Does US Intelligence Matter Anymore?

Trump, like Stalin, ignores facts and warnings to his—and our—great peril

The latest dreary news about the hollowing out of U.S. intelligence under the Trump administration came yesterday via The Steady State, an organization of some 400 former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security.

There, David Abramson, a 25-year veteran of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), a relatively tiny organization that has often proved more prescient than its far bigger CIA brother, detailed how, beginning in July 2025, “the State Department dismissed some of its most experienced intelligence analysts merely to appease the Trump Administration’s demands for cuts.”

Abramson, INR’s senior analyst on Russia, himself quit “because the Trump Administration had sidelined the State Department as the lead foreign policy arm of the U.S. government, at least with regard to Russia and Ukraine.” The president pretty much turned over Russia-Ukraine to real estate hustlers Steve Witcoff and Jared Kushner, who’ve also been key players in Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again war on Iran. The attention span of Secretary of State (and dual-hatted National Security Adviser) Marco Rubio, already stretched thin by his assignment as the virtual viceroy of Venezuela, has had little room left for Russia, despite its regular rattling of nuclear weapons.

“Three of my civil service colleagues, whose firings came as a surprise, all worked on different aspects of Russia’s foreign policy at a time when President Vladimir Putin was undermining American democracy and waging war on Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since World War II,” Abramson wrote.

“The three included INR’s sole analyst who covered U.S. relations with Russia, when ties between the two leading nuclear powers are fraught and uncertain. Also fired was an analyst who had nearly 20 years of experience dedicated to relations between Russia and the Middle East, including Iran, with which the U.S. is now embroiled in a war that is threatening the entire region’s security and the global economy. The third had just been assigned to be the sole analyst responsible for the foreign and domestic politics of Ukraine after many years as an analyst covering other areas of the former Soviet Union.”

To MAGA partisans, of course, the massacre at Foggy Bottom, echoed in dismissals of career professionals (and their advice) at the Pentagon, ODNI and FBI, represent a long overdue house cleaning of self-serving, establishment intellicrats, all of whom were seen as threats to Trump’s priorities, which include ridding the agencies of racial and gender diversity, disparaging and disengaging from longtime European allies, cozying up to autocrats and, until recently, avoiding so-called “forever wars” in the Middle East.

What Trump has really demonstrated on all those subjects, once again, is his low regard for U.S. intelligence agencies and experts of any kind. (That started early on in his first term, when he infamously took Vladimir Putin’s side over the CIA’s at a 2018 Helsinki press conference.) Maybe some good will come from browbeating NATO members into upping their military spending and relying less on the U.S. to defend them (no matter the long-term potential downside from rising German nationalism). But it shouldn’t take intelligence experts to tell Trump that fracturing an alliance that has largely prevented World War Three by, say, repeatedly threatening to invade one of its member’s territory, is a bad idea.

Iran Ignorance

It’s in his constant misjudgments with regard to Iran, however, that Trump has shown a willful ignorance that has landed him—and us—in a quagmire that could easily turn far more deadly for all concerned. (The Secret Service reportedly felt compelled to abandon Trump’s Qatari-donated 747 last week for the regular Air Force One to get Trump out of Turkey safely in front of an alleged Iranian assassination plot.) His first avoidable mistake was partnering with Israel in its Iran regime-change fantasies, the details on which grow wilder by the day. Twinned with that was Team Trump’s disastrous disregard for a decades of U.S. intelligence warnings that Iran could easily choke off the Strait of Hormuz if mortally threatened by the U.S.

In this, Trump reminds me not so much of George W. Bush & Co.’s obsession with nonexistent Iraqi WMDs (an illusion handmaidened by a feckless CIA) but Joe Stalin’s dismissal of some 80 recorded warnings from his intelligence agents in 1940 that Hitler was secretly planning to go back on their peace deal, invade Russia, and put an end to the Soviet Union and him.

Now this past June, having failed to crush the Iran regime by military means, and ignoring all yellow flags from wizened experts in several administrations past, Trump and his minions evidently thought they could easily hammer out a post-attack peace deal with Iran. Problem was, it quickly became apparent the Iranians had outfoxed them on that instantly infamous, slipshod Memorandum of Understanding.

“The president quite deliberately put this in the hands of his vice president, JD Vance, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner [and] his chief envoy, Steve Witkoff,” David Sanger, the New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent and veteran national security hand noted on Tuesday. “[T]hey viewed this fundamentally as the equivalent of a real estate deal, that everybody’s going to act in their rational economic interest,” he added. “And in fact, the administration was up against a revolutionary government whose ideology has been hinged for 47 years on direct opposition to the United States.”

Really, virtually anybody could have told them that—certainly anyone involved in the years-long talks that produced the Obama administration’s 2015 deal capping Iran’s nuclear enrichment program—a deal that Trump emotionally scuttled right after he was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017 (but would dearly like to have back by some other name).

Problem is, Iranian hardliners aren’t interested now. They have Trump by the short hairs and aren’t likely to let go anytime soon. Any of the cashiered State Department, CIA, or ODNI intelligence analysts could have told him that. But they’re gone. And Trump considers it treason to consult with Democrats who spent years directly negotiating with Iran—or mainstream Republicans who supported them.

So, now nobody has a good idea what’s up the Iranians’ sleeves—or, for that matter, an increasingly erratic Trump’s.

Things could turn bad fast. Buckle up.