The recently published Annual Threat Assessment reflects the administration’s political priorities and biases and the intelligence community’s willingness to defer to them.
Amid repeated caving to Donald Trump’s wishes by elements both inside and outside government, one might expect, or hope, that the U.S. intelligence community would remain relatively independent. Although the intelligence agencies are part of the executive branch, a measure of independence is part of the reason those agencies exist. Moreover, independence is critical to accomplishing their mission of providing the most accurate picture possible of the world outside U.S. borders, even if that picture is not what policymakers would like to see. Otherwise, those agencies become little more than bloated speechwriting staffs.
However, the unclassified version of the community’s most recent annual threat assessment shows that it, too, has caved to the interests of the administration.
It is not unusual for the annual assessment, which is a congressionally mandated document, to partly reflect policy concerns of the White House. Indeed, it is an appropriate and necessary part of the intelligence agencies’ mission to take those concerns into account when allocating resources for collecting and analyzing information and deciding what subjects are to be addressed in written products. But such responsiveness to policymaker interests is quite different from shaping publicly released intelligence products to echo preferred administration messages.
Such politicization, which is by no means unique to the Trump administration, rarely involves twisting analysts’ arms and ordering them to say that up is down or white is black. It can instead be a matter of phrasing and presentation, to reinforce administration messages without saying something patently false. It is also often a matter of emphasizing or de-emphasizing, or addressing or not addressing, certain topics.
What is not addressed in this year’s threat assessment is especially revealing of political influence. The first portion of the assessment, like many of the other annual statements in recent years, gives pride of place to transnational topics before addressing states in the remainder of the paper. But not mentioned are some major transnational problems that were prominently and appropriately featured in earlier annual assessments and are still very much threats—even increasing threats—today.
There is not a word in this year’s assessment about climate change, the preeminent transnational threat to the planet. Even if one did not recognize a loss of basic human habitability, which can affect Americans as well as foreigners, as a security problem, or acknowledge the insecurity from climate-related disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires, climate change is connected to more traditional security topics. The connections range from the flooding of U.S. military bases because of rising sea levels to the climate’s role in stimulating armed conflict.
But Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” rejecting both an overwhelming scientific consensus and the manifestations of climate change that Americans already are experiencing. Thus, the intelligence community is not permitted to say anything to the public about it.
Nuclear proliferation is another transnational problem that gets no mention in this document, other than in a later section about Iran. There is at least as much reason now to focus on proliferation as there had been in the previous years in which the issue was highlighted in annual threat assessments. There is new talk in countries from Germany to South Korea about possibly developing their own nuclear weapons. However, the reason for that talk is Trump’s treatment of allies as adversaries and his calling of U.S. security commitments into question, so this topic is evidently barred from unclassified intelligence products.
The danger of global pandemics is also missing from the transnational threat section of the assessment. There is no reason to be any less concerned about this threat than in most previous years, not with recent confirmation of avian flu spreading to mammals in Western countries. However, Trump has withdrawn from the World Health Organization and evidently does not believe in international cooperation on behalf of public health. He has appointed as health secretary an anti-vaxxer whose bizarre prescriptions for dealing with disease can make problems like bird flu and the current measles outbreak even worse than they otherwise would be.
The one place the assessment mentions infectious disease is the China section, with an extended passage about the origins og the COVID-19 Pandemic. This rehashing of one epidemiological puzzle is of limited utility in understanding current and future threats from infectious diseases and hardly justifies the three paragraphs devoted to it. This treatment of the subject echoes Trump’s strategy during the 2020 election campaign of trying to escape political damage from his handling of the COVID pandemic by blaming it all on China.
The transnational threat section in this year’s assessment is titled “Nonstate Transnational Criminals and Terrorists,” with sections on “Foreign Illicit Drug Actors,” “Transnational Islamic Extremists,” and “Other Transnational Criminals.” The impression is given that terrorism is solely a matter of Islamic extremism. Even within that context, the assessment mistakenly treats the problem as only the work of a few groups, such as ISIS or Al Qaeda, and says nothing about self-radicalization. It states that the perpetrator of the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans “was influenced by ISIS propaganda.” Still, it does not mention that the FBI investigation concluded that the U.S. citizen who conducted the attack had acted alone. There was no evidence of contact with ISIS or any foreign direction.
Missing altogether is any acknowledgement that if Americans are targeted by terrorists in the years ahead, it will most likely be by white supremacists of the radical Right. The intelligence community itself addressed this threat in a separate assessment in 2021 that noted the foreign ties of the domestic radicals involved. But Trump has said that these white supremacists include “very fine people” and considers them part of his political base, so this is yet another topic that evidently is off limits for the intelligence community, at least in anything released to the public.
