‘What the Hell Is Happening to Your Country?’

By Shane Harris

Thursday, March 06, 2025

 

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.

 

The United States also curtailed the intelligence it provides Ukraine, including technical assistance essential for firing long-range weapons at military positions miles inside Russia. Those strikes have allowed Ukraine to slow Russia’s advance, so cutting off the intelligence is in effect an act of assistance to Moscow. A Ukrainian official I was in touch with yesterday morning was despondent and confused. He wasn’t sure when the vital flow of intelligence would be turned back on. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox Business that it depends on Zelensky’s willingness to work with the Trump administration on a “peace” plan. But U.S. and Western intelligence officials have said for months now that Putin is unwilling to negotiate, because he believes he is winning the war he started against Ukraine and is not prepared to make concessions. Trump has placed no new pressure on Russia even as he ties Ukraine’s hands. It’s hard to see how the United States could still be called Ukraine’s ally.

 

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.

 

Back in the summer of 2024, before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, I started talking with senior allied officials about how they were preparing for Trump’s possible return to power. Could they depend on him to support Ukraine in a war that poses a significant, even existential threat to Europe? Would Trump preserve decades-old alliances or attempt to extract concessions in exchange for security support, as he did to Zelensky in 2019 during their infamous “perfect” phone call, and as he is doing now with a claim on Ukraine’s natural resources? On a tactical level, could longtime U.S. allies trust the president not to leak or mishandle the intelligence secrets they routinely share?

 

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?

 

The answer, unsurprisingly, was no. But it came with an essential caveat.

 

The president was not someone they could easily trust. But the career officials who work for the U.S. government have long been reliable partners. These are the senior-level employees who actually run the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Pentagon day-to-day, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or in the executive suites of headquarters buildings.

 

When foreign leaders extol the mutual benefit of military partnerships and intelligence sharing, they’re talking about this layer of permanent government and the people who work in it. These are the unknown officials who jointly collect and analyze electronic communications with the British; make strategic naval plans with the Australians to counter a rising China; collaborate on North American security and air defense with the Canadians; partner with the Germans to break up terrorist cells; collaborate with the Dutch on cyberoperations directed at Russia; and work hand in glove against Russia with the Ukrainians, whose contemporary intelligence service was practically built by the CIA.

 

These relationships are the soft tissue of global security. They are based on mutual trust that is earned, not assumed. And the officials who make up this part of the U.S. government are the ones Trump has relentlessly attacked since he took office, because they don’t swear allegiance to him. These working-level relationships took shape in the aftermath of World War II, and for eight decades they have withstood political stress and the whims of elected leaders. Now they are being tested in ways that only Trump has dared.

 

***

 

Trump casually abused U.S. allies’ trust practically from the moment he first took office.

 

In May 2017, he revealed a sensitive source of Israeli intelligence to two senior Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office—while the FBI was investigating Russia’s interference in the election and potential connections to Trump’s campaign.

 

That same month, a furious British Prime Minister Theresa May complained to the American president that his officials had disclosed the name of a suicide bomber who attacked a concert arena in Manchester, preempting local law enforcement. Police were also outraged that U.S. officials had leaked crime-scene photos to American reporters that the British had shared in confidence.

 

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.

 

Trump’s loose lips and sticky fingers arguably made U.S. allies less safe. In light of that history, allied officials told me recently that they were taking steps to limit the classified information they shared with the U.S. They would not stop sharing entirely; foreign countries depend too much on information that the United States provides them to blow up the entire arrangement. But the officials laid out a number of ways they could protect what they send over the transom. All the possibilities rely on those trusted relationships with career officials in U.S. national-security agencies.

 

In rare cases, allies might hold back a very sensitive piece of intelligence altogether. But more often, they would ask their counterparts to keep some information to themselves and not share it higher up in their organizations, where it might find its way to the president’s political appointees and potentially to him. The allies would not be hiding things from Trump, exactly—just avoiding the risk of bringing him in on things he doesn’t need to know. Another official told me their service might ask the Americans to read intelligence only in person, perhaps at the country’s embassy or a headquarters building. The Americans would still know the information, but they would take no hard copies with them that might find their way into the hands of Trump’s political advisers.

 

Some allied officials suggested that they would not start any new joint operations with the Americans unless necessary. Even before the election, one official in an allied intelligence service told me they were waiting to see the outcome before doing any new business with the Americans. They feared starting work under a president they could trust, only to regret the arrangement when Trump took over.

 

The allies aren’t worried only about how the Americans handle their secrets. Trump’s purge of senior FBI officials has eliminated many of the very interlocutors foreign law-enforcement and security officials deal with on any given day. Several officials told me they were anxiously waiting to see whom they are to call now, and whether their trusted contacts will be replaced by political loyalists.

