As it weighs the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard for the position of Director of National Intelligence, the United States Senate faces a fundamental choice: Should it reject those like Gabbard who challenge conventional wisdom, or should it recognize that sensibly questioning orthodox views is essential to avoid the kinds of intelligence and foreign policy failures we have experienced in such places as Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine?
The New York Times’ recent attack on Gabbard’s religious beliefs suggests that the foreign policy establishment is much more concerned about protecting its power than about the dangers of majoritarian intolerance that prompted the Bill of Rights. But disrespect for minority views and constitutional freedoms is exactly what most plagues our Intelligence Community (IC).
In fact, a form of groupthink has driven establishment approaches to national security for many years. It is rooted in three implicit assumptions.
Consensus Judgments are Correct Judgments. “The National Security Council’s consensus view tends to be the best, most informed judgment across… the U.S. government,” proclaimed NSC staffer Alexander Vindman while testifying in President Trump’s first impeachment trial over Ukraine in 2019.
He referred explicitly to this interagency consensus almost three dozen times in the course of his testimony, condemning Trump’s departures from it. This belief, that consensus views are most likely to be correct views, underpins the IC’s approach to analysis.
Using what the IC calls “coordination” to weed out basic errors is a sound approach to fact-checking, but it is not the best way to anticipate future discontinuities or overcome confirmation bias.
In fact, history is riddled with examples of consensus analytic judgments that proved false. Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) well before Operation Iraqi Freedom. The so-called “Washington Consensus” on political and economic reform in 1990s-era Russiaproved disastrous. Bringing China into the World Trade Organization did not produce a liberalizing middle class. Deposing Muammar Qaddafi failed to bring democracy and stability to Libya. Given this record, should Gabbard’s controversial warning that Assad’s removal might pave the way to radical Islamic rule in Syria be considered a disqualification?
The point is not that minority judgments are usually correct. It is that in many of these past examples, those who rightly questioned majority views did so at their personal and professional peril. If the IC is to improve its analytic record, it needs to promote rather than penalize diverse thinking and employ rigorous methodology to explain instances where objective analysts might reasonably offer alternatives to mainstream opinion.
Americans Can Trust the IC to Respect Civil Liberties. In 2013, Edward Snowden, employed at the time as a contractor by the National Security Agency, leaked reams of documents exposing highly classified intelligence programs that trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens. Some were horrified by the excesses revealed by the leaks. Many were outraged that Snowden had violated the law and put our nation’s security at risk. Both sides raised valid concerns.
Snowden was undoubtedly wrong to make himself the arbiter of whether classified information should be published, and his decision to defect to Russia only fueled questions about his motives and patriotism. But at the same time, the material he published highlighted the dangers of relying on the IC to police its own compliance with constitutional law and bureaucratic regulations.
His leaks also exposed the ways that new information technologies have eroded the wall that once separated foreign intelligence collection from America’s domestic affairs. This erosion has led to increasing IC involvement in electoral politics—rendering public judgments about what U.S. presidential candidates our adversaries prefer, for example—and to a growing role as arbiter of what constitutes “disinformation” in our public discourse. This has distorted important debates over such issues as Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and the origins and treatment of COVID-19.
Safeguarding democracy requires striking a reasonable balance on the spectrum between absolute security and absolute freedom. Left to its own devices, the IC will naturally prioritize security, because that is its primary responsibility.
That means that new intelligence collection technology must be carefully constrained within law and overseen by elected representatives of the people in both Congress and the executive branch. It also means that we need IC leaders who, like Gabbard, are sensitive to the dangers of IC overreach in its collection programs and public activities.
Empathizing With Rivals is Wrong. In the messy political scrum over acquiring and exercising power over foreign policy, Americans have too often confused analytic empathy with sympathy for the views and agendas of foreign adversaries. Hence the potency of Hillary Clinton’s accusation that Gabbard is a Russian “favorite” and the buzz from her skeptics that she harbors a disqualifying fondness for autocrats.
In fact, one of the most fundamental duties of any analyst of foreign affairs is to be able to walk in the shoes of adversaries and view U.S. actions from their perspective. That is not because their views are typically accurate and justified. Rather, it is because an inability to understand their perceptions and misperceptions greatly increases the likelihood of intelligence and policy failures.
Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson cited Washington’s misunderstanding of Japan’s perceptions as a central reason for the surprise over its attack on Pearl Harbor. Similarly, the WMD Commission highlighted a failure to grasp Saddam Hussein’s threat perceptions as a factor that led analysts to doubt he had destroyed Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD.
Securing a place for analytic empathy in the Intelligence Community is no easy task. In considering Gabbard, senators should ask themselves what combination of insight and political courage would have been required to dent the consensus views of the Iraq War and the intelligence used to justify it. They have a real-life example in the late Brent Scowcroft, whose warnings about the dangers of invading led to his expulsion from President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
A string of intelligence and foreign policy failures over the past several decades has undermined the trust of American people in the wisdom of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. In turn, its intrusive involvement in electoral politics has undermined the trust of Donald Trump and helped to elect him to a second term.
It is time to rebuild that trust. An establishment that zealously punishes dissenters and strictly polices public discourse is an establishment that is increasingly out of touch with the American people. And it is an establishment that is setting itself up for even more failures.
George Beebe spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA's Russia analysis and as a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney. He is the author of "The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe" (2019).
Top photo credit: Tulsi Gabbard in Congress, July 2018 (LindamozukuCreative Commons)
Just days after replacing Justin Trudeau and becoming Canada’s 24th prime minister, Mark Carney has advised Governor General Mary Simon to dissolve Parliament. Canadians will now head to the polls on April 28 for a long awaited and highly anticipated federal election.
Trudeau had announced his intention to resign as prime minister and Liberal Party leader on January 6, having served more than nine years as Canada’s head of government. Opinion polling had shown an increasingly sizable lead for the rival Conservative Party over the preceding 18 months, with about 25 percentage points separating the two parties by the time Trudeau announced he was stepping down.
Carney’s arrival on the scene has changed the dynamic decisively. A former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Carney’s image as a steady pair of hands at the helm during a time of national crisis has allowed the Liberals to establish a roughly five-point polling lead in the early days of the campaign. What was almost certain to be one of the largest Tory landslides in Canadian history has since become a tossup.
Given the mounting popular perception that Trudeau’s government had mismanaged major policy files ranging from the economy to immigration to public order, this election was expected to be a referendum on nearly a decade of Liberal rule. But Trudeau’s departure and — more importantly — Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene have ensured that Canadians are likely to cast their ballots with the future rather than the past in mind.
The ballot box question “Who is best positioned to deal with Trump?” has become increasingly urgent due to the growing perception that the U.S. president is not joking when he repeatedly threatens to annex Canada and make it America’s 51st state. Few Canadians believe that the tariffs the administration has levied have anything to do with fentanyl — indeed, the Intelligence Community’s newly released Annual Threat Assessmentneglects to mention Canada as a source of America’s fentanyl crisis.
With no clear demands or conditions for how to avert (or lift) the imposition of tariffs, there is a sense among Canadians that the purpose of these economic measures is not to compel a negotiation nor to obtain specific policy concessions, but rather, in Trudeau’s words, to bring about “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex [Canada].” Tariffs are seen not as a tool, but rather as a good in themselves capable — albeit at great cost, given the highly integrated nature of the North American economy — of repatriating jobs to the United States.
Carney has pledged to negotiate with the U.S. on trade only when “Canada is shown respect as a sovereign nation.” But Trump would be wrong to conclude that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would be easier to deal with. Poilievre’s brand of Canadian “prairie populism” is ideologically distinct from the more iconoclastic MAGA populism found south of the border. And unlike Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s call for an “Am-Can Fortress” which focuses on persuading Americans of the extent to which Canada can underwrite American security and prosperity, Poilievre’s brand of “Canada First” is more in line with promoting Canadian resource development for overseas export.
Given the perception among many Canadians that their country has become engulfed not in a mere trade dispute but rather a struggle to preserve their national sovereignty, Ottawa will likely be more willing than Washington to endure the pain that the ongoing tariff war will bring, even if Canada is more economically dependent on the United States than the U.S. is on its northern neighbor. And whatever the potential benefits of pursuing a deeper economic relationship with Moscow, many struggle to understand the logic behind talking up economic ties with Russia while placing Canada so firmly within America’s crosshairs.
