Are Russia and China Getting Closer? U.S. Spy Chiefs Think So
Teaming up to diminish America’s influence, spread tyranny and undermine democracy.
Eventually one of these guys is going to bow to the other.
Photographer: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
Substance often runs a distant second to drama in the age of Donald Trump. So it was when America’s intelligence chiefs visited Capitol Hill recently to deliver their agencies’ annual worldwide threat assessment. It got traction in the news media largely because Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA director Gina Haspel gave testimony that implicitly cut across Trump’s policies toward North Korea and Iran. Kim Jong Un has no intention of giving up is nuclear weapons, Coats and Haspel testified, whereas while the Iranians might like to have them, they are not currently building them. Coats’s testimony, in turn, triggered a predictable Twitter meltdown from Trump, who admonished his own intelligence officials to “go back to School.”
Largely lost in this controversy were the most interesting aspects of the intelligence community’s assessment. These shed light on three trends that could seriously alter the global landscape for the worse.