 

What’s more, one official worried, if American intelligence agencies are distracted by internal battles, what vital information might their agents miss? Would the quality of information about terrorist plots or Russian espionage degrade? How helpful a partner can the United States be when it is consumed by feuds?

 

Allied officials can protect some information by limiting what they tell their counterparts. But to restrict the flow of technical information, particularly “signals intelligence,” the fruits of electronic eavesdropping or cyberespionage, is difficult.

 

The U.S. and British signals-intelligence systems are so intertwined as to be practically one and the same; their technical equipment, or “kit,” as the Brits like to say, is sometimes physically co-located. The systems are so compatible that in 2003, when the National Security Agency was tracking a plot by al-Qaeda to detonate a nuclear weapon inside the United States, officials made a contingency plan to transfer the control of U.S. signals intelligence to the British, in the event that NSA headquarters was taken out by terrorists, Michael Hayden, the agency’s director at the time, once told me.

 

That kind of nightmare-scenario planning speaks to the bedrock level of trust between the U.S. and Great Britain, its closest ally. The two countries are members of the so-called Five Eyes, an Anglophone security pact that includes Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The member states share an enormous amount of classified information. And although the United States is by far the biggest contributor to that bounty, it materially benefits from the other countries’ ability to fill in the gaps with their own unique sources and capabilities. The American intelligence system, massive as it is, cannot cover everything.

 

Yet now, even the Five Eyes is not sacrosanct. Late last month, the Financial Times reported that Trump-administration officials were discussing kicking Canada out of the pact, as a way of extracting more favorable security and trade arrangements. Two allied officials bluntly described the proposal to me as “crazy.”

 

The White House official reportedly pushing the expulsion, Peter Navarro, later claimed he hadn’t done so. But other officials told me that Trump indeed has toyed with the idea, which would have been unthinkable under previous Democratic and Republican presidents. How one member jettisons another is not clear, because the other countries can work with whomever they choose. A “Four Eyes” alliance theoretically could exclude the United States, but it would be a severely diminished partnership.

 

***

 

Nothing Trump has said or done since taking office this year has lessened allies’ concern about his reliability. Recently, the newly elected chancellor of Germany has suggested that the time has come for the transatlantic powers to break up.

 

“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step-by-step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.,” Friedrich Merz said last month.

 

Merz may have taken to heart a truculent speech Vance had given days earlier at the Munich Security Conference. The address, in which vice presidents customarily acknowledge the alliance’s shared democratic values and mutual security interests, was read as a giant middle finger. “He told us off,” one Western official in the audience put it to me more diplomatically. Vance’s speech was the dominant subject for the remainder of the conference.

 

Vance further infuriated European officials in an interview with Fox News this week, when he dismissed their potential contribution to a future peacekeeping force in Ukraine as “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” His comments were widely seen as directed at Great Britain and France, which have pledged to commit forces to such an effort. But troops from more than two dozen additional countries have died fighting with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign officials were quick to note.

 

Hanging over the rapid dissolution of these old relationships is the question of who would lead in the United States’ absence. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, held an emergency meeting with Zelensky and other European leaders in London on Sunday, trying to assemble what he called a “coalition of the willing” against Russia. Starmer insisted that the United States remained a reliable partner, while exhorting his colleagues to seize a “once-in-a-generation moment” to protect Europe from Putin’s expansionist appetites. The Americans would clearly not lead that effort. But the British have been working to secure an American “backstop” to a peace deal in Ukraine, keeping long-range weapons and other heavy equipment on standby in a nearby country in case Russia attacked Ukraine again.

 

Vance isn’t alone in undermining allied confidence. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took to X on Friday, praising Trump for his “unwavering leadership in standing up for the interests of the American people, and peace. What you said is absolutely true: Zelensky has been trying to drag the United States into a nuclear war with Russia/WW3 for years now, and no one has called him on it.”

 

Putting aside that Trump actually told Zelensky he risks a third world war if he doesn’t strike a peace deal, not that he was “trying to drag the United States” into one, Gabbard’s statement is completely at odds with years of intelligence reporting that the office she now leads has provided to American policy makers and allies. U.S. intelligence has long assessed that Russia invaded Ukraine in the hopes of decapitating its leadership and installing a Kremlin-friendly government. When Gabbard portrays Zelensky as the aggressor, and rhetorically backs up Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine, she politicizes the intelligence community at the very highest level, something every allied official I talked with has long feared. Gabbard’s office didn’t respond to my request that she elaborate on her comments.

 

Seemingly the only country praising Trump’s strong-arming of Ukraine is Russia. After Zelensky left the White House, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a Russian-state-television reporter, “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign-policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.”

 

This, too, is an outcome the allies have dreaded. The officials I talked with debate why exactly Trump is so solicitous of Putin; they have for years. But there was little arguing this week that the United States seems to be switching sides.