(CNN) -- It's a rare thing for the threads of an ongoing crisis to be pulled so closely together in a discrete event, compressed in time and space as if they were part of a dramatization, as they were when President Obama met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this month in the Oval Office. This session had it all: primal Israeli, Iranian, American and even Arab interests; nuclear proliferation and global energy supplies; existential dangers; war and peace. The meeting was no doubt made more difficult by the strained relations between the two leaders, but in truth, this one needed little personal antipathy to make it hard. Even though both men had announced that Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon was unacceptable, there was no final agreement on how to prevent that from happening. In many ways, I suspect, the two men talked past one another.
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Michael Hayden: U.S. policy on Iran implies pre-emption idea from Bush administration
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He says Israelis want to know if U.S. would act on Iran nuclear sites in time
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Hayden says a decision to stop Iran's nuclear program requires strong intelligence
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He says it's a high bar to prove that Iran decided on developing nuclear program
Something like that may have taken place in the Oval, with @placeholder pointing out how hard we were working to solve for "y" where "y" represented Iranian intentions.