This War on Expertise Thrills America’s Enemies

And so the purge continues. Some of us used to think, or hope, that President Donald Trump’s campaign of “retribution” would prove brutal but short, leaving American statecraft bruised but functional. The news flow suggests a different direction. As Senator Mark Warner puts it, “when expertise is cast aside and intelligence is distorted or silenced, our adversaries gain the upper hand and America is left less safe.”

Warner, a Democrat who is vice chair of the senate’s intelligence committee, was referring to the firing of Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA is the Pentagon spy outfit that concluded in an initial assessment after the American bombing of Iran in June that the strikes had probably set back Tehran’s nuclear efforts only by months. That contradicted Trump’s narrative, in which he had “obliterated” Iran’s program. Goodbye Kruse.