Having secured re-election, Canadians can no longer afford to dismiss Trump as an aberration in American politics. Unlike during his first term when it was assumed that “adults in the room” would limit Trump’s room for maneuver, this time he has built a loyal administration willing to cheer him on. But the economic fallout of a sustained trade war with Canada may risk Trump’s most significant accomplishment — a generational political realignment in which a multiethnic working-class electoral coalition underwrites support for the Republican Party.
Given these circumstances, Trump would be wise to declare victory and move on. For example, he could claim that Trudeau was the problem and that his administration’s policies successfully drove him from power. Building on the positive tone of his first call with Carney, he could also publicly acknowledge that, while he continues to believe that Canada would be better served by joining the United States, such a venture is not practical nor economical so long as Canadians overwhelmingly oppose it. These entirely cost-free moves from the administration would help to avert potentially permanent damage to Canada-U.S. relations.
Canada remains the largest market for American exports, larger thanChina, Japan, Britain and France combined. It also remains a friendly and reliable source of (subsidized) energy — the largest provider of oil, gas and electricity to the United States by a wide margin. American leaders should take note when the Canadian prime minister, a member of the country’s centrist establishment, openly concludes that the longstanding era of Canada-U.S. cooperation “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over.”
Whatever discord exists between Ottawa and Washington on issues ranging from trade to continental defense, maintaining a cooperative — and respectful — relationship with Canada remains manifestly in the national interest of the United States.
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Top photo credit: Alexander Vindman (Philip Yabut/Shutterstock) and the cover of his new book (publisher, PublicAffairs)
Alexander Vindman’s recent book, “The Folly of Realism,”throws down the gauntlet, as the name suggests, at the “realists” he thinks were responsible for failing to deter Russia and seize opportunities for defense cooperation with Ukraine.
According to Vindman, the former National Security Council official who testified against President Trump during his impeachment trial in 2019, this “realist” behavior incentivized Moscow’s continued imperialist predations, culminating in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Vindman’s proposed antidote to what he considers the lapses of the past three decades is Benjamin Tallis’ framework of "neo-idealism," a lightly repackaged menagerie of post-Cold War transatlanticism’s greatest hits that is bizarrely presented as a novel outlook on the international system.
Fully squaring all the historical misjudgments presented in these 240 pages demands an exegesis of at least as many pages, and not just because there are so many — though one certainly doesn’t find themselves pressed for material — but because Vindman’s central arguments flow from larger, decades-long narratives about Russia and post-Cold War U.S. policy that simply do not stand up to scrutiny.
Nuclear policy emerges as one of the main causal drivers of Vindman’s story. No one can quarrel with the proposition that successive administrations took seriously the cause of nonproliferation in the post-Soviet sphere — they had every reason to — and that nuclear concerns shaped U.S. engagement with the Russian Federation to a significant even if not decisive degree.
But to suggest, as Vindman does, that the thrust of early U.S./NATO policy toward Russia boils down to nuclear concerns is to lapse into a narrowly tendentious reading of events that history doesn’t lend itself to.
Vindman, who interviewed the officials involved in negotiating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum from the U.S. side, was careful not to retread the solecisms so heartily indulged by many of his allies and fellow travelers. He concedes, and not insignificantly so considering how deeply this narrative has entrenched itself in recent years, that the signed memorandum did not contain U.S. security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for relinquishing its supposed nuclear arsenal.
“There's no question in my memory and in my mind that the Ukrainians understood completely the difference between security assurances and Article 5 security guarantees. And they understood they were getting security assurances,” Vindman quoted Nicholas Burns, Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs at the National Security Council, as saying.
These assurances, as I explained with my colleague Zach Paikin, did not commit the U.S. to undertake any specific commitments beyond what it agreed to in previous treaties. Indeed, it’s precisely because the memorandum was not legally binding and contained no concrete defense commitments that it did not have to be ratified by the Senate, as all treaties must be.
But this whole “denuclearization” business calls for a greater degree of technical scrutiny than Vindman affords it. Three of the 15 states that emerged from the Soviet collapse — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus — did not in fact “inherit” thousands of nuclear weapons. These were Soviet nuclear weapons, stationed across the Soviet Union but controlled from Moscow. After the Soviet collapse, these became Soviet nuclear weapons left over on the territories of former Soviet soviet states.
