens,” Emily Horne told me. “We did have the luxury of a lot of time to really think creatively.” In January 2022, the team delivered its playbook to the principals, then to President Biden, who signed off on it.
The stage was set. U.S. intel suggested that the Russians might move at any time, but with the winter Olympic games scheduled for February 4–20 in Beijing, most expected Putin to hold off. It seemed highly unlikely that he would launch an invasion while his neighbors to the east were hosting the games. After the frenzy of preparations, some in the White House dared to relax a bit.
But the respite would be short-lived.
AT AROUND FIVE p.m. on February 10, “we got a piece of intelligence,” national security official Matt Miller recalls. “Not getting into too many details, it made clear that Russia might attack before the end of the Olympics.” Ten minutes later, Miller received another email, calling for an emergency meeting of the principals in the Sit Room at six p.m.
Because of the quick turnaround, many of the principals joined by SVTS. President Biden wasn’t in the Sit Room when it began, but he and Vice President Kamala Harris walked in shortly after the meeting started. This was all-hands-on-deck—the moment the administration had been preparing for since early October.
“I’m sitting in the chair, running the meeting, like ‘All right, this may happen as soon as… hours to days from now,’” Jake Sullivan recalls. As soon as the president walked in, Sullivan slid out of the chair at the head of the table, and President Biden settled into it and took charge.
He ordered two points of action. “One was to immediately downgrade some of the intelligence so we could share it with allies—NATO allies, Ukraine, obviously—and make them aware that this could happen in very short order,” recalls Miller. This was an intensification of the intel-sharing strategy started in December. “And two was to work both inside the U.S. government, and with the allies we were planning these steps with, to make sure all of our response mechanisms were ready—the sanctions, the export controls, all the things that we were planning to go in a couple weeks.”
For Emily Horne, whose fortieth birthday happened to fall on February 10, the day was full of strange contradictions. “My team brought me the saddest little cupcake in all the land,” she recalls. “And I was so touched, because they’d been working their hearts out for months.” Everyone was ready, Horne says—but the event they’d been planning for was one they dreaded. “You’re waiting, sort of coiled and ready for action,” she said. “But you’re also really, really hoping that it never happens.”
President Biden’s decision to declassify and share intelligence was an unusual and highly strategic move. It set up a win-win scenario for the White House: If going public managed to cow Putin into calling off the invasion, catastrophe in Ukraine would be averted. U.S. intelligence might wind up with egg on its face, but that was a price worth paying. If, on the other hand, Putin forged ahead, U.S. intelligence efforts would be validated, and the White House would have a head start in organizing an allied response.
“The object of [releasing the intel] was less to stop them from invading, and more to shape the invasion in a way that was maximally to our advantage rather than theirs,” Jake Sullivan told me. It was an effort to win the information space—something the United States had failed to do in the Afghanistan debacle.
“First, deny them the element of surprise, which they had in [the 2014 invasion of] Crimea and worked massively to their advantage because they created a fait accompli before the world had scrambled to do anything about it,” Sullivan went on. “And the second was to deny them a pretext where they could say to the world, ‘We had no choice, the Ukrainians are bombing us. The Ukrainians just killed a hundred ethnic Russians.’”
Seven years earlier, the Russians had tested the waters by invading Crimea and the Donbass. “Both times, they were able to achieve the element of surprise, and also the element of fuzziness: What’s happening exactly, and why is it happening?” Sullivan told me. “And any time there’s fuzziness in international politics, it allows everyone to kind of default to, ‘Well, we’re not really sure what’s happening, so we shouldn’t really do anything about it.’
“Clarity is not Russia’s friend,” he concludes. “And creating clarity about what was going to happen, and why it was happening, enabled the galvanizing of the coalition” that would oppose the invasion.
On Thursday, February 17, Secretary of State Blinken addressed the United Nations Security Council. He went into extraordinary detail about Russia’s preparation for the invasion, the pretexts Putin was manufacturing to justify the attack, and the expected targets of Russian forces. “We’ve been warning the Ukrainian government of all that is coming,” Blinken told the group. “And here today, we are laying it out in great detail, with the hope that by sharing what we know with the world, we can influence Russia to abandon the path of war and choose a different path while there’s still time.”
Blinken also acknowledged the specter of the 2003 Iraq WMD debacle. “I am mindful that some have called into question our information, recalling previous instances where intelligence ultimately did not bear out,” he said. “But let me be clear: I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one. The information I’ve presented here is validated by what we’ve seen unfolding in plain sight before our eyes for months.”
This was the win-win strategy in action. “The goal of him going out was this last-ditch effort, let’s see if we can prevent this from happening,” Lissner told me. “So in some sense, success would have been getting it ‘wrong.’ But in the end, Putin went forward, and everything that we laid out ended up being validated by events that followed.”
IN THE EARLY morning hours of Thursday, February 24, Russian troops stormed into Ukraine. Missiles rained from the sky, wreaking fiery havoc on cities such as Kharkiv and Dnipro and the capital city of Kyiv. In a lengthy speech, President Putin announced that this was a “special military operation” intended to “protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.” President Zelensky quickly declared martial law and cut off all diplomatic ties with Moscow. “Russia has embarked on a path of evil,” he tweeted. “But Ukraine is defending itself.”
