The relationship between the Trump administration and the intelligence agencies will be worth keeping an eye on. The loss of trust will lead to otherwise-avoidable intelligence failures.
But while there is a long history of intelligence-policy friction, the hostility between the incoming administration and the intelligence community is unprecedented. This is not just due to Trump’s tweets, though they have certainly played a role. Gen. Flynn’s statements about the CIA must sound ominous to insiders, given his checkered past. As director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he reportedly alienated subordinates by telling them “that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his.” Because the White House is the CIA’s most important consumer, rejection by the president’s national security advisor would be particularly troubling.
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The intelligence community faces two looming dangers in the next four years. The first is neglect. If the president elect means what he says, he is likely to downplay intelligence or ignore it completely. Trump has already announced that he won’t receive the President’s Daily Brief on a daily basis. Instead, he’ll get intelligence briefings three times a week and rely on his advisors to alert him when international events require his attention. The issue of neglect, however, goes beyond the number of formal interactions between the president elect and his intelligence officials. The real question is whether such actions will have any value to the policy process, or whether they will descend into brief pro forma exercises. Policymakers can easily ignore intelligence while going through the motions.
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Whatever the cause, neglect has serious consequences for the conduct of foreign policy. Intelligence agencies have access to unique sources of information, along with personnel who are specially trained to make sense of it. As a result, ignoring intelligence removes a potentially important source of information from policy deliberations. It also removes an important check on policymakers’ assumptions. Like anyone else, leaders are susceptible to cognitive biases that reinforce prior expectations. Healthy intelligence-policy relations are a natural barrier to this kind of tunnel vision. Ignoring intelligence, on the other hand, opens a pathway to policy myopia.
The second problem is politicization, or the manipulation of intelligence to reflect policy preferences. Politicization comes in many flavors. Direct politicization refers to crude arm-twisting, as leaders try to coerce intelligence officials to deliver politically convenient estimates. Indirect politicization is more subtle: rather than threatening or cajoling intelligence officials, policymakers send repeated tacit signals about what they expect to hear. And like the problem of neglect, intelligence agencies can also be responsible for politicization if they let their own policy preferences affect their estimates.