Direct bargaining—“I’ll give you this if you do that”—can be useful in a negotiation, but it’s also something to be cautious about. Wheeler told a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in which Kissinger watched Nixon use a treat to coax his Irish setter off a chair in the Oval Office. Kissinger supposedly told Nixon that the lesson the dog had learned was not that he should stay off the chair—but rather that if he got on the chair, he’d get a treat for getting off it. (In some tellings, the problem behavior was chewing the rug.)

when he saw the macroeconomic statistics and he saw that from 1968 from 1968 onwards America for the first time since the 1930s had become a deficit country

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently. These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.