Shortly after dawn broke in Washington, D.C., President Biden met with the NSC in the Situation Room. Vice President Harris, cabinet secretaries Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin and Janet Yellen, CIA director William Burns, General Mark Milley and others—all wearing masks, per Covid protocol—crowded around the JFK conference room table, which was covered with coffee cups and paperwork. “People across the government closely consulted the Tiger Team playbook,” Alex Bick notes with pride. “Which I’ve got to say as a planner is a pretty satisfying thing, since most of these break-glass playbooks are still collecting dust on some shelf of the defense department. This one had a life.”
Since the Tiger Team had laid out clear steps, President Biden wasted no time in solidifying an allied response. “What we had planned was, as soon as this goes down, we’re going to do… a G7 summit,” recalls Jake Sullivan. “And we’re going to show that there is unity. And we almost pre-negotiated, basically, joint statements that would come out of those things.” Then they did something that would have been simply inconceivable in the original Situation Room: Modern video technology allowed them to create an instantaneous virtual summit of world leaders, who all popped up on the video screens in the JFK conference room. Imagine if, at the height of World War II, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had been able to have daily video meetings, looking each other in the eye, while Hitler marched through Europe.
“It’s like a Hollywood Squares–looking, kind of like a Zoom call,” deputy national security adviser Jon Finer told me, with the leaders of Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada all in little boxes on screen. “Think about how hard it would have been to get that group of leaders face-to-face.”
The comfort with this technology was one of the few benefits of the ongoing pandemic. “It was this weird thing where you’re using the technology of the Situation Room, but also the adaptation forced by Covid,” says Miller. “People suddenly are used to doing video conference meetings—even heads of state.”
President Biden rallied his G7 counterparts to line up behind Ukraine. “The fundamental message [was] that unity was going to be, in some ways, our most important strategic asset,” Finer recalls. “And that preserving it would be challenging, but was just essential to supporting Ukraine in what was going to be a very long, difficult period ahead.”
Suddenly, the president rose from his seat and walked out of the conference room. He ducked into a small secure telephone booth, sliding its glass door shut. In that tiny, anachronistic booth, he connected with Zelensky, who was hunkered down in the presidential compound in Kyiv. As the two men talked on the phone, “Zelensky was telling him an update from the ground about what was happening… basically describing a bunch of things they needed in terms of security assistance,” Finer recalls. Biden would then poke his head out of the booth and tell Jake Sullivan, Secretary Austin and Secretary Blinken what Zelensky needed, and the information would be conveyed to the G7 leaders.
“That phone booth is an amusing aside,” Blinken told me. “It looks like a relic of the past, but… it has a couple of classified phones in it, so that you could have a secure conversation, and also a private conversation.” It feels incongruous in this age when phone booths don’t really exist anymore, he admits. “It seems like something out of Get Smart”—the 1960s TV sendup of spy movies.
Hearing this, I couldn’t help but think back to the scene in April 1961: Tazewell Shepard sits outside the Cabinet Room during the Bay of Pigs, waiting for Admiral Burke to pass along orders from President Kennedy, which Shepard then relays by phone to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Six decades later, the technology is obviously superior, with secure phone lines and crisp real-time video bringing the world’s leaders together at the push of a button. But the basics of person-to-person communication are, in many ways, unchanged. The core of any successful collaborative endeavor, from a summit of the most powerful people on earth to a tabletop exercise to a simple staff meeting, is the ability of humans to connect.
Yet with all the benefits, “there’s something lost in the fact that we’re not physically in the same room together,” Wendy Sherman says. “What’s lost is that bonding from that tiny room, and the business on the margins that you can do before the meeting starts and when the meeting ends, and the notes that you can’t pass to the person sitting next to you, or the jokes you can’t make about whatever somebody else is saying by passing a note to the person across the table.”
So much has changed in the sixty-plus years since the Situation Room was established. And yet, the Cold War conditions that led to its creation have come full circle. Once again, the United States and Russia are adversaries. We’re again engaged in a tense and dangerous conflict over another people’s land. History is, in some ways, repeating itself. The difference is, we now live in a world where information flow is instantaneous, technology is ubiquitous and timelines are compressed.
“The world’s a much more complicated place,” says Wendy Sherman, “because it’s not like there are just two powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. And there aren’t two major nuclear powers. There’s Chinese nuclear power, there’s Pakistan, there’s India, and of course the original nuclear powers of France and Great Britain… It’s a multipolar world. It’s not a bipolar world.”
There are “lessons to be learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis,” she told me, “but you don’t want to overlearn it. It’s a very different situation… Communication is so fast. So fast, that you don’t have time to deliberate in the way that Kennedy did,” she says, concluding that “the pressure to move faster is unfortunate.” And this is why the Situation Room was, and remains, a crucial and irreplaceable part of any administration. Never again will a president have the luxury of taking extra time to deliberate a response: Between satellites, cell phones, social media, streaming video and the insatiable global appetite for information, the world learns almost instantly whenever a crisis arises.
“Time and the world do not stand still,” President Kennedy remarked during a speech in Frankfurt in 1963. “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” No matter how much changes outside its walls in the years to come, the Sit Room will change along with it. Because it must.
Footnotes
i. That was my first and likely last interview with Putin. In 2022, the Russian government sanctioned and banned me from the country after a contentious interview with foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.