Can allies still trust the United States with sensitive intelligence in the Trump era? Two stories this week suggest even the closest partners are starting to have doubts.
What happens when allies don’t trust America to keep a secret?
The global backlash to Trump’s politicization of US intelligence, explained.
Joshua Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.
On Tuesday, CNN reported that the United Kingdom is no longer sharing information with the United States about suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, because it does not want to be complicit in military strikes it considers to be illegal. Several islands in the Caribbean are British territories, and the two governments have traditionally cooperated on drug interdiction.
According to CNN, Canadian officials have also made clear they don’t want their intelligence being used in the deadly strikes. Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, a longtime US counternarcotics partner but, lately, a Trump antagonist, announced on Wednesday that he too had put a halt on intelligence sharing with Washington.
Two days earlier, the New York Times reported that FBI Director Kash Patel had let go of an FBI agent based in London due to budget cuts, after personally promising the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, that he would protect the agent. The agent was responsible for high-tech surveillance tools, described by the New York Times as “the kind [MI5] might need to monitor a new embassy that China wants to build near the Tower of London.”
These aren’t isolated examples. Last month, the heads of the two main spy agencies in the Netherlands, a NATO ally, said in an interview that they were curtailing intelligence cooperation with the US due to concerns over “politicization of our intelligence and the violation of human rights.”
The rift between the US and Britain is particularly significant, as both are members of Five Eyes, the intelligence sharing group founded after World War II by five English-speaking countries as a pact that is today considered the world’s most powerful and significant intelligence alliance. (Patel was already on thin ice with Five Eyes. On a visit to New Zealand last summer, he tried to bring a selection of 3D printed guns as gifts to local officials. The guns are illegal under the country’s laws and had to be destroyed.)
The examples over the past few days illustrate one consequence of the Trump administration’s hiring of partisans for senior intel roles, politicized use of intelligence, and flouting of international law: Allies increasingly don’t trust the US with sensitive information.
Trump vs. the spies: A long and awkward struggle
Concerns about President Donald Trump’s handling of intelligence go back to his first term, throughout which he frequently clashed with his own intelligence agencies. In 2017, Trump shared classified information about ISIS, provided by Israel, with Russian officials visiting the White House, which may have endangered an Israeli spy placed within the group. Trump also publicly took the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin over that of his own intelligence agencies over whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
These concerns were not mollified by picks like Patel — a partisan operator of dubious qualifications — to run the FBI and Tulsi Gabbard — with her past defenses of Russia, her meeting with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and her endorsement of conspiracy theories — as Director of National Intelligence. (CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was a controversial choice when Trump appointed him director of national intelligence in his first term due to his hardline partisan views, has had a relatively drama-free tenure and, these days, looks like an establishment choice in contrast to some of his colleagues.)
Shortly before Trump retook office in January, the Atlantic reported that foreign intelligence officials were “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.”
Since then, Gabbard has justified some of these concerns by recalling a classified National Security Agency report that contradicted Trump’s claim of direct links between the Venezuelan government and the Tren De Aragua gang and firing two top officials over it. Trump has also removed senior officials from the agency after they were accused of “disloyalty” by far-right activist Laura Loomer.
How unprecedented is this?
Of course, there were rifts between US allies over intelligence before Donald Trump came around — notably after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed the extent of US intelligence collection on some of those allies. But Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and White House staffer now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the current conflicts are still unusual.
“Even during Snowden, what you saw was: The politicians and the diplomats would make public statements saying, ‘Oh, this terrible,’” Harding said. “But on the intelligence side, they were saying, ‘Let’s get back to business. This partnership is too important.’”
While we don’t know the extent of the information that the UK is withholding or how vital it was to US operations, the choice to withhold it due to objections over policy is “strange,” Harding said.
Beyond this particular case, it would be a concerning development for US security if intelligence-sharing between allies — particularly close and historically strong partnerships like Five Eyes — started to break down. While the US may have the world’s largest intelligence services, other countries still have expertise and access that American spies lack — embassies in places like Iran and North Korea, for instance.
“There are still places that we can’t go, and it’s much more efficient to share information with allies than it is to try and do it all on our own,” said Harding.
Beyond just narrow security goals, intelligence sharing can also be a geopolitical asset, as when the US strategically released classified information about Russian military activities to rally international support in the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine.
Alliances like Five Eyes and NATO were founded after World War II on the basis of trust between countries that felt they shared similar values. If allies no longer feel they share those values, because of the kinds of officials being put in high-level positions in Washington or because of the actions the US is carrying out abroad, the trust that allows them to share some of the world’s most sensitive information may be hard to regain.
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