lifelong diplomat, she had served for a time in Moscow. When we spoke, she was just a few months short of retirement, perhaps making her more willing than most serving diplomats to assess what she and her colleagues had missed. At its core, she concluded, diplomacy was premised on “a wager, a bet on a result, or a desire. We end up being right or wrong. And in the end”—on Putin, on Russia’s direction for the future—“we got it wrong.”
