American allies don’t trust Trump with the intelligence they share.

Cross-posted from https://rss.ponder.cat/post/126536

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Watching president Donald Trump berate the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office last Friday, many Western officials were appalled. But they weren’t surprised. They have long understood what is now obvious to anyone who watched the ostensible photo op that careened into a diplomatic fiasco: Trump’s visceral disdain for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is inversely proportional to his abiding admiration for Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Most U.S. allies I spoke with after the White House confrontation thought that Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance had planned to attack Zelensky, like bullies cornering the new kid on the school playground. One former U.S. official called it a “setup” (the White House denies this), intended to give Trump a pretext to withdraw American military support from an ungrateful ally, which, three days later, he did.

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?” 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.

My conversations with more than a dozen career diplomats and intelligence officers throughout the Western alliance, several of whom have served long tours in Washington, continued through the 2024 campaign, after the election, and into this week. Eventually the discussion came around to one basic question: Is Trump a reliable ally?

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    18·
    12 hours ago

    Not one to spill only other governments’ secrets, by then Trump had already revealed the presence of two U.S. nuclear submarines off the coast of North Korea, during a phone call with the president of the Philippines. In 2019, Trump tweeted a potentially revealing U.S.-spy-satellite photo of a missile launch site in Iran. In 2022, after the FBI found that Trump had stored boxes of classified documents at his Florida mansion—an action for which he was criminally charged—former White House aides said they weren’t shocked, because the president had routinely mishandled classified information while in office, taking transcripts of calls with foreign leaders, as well as intelligence-briefing materials, up to his residence for no clear reason and without an explanation.