Mark Episkopos
The world of Cold War-era espionage was famously described by former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton as a wilderness of mirrors, one of those rare coinages that so beautifully captures its subject matter as to require little by way of elaboration.
The wilderness of mirrors is itself a rather brilliant literary appropriation from T.S. Eliot's 1920 poem Gerontion, a hauntingly foreboding portrait of interwar abjection that gripped a generation of Europeans hurtling at breakneck speed toward another, even greater calamity lurking just around the corner.
Angleton plucked this phrase from its original, admittedly vastly different context to capture the grasping in the dark — or, as Eliot put it, braving life’s many “cunning passages” and “contrived corridors” only to arrive at a distant echo of the truth — that is part and parcel of intelligence and counterintelligence work.
But these problems of perception are no less salient in the peripheral world of statecraft, where leaders must deter adversaries and uphold international commitments not, for the most part, by their actions but by the signals they transmit to their counterparts. The structure of the international system is held aloft by these signals and the vast array of policies, institutions, and arrangements underpinning them.
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