“What keeps you up at night?” In Burns’s view, the greatest risk in this new era of great power competition is not necessarily a deliberate decision to go to war, but a small encounter among the great powers spiraling into something far bigger. “Any day you could have two military aircraft flying too close. Somebody clips another one. You could be off to the races, especially without a reliable mechanism to communicate with one another,” Burns said. “So that’s why I’m a huge believer in intelligence channels. If you’re not talking to them, it’s very hard to be able to manage crises, which
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CIA Director
