Intelligence leaders have recently testified in Capitol Hill concerning the new annual threats to the American Intelligence Community. In a brutal gap compared to the previous reports, this year's assessment began with an overview of the threats posed by criminal organizations, including drug cartels and transnational gangs, before moving on to detail the challenge of countering jihadist groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda and their global networks. Before moving on to traditional threats based on the state embodied by China, Iran and others, the section on non -state actors ends with an analysis of cybercriminals, pirates and online fraudsters using ransomware.
But the absent fact of the report is the mention of the extremely right transnational extremists, including neonazis, white supremacists and others animated by racial or ethnic hatred. It 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 extremist who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, killing more than 50 people and injuring more than 40 others.
The decision to exclude any mention of far -right terrorism 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 not foreign to extreme right extremist terrorism, which raised its ugly head during a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018; Again in a Walmart in El Paso in August 2019; And in a supermarket in an African-American predominantly section of Buffalo, NY, in May 2022. The authors of each of these attacks engaged in far-right propaganda online and subscribed to a version of the version of the Large replacement theoryAlso recommended by Breivik and Tarrant, who evokes a global cabale of Jews and elites who actively seek to replace the white Christian population with ethnic and religious minorities.
It should not be surprising that the first annual evaluation of threats from this Trump administration ranks gangs and cartels as the first danger, given the accent put by the president on deportations. But going further by completely omitting far -right terrorists fundamentally ignores a fundamental threat to American democracy.
A year earlier, the 2024 Threat assessment explained that “the transnational movement of violent extremists with racial or ethnically motivated motivation (RMVE), in particular motivated by white supremacy, will continue to do violence through Europe, South America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand inspiring the lonely actor or small cells that constitute a significant threat to American people.” There is no reason to think that the threat has disappeared.
Although evaluations of threats from the intelligence community should always remain politically neutral, it seems obvious that the Trump administration has put its thumb to the scale to influence the analysis, generating a result which directly reflects Trump's political priorities. More recently – and at the request of Trump's consultation of Trump, the director general of Tesla, Elon Musk – These priorities have included labeling attacks on Tesla dealers as domestic terrorism.
During his first mandate, Trump largely ignored the threat posed by extremists of the far right and suggested that he was considering designating extreme left movements like antifa As a terrorist organization. (A Mountain of evidence shows that the threat of the far right was much more deadly.))
The last assessment of the intelligence community follows the unprecedented decision To label 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 profit, and not on politics, and as such, are more precisely characterized as criminals, not terrorists. However, the designation of the Venezuelan Ring Ring Tren of Aragua as a terrorist group served as a basic (controversial) so that the Trump administration uses the Act extraterrestrial enemies To expel the Venezuelan nationals – some of which have been reported as having no connection with the group, and at least one had legal status and was protected against expulsion by an order of the court that the administration ignored.
During his first months in power, Trump intimidated opponents in politics and the media, intimidated from powerful law firms and even co -opted technological titans which were once among his most noisy criticism. But the distortion of the evaluation of the threats of the intelligence community represents a special danger. One of the main aspects of the relationship between intelligence leaders and political decision-makers in constitutional federal republics as the United States is that the intelligence community should exercise autonomy and be sheltered from the policy of the time. Although the President has the right to reorganize his priorities, the intelligence community should not the weight of greater threats depending on the president's perceptions or wishes. If our country has learned something from the debacle of war in Iraq, it is because decision -makers should not influence the analysis of the intelligence community.
The danger is apparent not only in the distorted evaluation but also in the decisions of the personnel and the allocation of resources. Even before the Ministry of Effectiveness of the Government of the White House began to abandon the entire agencies of the federal government, a change was underway in which resources and staff were far from the fight against terrorism and towards strategic competition with close peers like China and Russia. Now, almost overnight, tens of millions of dollars In funding, researching radicalization, violent extremism and the prevention of terrorism has been cut. Which includes a database of $ 3 million that has been maintained by researchers follow and study Threats of domestic terrorism.
The actions of the Trump administration – the loss of staff and the funding, the politicization of the fight against terrorism – leave the United States much more vulnerable to an attack than at any time of recent memory.
Jason Mr. Blazakis, professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, was director of the Office of Finance and Designations of the State Department of the Department of State of the Bureau of Terterroism from 2008 to 2018. Colin P. Clarke is the director of research at Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting company based in New York.