It was never established that Ukraine exercised legal, political, or operational control over these weapons, nor that the nascent Ukrainian state disposed of the considerable resources required to maintain them. Ukraine did not, in this sense, possess a nuclear inheritance that could be bartered away for Western security guarantees or anything else.
What we have before us, then, is not a geostrategic question but a largely operational challenge of removing these weapons, to which Ukraine had no recognized claim, from Ukrainian territory in an orderly way. This rather unremarkable process, though unquestionably a major part of the story of 1990s U.S.-Russia relations, is lent a degree of long-term political significance by Vindman that it simply doesn’t deserve.
So, what, then, is the larger picture and how does it fit into Vindman’s argument that the West’s woes stem from a decades-long policy of, if not appeasing, then at least turning a blind eye to “Russian ambition and exceptionalism?”
One cannot help but escape the sense that Vindman’s story suffers from the plight of Alexander the Great, who wept that he had only one world to conquer. His analysis is strongly tinted by the endless, yet strategically vacuous, expressions of goodwill, optimism about Russia’s Western path, and other such millenarian effusions that characterized U.S.-Russia relations up to the mid-2000’s.
But in the most important ways, U.S. policy has been guided all along by something quite similar to Vindman’s neo-idealism. The Soviet collapse gave Western leaders a generational opportunity to go about the difficult but necessary task of building a new security architecture that includes mechanisms not just to deter Russia, but also to engage it in ways that do not lead to security spirals in Eastern Europe. U.S. policymakers, less driven by balance of power concerns than they were enchanted by the seductive vision of a Europe “whole and free,” brushed aside the concerns of George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and a great many others to greenlight the limitless expansion of NATO, an alliance explicitly arrayed against the Russian Federation’s Soviet predecessor.
It seems to be a source of consternation for Vindman that Ukraine was not invited into NATO in those early days. Vindman’s implication that Ukraine was thus abandoned to Russia’s sphere of influence incorrectly frames the problem at hand. Washington’s fervid devotion to NATO’s “open door” membership policy and dogged refusal to countenance any framework for delimiting NATO’s boundaries shows that the lack of progress in this area was purely tactical in nature and certainly not grounded in systemic realist thinking.
There is also the peccadillo of democratic values, defense of which is supposed to be NATO’s entire raison d’être. In point of fact, polling shows most Ukrainians had no desire to join the alliance until as late as the mid 2010s, when it became impossible due to outstanding territorial conflicts with Russia.
Vindman’s indictment of what he wants the reader to believe passes for “realism” — more on that shortly — hinges on viewing Russia as an innate aggrandizer emboldened by the failure of successive U.S. administrations to deter it.
It all falls apart upon the most basic attempt at a more sophisticated structural analysis — one which would find that Russia’s behavior is consistent not with a grand strategy of conquest for its own sake but with what most realists would identify as balancing behavior in response to the eastward expansion of Western military and security institutions into the post-Soviet sphere, and Russian actions intended to preemptively deny such expansion.
Trudging through this book, with its unique blend of endless encyclopedic tedium heaped on top of the analytical equivalent of a children's pop-up story, can be best likened to navigating a swamp that’s shallow yet impossibly vast. But this rather unpleasant journey at least gives the reader ample time to meditate on the book’s central conceit.
Vindman unfortunately displays a woefully inadequate grasp of that which he tries to impugn: at no point does he demonstrate anything more than a cursory understanding of realist approaches to the issues he tries to elucidate.
One is left grasping in vain for any evidence that Vindman can pass the simple theoretical Turing Test of explaining any school of realism — let alone to distinguish between them — to the satisfaction of a realist. But Vindman’s underlying thrust is not to meaningfully engage with realist arguments on Ukraine’s post-Soviet transition, 1990’s U.S.-Russia relations, or nuclear proliferation in the former Soviet sphere.
Instead he wants to launder what has largely been an idealist, atlanticist handling of these issues since 1991 by pinning the neoconservatives’ manifold sins and lapses on a haphazard cluster of ideas and approaches clumsily christened by him as “realism.” There was no realism in the strategically shortsighted decision — condemned by many realists at the time — to enable successive waves of NATO expansion and encourage, against genuine U.S. and European security interests, the integration of post-Soviet states into the West’s collective defense umbrella.
