Can America's Global Spy Network Survive Trump's Moscow Tilt?

A new book on the 'Five Eyes' traces the spy alliance's uneven history and raises questions about its future under Trump's 'America First' agenda.

The so-called Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing coalition among the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, which has been a pillar of U.S. national security interests for decades, appears now to be at risk with the “America First” policies of the Trump administration.

Not that the relationship of the English-speaking nations has always been smooth and unencumbered, writes Richard Kerbaj in The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network. But it has been an unbreakable bond, “equivalent to a band of brothers and sisters drawn together by common values, language and cause” for over seven decades.

Kerbaj, an Australian filmmaker and journalist who specializes in national security issues, traces the origin of the relationship back to joint U.S.-British operations as early as World War I and offers case studies throughout the 20th century. With the defeat of the Nazis, however, the five partners more or less formalized a subterranean relationship that was not even acknowledged publicly until 2010. 

Throughout the Cold War and beyond, their unheralded “historical achievements  include the defeat of the Soviet Union, combatting Islamist terrorism, and exposing Russian interference in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” Kerbaj writes. “But on the other hand, the alliance is a non-binding marriage of convenience riddled with distrust, competing intelligence agendas and a massive imbalance of power that predominantly favours the United States.”