When Donald Trump sat down with reporters from Time magazine in late November, the president-elect faced a rather pointed question that he apparently wasn’t expecting: “Mr. President, some foreign officials have expressed concern about sharing intelligence with Tulsi Gabbard, given her positions in support of Russia and Syria. Would her confirmation be worth the price of some of our allies not sharing intelligence with us?”
“I’m surprised to hear it,” the Republican replied. He added that the former congresswoman — his highly controversial choice to serve as the next director of national intelligence — is “like, a really great American.”
That wasn’t an especially compelling response, but this was an instance in which the question was more newsworthy than the answer: Trump’s prospective DNI nominee is so problematic that U.S. allies abroad are reportedly rethinking their willingness to participate in intelligence-sharing strategies.
More than a month later, Shane Harris has an interesting new report in The Atlantic on Trump’s former DNI, Texas Republican John Ratcliff, whom the president-elect intends to nominate to lead the CIA. The piece added this tidbit:
Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.
While the underlying point hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the intelligence dynamic highlighted by The Atlantic and Time magazine is both striking and unfamiliar.
In recent generations, U.S. allies abroad didn’t feel much of a need to curtail intelligence sharing with American officials. But as 2025 gets underway and Trump prepares to return to the White House, it’s a qualitatively different landscape. If all goes according to the president-elect’s plans, the U.S. will soon have:
- an erratic president with a track record for allegedly mishandling classified information and blurting out sensitive intelligence secrets for reasons that have never been fully explained;
- a director of national intelligence who repeatedly defended Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime and has been accused of “repeatedly echoing propaganda spread by Russia”;
- and a CIA director with a reputation as a knee-jerk partisan operative, who was accused by a former CIA station chief of being “among the most destructive intelligence officials in U.S. history.”
It’s certainly possible that nothing will come of this. Perhaps the new administration will get underway, officials will manage to reassure U.S. allies abroad, and intelligence sharing will continue as if Trump’s team were normal.
But if the reported concerns come to fruition and U.S. allies decide to limit intelligence sharing with the Republican administration, the results might very well undermine our national security in ways without modern precedent.