The well-established idealist framing of American engagement with competitors as a manichean confrontation between democracy and autocracy is anathema to realism and, indeed, to a healthy understanding of U.S. national security priorities.
But it is true that actual realist ideas are rapidly making their way back into the foreign policy discourse after decades in the wilderness. As is always the case after an exiled intellectual movement rediscovers the levers of power, there will and should be a vigorous debate on what form these ideas will take when filtered through the vicissitudes of American politics and applied to the pressing challenges of our time, including the Russia-Ukraine war and the broader task of building a sustainable architecture of European security.
And whatever missteps are made along the way pale in comparison to a disastrous status quo that can be described by many names. Realism, it is not.
At the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance warned Europe not to back away from one of the West’s most basic democratic values: free speech.
“In Washington there is a new sheriff in town," he said, "and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Vance continued, “Dismissing people, dismissing their concerns… shutting down media, shutting down elections… protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
He added, “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.”
Vance had just joined Donald Trump in running a successful 2024 presidential campaign that championed free speech and condemned the Biden administration for its censorship efforts.
On March 8, barely three weeks after Vance’s Munich speech, Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and sent to a detention center in Louisiana to be deported. He is a legal resident married to an American woman who is pregnant.
Khalil was not charged with a crime. President Trump praised the arrest, saying that Khalil had engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity” that his administration would not tolerate.
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country,” Trump added.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said his department has revoked more than 300 student visas. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas," he said.
When Turkish Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested this week, a video showed “masked, plain-clothes officers handcuffing and leading her to an unmarked car.”
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Ozturk "engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
"A visa is a privilege not a right," she added.
Yet, like the case of Khalil, no one knows what, if any charges she is facing. A judge ruled that she could not be removed from Massachusetts but the feds took her to the same Louisiana detention center anyway. Reports presume that it was an op-ed that Oztruk wrote last year with two other students criticizing the Israel war in Gaza that brought on the heat.
When asked about Oztruk, however, Rubio said no one should get a visa if they come to the United States to join protest movements that result in vandalism and “raising a ruckus” on campus. He would not say if Ozturk was being singled out for those activities.
The administration argues that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gives the government the right to revoke the green card of “[a]n alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Without issuing evidence that Khalil and Ozturk’s presence here in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” (the statute says the administration has to notify Congress with their justifications, have they?) we can assume that they are being used as examples in order to chill speech more broadly.
The administration appears to be hiding behind this rarely used statute, but what the rest of us are taking away from all this is that the administration believes our First Amendment protections end at criticizing Israel’s government.
“One reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people,” wrote Andrew Day for the American Conservative, who warned Trump supporters that “the precedent could enable a future Democratic president to target conservatives.”
Categorizing pro-Palestinian protesters as “pro-terrorist,” “pro-Hamas,” or “anti-Semitic” could feasibly be true in some of these cases, and yet, if these people are not actually committing crimes, their speech should be Constitutionally protected.
The Nazi marchers that the Americans Civil Liberties Union so famously defended in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978 were definitely anti-Semitic.
And the courts determined they had a right to speak.
It might be cliché to say that the entire point of free speech is to protect the speech we hate, but apparently it's a trope the Trump administration hasn’t heard enough.
Those cheering Trump’s rounding up of pro-Palestinian protesters might argue that supporting Israel and opposing Hamas has greater value than free speech, or even that those targeted are actual terrorists, putting them in a separate category.
But we can rationalize similar free speech exceptions about all sorts of positions.
In his Munich speech, Vance cited the prosecution of Briton Adam Smith-Connor, a physiotherapist and army veteran who Vance said had been charged with the “heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.”
Heidi Stewart, chief executive of Bpas, the UK’s leading abortion provider, said of Vance’s comments, “Bpas ... will always remain proud to stand against misogynistic and anti-democratic interference with British women’s reproductive rights by foreign extremists, whether they are the vice-president of the US or not.”
Someday, “foreign extremist” JD Vance could be considered a “threat” to U.S. foreign policy by another administration. Then what happens?
Vance’s broader point was that people of different views should be able to express them in Western democracies.
And he was right. The first time.
He told European countries last month that their greatest threats weren’t from Russia or China, but their retreat from some of their “most fundamental values,” that the United States has historically shared with them, with freedom of expression seeming to top his list.
“What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance warned.
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