The 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.
In her opening statement Gabbard identified “cartels, gangs and other transnational criminal organisations” as “what most immediately and directly threatens the United States and the wellbeing of the American people”.
These 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 three” 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.
An even more notable omission is the absence of any mention of climate change, either as an existential threat to human life as we know it or as a force multiplier to other threats such as migration, environmental disasters or famine.
This led to a testy exchange between Gabbard and Senator Angus King, an independent senator from Maine. King asked the director of national intelligence: “Has global climate change been solved? Why is that not in this report? And who made the decision that it should not be in the report when it’s been in every one of the 11 prior reports?” Gabbard replied: “What I focused this annual threat assessment on … are the most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security.”
This was an unconvincing response, given that the 2025 ATA specifically notes the security impact of melting sea ice in the Arctic. The report also notes increasing cooperation between Russia and China in the Arctic and a growing Chinese footprint in the region.
Russian threat relegated
But the most notable difference in this year’s ATA concerns Russia. The Trump administration’s new approach to Moscow and the Russian leadership infuses the language and substance of this year’s intelligence report. The 2024 threat assessment led the section on Russia with the assertion that Moscow “seeks to project and defend its interests globally and to undermine the United States and the west”.
In 2025, the headline finding about the threat from Russia is that the Kremlin’s objective is “to restore Russian strength and security in its near abroad against perceived US and western encroachment”. This, the report said, “has increased the risks of unintended escalation between Russia and Nato”.
Gone are the references to Russia as “a resilient and capable adversary across a wide range of domains”. Instead, this year’s ATA downplays the actual threat that the Kremlin poses to America’s interests by describing Russia merely as an “enduring potential threat to US power, presence and global interests”.
The 2025 report also assesses that Russia “has seized the upper hand in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is on a path to accrue greater leverage to press Kyiv and its western backers to negotiate an end to the war that grants Moscow concessions it seeks”. It doesn’t question why that might be the case or how it could be reversed.
Moreover, it presents the Kremlin’s malign influence activities as aimed at countering threats. This affords them an unprecedented degree of legitimacy and implies that the west poses a threat to Russia. This, of course, has long been a favourite talking point of Vladimir Putin’s.
Change of policy
More than just a change in threat assessment, the 2025 ATA doubles down on a change in policy. The report takes as a given that “Russia retains momentum (in) a grinding war of attrition … (which) will lead to a gradual but steady erosion of Kyiv’s position on the battlefield, regardless of any US or allied attempts to impose new and greater costs on Moscow.”
The inevitable conclusion is that the US should not pressure Russia to halt its illegal and brutal war of aggression against Ukraine. Rather Washington’s approach to security should accommodate the Kremlin’s ever multiplying conditions for a ceasefire.
The report’s language on China is less ambiguous. It describes Beijing as “the most comprehensive and robust military threat to US national security” and as likely to “continue to expand its coercive and subversive malign influence activities to weaken the United States internally and globally”.
The report also notes that Beijing is critical to the alignment of all four major state actors that pose threats to the US: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
But China, and the other state adversaries, still take second place in America’s national security thinking to accommodate the administration’s inwardly focused “America First” mindset. This is not merely an indication of the isolationist tendencies in the foreign policy approach of Trumpism. It’s a deliberate abdication of US global leadership.
Trump and his team may believe that this will make America more secure – and the 2025 threat assessment is framed in a way that justifies such an approach. But it fails to provide any credible evidence that it might succeed.
David Hastings Dunn has previously received funding from the ESRC, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Open Democracy Foundation and has previously been both a NATO and a Fulbright Fellow.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU's Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
