America First Intel Approach Downplays Russia, Ignores Climate Change

2025-04-01 08:20:57

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Recently appointed US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and other top intelligence officials appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss the US intelligence services' annual threat assessment (ATA).

Most of the committee's time and attention was focused on the revelation by the editor of the Atlantic magazine that he had been inadvertently added to an insecure chat group, in which top security officials discussed detailed plans for an attack on Yemen. Gabbard and her colleagues steadfastly refused to admit that this had been a security breach . It was an unhelpful distraction from the main event, a discussion of the latest ATA report.

Produced annually, the ATA is a combined assessment by 18 US intelligence agencies, headed up by the Office for National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, of the major threats to national security in America. The 2025 version is the first of Donald Trump's second term and reflects Trumpism's major shift from America's previous security priorities in three ways.

First, the assessment gave priority to what it identified as domestic security threats over those posed by foreign adversaries. Second, the report ignored climate change as a critical threat to US security. And third, there was an unprecedented softening of the language in relation to Russia.

Close to home

In her opening statement Gabbard identified“cartels, gangs and other transnational criminal organizations” as“what most immediately and directly threatens the United States and the wellbeing of the American people.”

Those threats are closer to home, but they hardly warrant their lead billing – particularly given the way that Trump himself has regularly invoked the threat of“World War III” ever since he started his campaign to return to the White House more than two years ago.

But what they do indicate is an America increasingly focused on the narrow predilections of its president and his MAGA supporters.

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