Pompeo, who was fresh off a term as the CIA director, about this, he told me the two countries had such long-running enmity that they would never work together effectively. In fact, the history between the two countries wasn’t so clear-cut: Like planets moving in and out of each other’s orbits, there were moments when they moved closer and farther apart. But this history—when they worked together and when they blasted apart—illuminated what made their cooperation in 2022 so different.
