We're not the only ones who are worried. As Donald Trump embarks on his 9-day trip overseas, U.S. allies in Europe are expressing alarm that Trump is trashing America's ability to lead in the event of a global crisis or even the slow creep of bad actors bolstering their power. Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post writes:
In conversations with more than two dozen current and former European ministers, lawmakers, diplomats, intelligence officials and military officers in recent days, there was a common theme: After nearly four months of the Trump administration, many fear that mounting domestic scandals could sap Washington’s ability to respond to challenges ranging from Russia to terrorism to North Korea. [...]
“It’s disturbing,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who works on U.S. affairs.
“The vacuum may encourage people all over the world to seize the moment of an absent United States,” she said, pointing to political turmoil in the Western Balkans and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria as first examples.
Additionally, our European allies are clearly afraid of upsetting Trump for fear of retaliation.
One senior European intelligence officer said if his agency ever came into possession of information that was incriminating to Trump or his circle, it would hold back from sharing with the United States for fear the U.S. president would seek revenge. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was concerned about provoking Trump’s reaction.
Great. After Trump outed Israeli intel to the Russians, we had a slew of headlines about foreign intelligence agencies rethinking whether they would share sensitive information with the U.S. anymore.
Now we have allies who don't even want to share intelligence that might implicate Trump's inner circle. Taken together, that could shut us out of key intel related to the Middle East—where we're virtually totally dependent on our allies—and all intel concerning Russia and maybe even China, where Jared Kushner's family business has run into trouble.
Russia, China, the Middle East, meh.
What's so worrying about this is that we may never know what we don't learn. The extent of Trump's damage to our intelligence community and sourcing will be incredibly difficult to measure, even for intelligence professionals. Forget about the American public.