Michael Hayden, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was unapologetically grim on Thursday, telling attendees of TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC conference in Orlando “that if they wanted something positive, you should have had a priest as your lunchtime keynote, not a career intelligence officer.”
Hayden, a retired Air Force general and former head of the National Security Agency, began by noting he has seen more dangerous times from a macro-global standpoint, but not one as complex or immediate.
Flashing a rogues’ gallery of autocrats and dictators, including Putin and the latest “fun-loving member of the Kim family” in North Korea, Hayden noted the whack-a-mole nature of foreign policy crises, only imploring a fuzz ball metaphor instead.
“If the Kurd spike pops out, you might push it back in, but then another three of four spikes will pop out of the fuzz ball instead.”
He added that the industrial age required a centralized authority, one reason formal nations did so well.
“Even communism, which was bad as an historical philosophy and bad as a political system, was good if you needed to take a backwards country and turn it into an industrialized powerhouse quickly.”
In this post-industrial age, however, that power “bleeds from the center,” and it is decentralized groups, gangs and individuals that are benefiting.
The Iran deal was a particular target of his ire. Hayden explained that if the deal goes as planned, in 10 years Iran will have the necessary fissile material so it will never be more than three weeks from building a bomb.
“And that’s if the deal works the right way,” he emphasized.
One bright spot in Hayden’s otherwise bleak outlook was China. He noted that China has moved 400 million people into the middle class over the past two decades, something that had never been done before.
“God bless ’em, there is no reason why we can’t be friends, hey are logical, rational, and acting in their best interests. The issue will be if they can maintain that standard of living. If not, their nationalistic tendencies will increase.”