US Intelligence Sharing

Back in February, David Gioe wrote in Foreign Affairs about the importance of the Trump administration maintaining US intelligence sharing relationships.

• Gioe, D. V. (2025, February 13). How America’s Allies Boost U.S. Intelligence. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-americas-allies-boost-us-intelligence

Intelligence sharing, he wrote, is a force multiplier that allows us to:

• compare unvarnished notes in private with a trusted partner;

• share the costs of developing and maintaining expensive satellites;

• divide up the enormous task of processing and translating voluminous signals intelligence; and

• use our collective geography to get better access to collect.

"Liaison allows states to pool resources to analyze an intelligence target of interest, to coordinate agent networks to provide complementary human intelligence, and to validate existing reporting to increase analytical confidence."

Since then, he has become increasingly pessimistic.

• Gioe, D. V. & Hayden, M. V. (2025, July 2), Trump is Breaking American Intelligence. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trump-breaking-american-intelligence.

• Gioe, D. V. (2025, April 23), The Shallow State: Trump 2.0 is Putting America’s Critical Intelligence Liaison Relationships in Jeopardy. The Insider. https://theins.ru/en/opinion/david-gioe/280811. 

Some of Gioe's worst fears have come true. Trump is using intelligence exchange transactionally (withholding information as leverage on an unrelated issues) and appointing inexperienced loyalists for senior intelligence and national security roles.

"If U.S. partners suspected American officials of distorting or cherry-picking shared intelligence to support a preferred policy of the Trump administration, that would have serious ramifications for Washington’s liaison relationships."

US national security will suffer, he argues, if a quasi-isolationist US allows its external intelligence relationships to wither.