Intelligence officials for U.S. allies are looking on in horror at President Donald Trump's chaos — and questioning how they can be capable of sharing their own information with his administration, reported The Atlantic on Thursday.
A major catalyst for these fears, which had already been lurking since Trump's election, came from the president's public verbal attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, demanding that he make peace with the Russian invasion of his country and ultimately tossing him out of the building. Trump followed this up by pausing military aid to the country, as well as intelligence sharing.
"Watching Trump browbeat a country the United States had steadfastly backed until just six weeks ago, one bewildered Western diplomat who served in Russia asked me, 'What the hell is happening to your country?'" wrote Shane Harris. "Now some of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters in the West wonder where their countries stand with the new leadership in Washington. The question has been on their mind for months."
ALSO READ: 'Confusing and callous': GOP senator takes direct shot at Elon Musk on his own app
All of this was solidified by a longtime Trump ally's threat to kick Canada out of the "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing alliance, which some officials told Harris was "crazy."
"Back in the summer of 2024, before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, I started talking with senior allied officials about how they were preparing for Trump’s possible return to power," reported Harris. "Could they depend on him to support Ukraine in a war that poses a significant, even existential threat to Europe? Would Trump preserve decades-old alliances or attempt to extract concessions in exchange for security support, as he did to Zelensky in 2019 during their infamous 'perfect' phone call, and as he is doing now with a claim on Ukraine’s natural resources? On a tactical level, could longtime U.S. allies trust the president not to leak or mishandle the intelligence secrets they routinely share?"
The broad consensus, even at that time, was that these allies could not trust Trump — however, there was one thing giving them hope the U.S. wouldn't be a total loss: "the career officials who work for the U.S. government have long been reliable partners. These are the senior-level employees who actually run the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Pentagon day-to-day, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or in the executive suites of headquarters buildings." Even this is now being tested as Trump moves for ideological loyalty tests and purges of these very officials.
This situation, combined with the increasing praise of Trump's reversal by Russia itself, "is an outcome the allies have dreaded. The officials I talked with debate why exactly Trump is so solicitous of Putin; they have for years. But there was little arguing this week that the United States seems to be switching sides."