Intelligence chiefs recently testified in Capitol Hill about the annual annual threat evaluation of the United States intelligence community. In a marked deviation from the previous reports, this year's evaluation began with an overview of the threats raised by criminal organizations, including drug posters and transnational gangs, before continuing to detail the challenge of counteracting jihadist groups such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and their world networks. Before moving on to traditional threats based on the state incorporated by China, Iran and others, the section on non -state actors concludes with an analysis of cybercriminals, computer pirates and online scammers using ransomware.
But the report is significantly mentioned to the extreme transnational extreme extremists, including neo -Nazis, white supremacists and others animated by racial or ethnic hate. This is the same ideology promoted by Anders BreivikA Norwegian white supremacist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Brenton TarrantAn Australian extreme right -wing extremist who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, killing more than 50 people and wounding more than 40 another 40.
The decision to exclude any terrorism mention of extreme right is not necessarily surprising, given the support of President Trump to certain political terrorists and political violence. But ignoring these threats will not make them disappear. The United States is no stranger to extreme right -wing terrorism, which raised its ugly head in a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018; Again in a Walmart in El Paso in August 2019; and in a supermarket in a predominantly African -American section of Buffalo, NY, in May 2022. The perpetrators of each of these attacks involved with extreme right -right propagand Great replacement theoryAlso defended by Breivik and Tarant, which evokes a global clique of Jews and elites that actively seek to replace the white Christian population with ethnic and religious minorities.
It should not surprise that the first annual evaluation of threats of this Trump administration classifies gangs and posters such as the superior danger, given the president's emphasis on deportations. But going further omitting completely right -wing terrorists fundamentally ignores a central threat to American democracy.
Only a year earlier, the 2024 threat evaluation He explained that “the transnational movement of violent extremists (RMVE) motivated racially or ethnnically, particularly motivated by white supremacy, will continue to encourage violence in Europe, South America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand that inspires the solitary actor or small cell attacks that represent a significant threat to US people.” There is no reason to think that the threat has disappeared.
While threat assessments of the intelligence community must always remain politically neutral, it seems clear that the Trump administration put its thumb on the scale to influence the analysis, generating a result that directly reflects Trump's political priorities. More recently, already instances of Trump Du Jour, the executive president of Tesla, Elon Musk, these priorities have included the labeling of attacks against Tesla's concessionaires as domestic terrorism.
During his first term, Trump greatly ignored the threat that extreme right -wing extremists represents and suggested that he would seek to designate extreme left movements as Antifa as terrorist organizations. (TO Mountain of evidence It shows that the threat of the extreme right was much more lethal).
The last evaluation of the intelligence community follows the unprecedented decision Labeling Mexican drug cartels and Venezuelan and Salvadoran gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. There is no doubt that these groups are violent and dangerous, but they are motivated by profits, not politics and, as such, they are characterized more accurately as criminals, not terrorists. However, the designation of the Venezuelan Ring of Venezuelan Train of Aragua as a terrorist group served as a base (controversial) for the Trump administration to use the Alien enemies law To deport Venezuelan nationals, some of which have been reported that they have no links with the group, and at least one of which He had legal status and was protected from deportation by a court order that the administration ignored.
In his first months in office, Trump has intimidated opponents in politics and media, intensified the powerful law firms and even co -opted technological titans that were once among their stronger critics. But distorting the evaluation of threats from the intelligence community represents a special type of danger. One of the central aspects of the relationship between intelligence officials and policy formulators in constitutional federal republics such as the United States is that the intelligence community must exercise autonomy and be immune to the policy of the time. While the president has every right to reorder his priorities, the intelligence community should not weight the most significant threats based on the president's perceptions or desires. If our country learned something from the Iraq war debacle, it is that policy formulators should not influence the analysis of the intelligence community.
The danger is evident not only in the distorted evaluation but also in the decisions of the personnel and the allocation of resources. Even before the Efficiency Department of the White House Government began to get rid of the entire agencies of the federal government, a change was made in which resources and staff moved away from the contribution and towards strategic competence with nearby pairs such as China and Russia. Now, almost overnight, Dozens of millions of dollars In funds for research studying radicalization, violent extremism and terrorism prevention have been reduced. Which includes a $ 3 million database that researchers maintained track and study Threats of domestic terrorism.
The actions of the Trump administration, the loss of personnel and financing, the politicization of the counterterrorism, leave the United States much more vulnerable to an attack than at any time in recent memory.
Jason M. Blazakis, Professor of Practice at the Institute of International Studies of Middlebury, was director of the Office of Finance and Designations of Contribution of the State Department at the Office of Contractorism from 2008 to 2018. Colin P. Clarke is the research director of the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm based on New York City.