The section on “Other Transnational Criminals” includes a passage about migration that appears intended either to give the impression that illegal migration to the United States is primarily driven by criminal organizations or to associate the migrants more generally with criminality—that latter being a major rhetorical theme of the Trump administration. The assessment offers nothing more than a half-sentence aside about the actual drivers of illegal migration, which are the debilitating economic, political, and security conditions in the migrants’ home countries.
While the assessment is silent on many ways in which Trump’s policies exacerbate threats such as proliferation and terrorism, there is no shyness about proclaiming (in bold italics in the original): “The total number of migrants trying to reach the United States has dropped significantly since January 2025 due to a surge in border security enforcement,” without giving numbers to back up that statement.
Two sentences later, the assessment states, “U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions along the Southwest border in January 2025 dropped 85 percent from the same period in 2024,” leaving the impression that it was that it was the change of administrations and the beginning of that same “surge” in enforcement that was responsible for the drop. Left unsaid was that the biggest part of the drop occurred during the first half of 2024, when the Biden administration’s policies were still in effect. Much of the drop reflected cooperation by the Mexican government with that administration, secured without the threat of a trade war.
The assessment’s later section on “Major State Actors” mostly contains straightforward descriptions of military and other capabilities of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. However, it mistakenly leaves the impression that state-initiated problems overseas are solely a matter of those four. There are many ways in which the actions and policies of other states can drag the United States into conflicts or otherwise negatively affect U.S. interests. Still, this document gives the reader no clue about any of those.
Amid the straightforward material are passages tailored to echo rhetoric about Trump administration initiatives. For example, the economic portion of the China section states, “China’s weak domestic demand, coupled with its industrial policies, such as manufacturing subsidies, have enabled a surge in cheap Chinese exports in sectors such as steel, harming U.S. competitors and fueling a record PRC trade surplus.” The economic facts involved do not need to come from the intelligence community and could have come from the business section of any major newspaper. The rest is editorializing in support of Trump’s neo-mercantilist trade policies.
Passages about Greenland in the sections on both China and Russia constitute perhaps the most obvious stretch to include language about an administration hobbyhorse. Although some mention of Chinese and Russian interests in the Arctic at large would be understandable, it is hard to imagine that an assessment of this modest length would go out of its way to address Greenland were it not for the president’s fixation on acquiring the island.
The Russia section also shows deference to Trump’s personal interests when it says, “Moscow probably believes information operations efforts to influence U.S. elections are advantageous, regardless of whether they affect election outcomes, because reinforcing doubt in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system achieves one of its core objectives.” Sowing general doubts about U.S. democracy certainly has been one of the Russian objectives, but it is clear that the Russians also care about election outcomes and that Trump is their man.
The intelligence community addressed this subject in a January 2017 assessment about Russian interference in the previous year’s presidential election, with these “high confidence” key judgments: “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Given how much Trump’s policies have been a bonanza for the Putin regime, this Russian preference is unlikely to have weakened since that assessment.
Trump has assiduously worked to discredit and impede any discussion or investigation of Russia’s election help to him or his mostly uninvestigated relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin. His efforts included repeated obstruction of Robert Mueller’s investigation during Trump’s first term. Accordingly, this subject is another item on the intelligence community’s taboo list.
No single sentence in the threat assessment appears to be an outright falsehood, which makes it unlike much of the Trump administration’s public output. Thus, working-level intelligence analysts can assure themselves that they did not sign off on a lie. Those analysts are not responsible for the overall messaging of the document. That messaging is the result of command influence.
The bias of the messages in this document is not surprising, given the people appointed to high positions in the intelligence community. CIA director John Ratcliffe is a Trump loyalist who showed his inclination for politicization during his brief tenure as director of national intelligence in the last year of Trump’s first term. Current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, despite earlier mercurial policy tendencies that suggested a degree of independence, is now just as much of a hardcore Trump loyalist as Ratcliffe, as illustrated by her performance (along with Ratcliffe’s) when questioned by Congress about the leaked principals’ discussion on bombing Yemen.
The damage from the politicization of this threat assessment includes giving the American public a misleading sense of the actual threats to the nation. This document is simply not, as its introduction claims it to be, “nuanced, independent, and unvarnished intelligence” that is needed “to protect American lives and America’s interests anywhere in the world.”The document is also another discouraging sign of the rapid erosion of the independence of institutions that are supposed to serve the national interest rather than just the personal and political interests of whoever happens to be in the White House. The loss of independence in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission is clearly visible. Now we see the same trend at work in the intelligence community and its mission of providing the knowledge on which the security of the nation depends.
Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.
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