“The West handiest hears what it needs to listen to from Moscow”

“Like speaking within the reflect’: that is how historian Sergei Radchenko describes how Khrushchev ready for negotiations with Eisenhower after Stalin’s dying. The Soviet chief imagined what he would say to the American president, how Ike would first of all reject his arguments however then yield to their common sense. “The trouble of chatting with imaginary warring parties,” Ratchenko writes, “is that we unconsciously cause them to say what we would like them to mention.” We do not consider what would occur if the opposite facet resisted our common sense.