OPINION:
During my last overseas CIA assignment as a station chief in a South Asian war zone, we worked in close partnership with our colleagues in the intelligence community, State Department and U.S. military. We developed a powerfully cohesive team focused on detecting and preempting terrorist threats long before they could inflict any harm on the U.S. homeland.
Many times, we relied not only on our own intelligence efforts but also on our host government’s intelligence capabilities and assets as well. We enjoyed with our allies a robust exchange of intelligence on our mutual adversaries, shared analytic judgments and regularly collaborated on tactical operations.
In one case, we tracked a high-value senior al Qaeda terrorist operative who was responsible for planning operations against U.S. targets. We found and fixed the target’s location and, without hesitation, shared it with the host government, whose military executed a risky raid that took out the operative.
One team, one fight.
Of the many lessons I learned at the CIA, one of the most important was that our allies can be a tremendous force multiplier when it comes to protecting our country, a dynamic that is playing out right now in the heart of Europe.
Dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping want their enemies to be weak and divided. They do everything possible to drive a wedge between the U.S. and our closest allies, because they know that together we are stronger and better equipped to protect internationally recognized borders, freedom of navigation and the free exchange of goods and services on which the U.S. and global economies rely.
We learned at great human cost in the 20th century that when they believe they have the military advantage over smaller and weaker neighbors, dictators seek to carve out a sphere of influence and grab territory in unprovoked wars of aggression, just like the one Mr. Putin is waging on Ukraine.
Tens of thousands of brave Ukrainian soldiers have paid the ultimate price to defend their nation, as have countless civilians whom the Russian army ruthlessly murdered in their homes, parks, churches and maternity wards.
Allied with China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, Russia continues to define the U.S. as its “main enemy.”
In the past two decades of Mr. Putin’s rule, the Kremlin has flooded the zone with espionage operations that include hacking U.S. social media, the Democratic National Committee’s computer network and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Russian intelligence agencies penetrated the SolarWinds operating systems and spread malware that opened a back door to some 30,000 customers’ information technology systems, including those of major Fortune 500 companies.
The Kremlin stole protected information from a panoply of private sector and U.S. government agencies.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prophetically warned NATO foreign ministers during the alliance’s 70th anniversary in 2019 about the need to confront Russia’s multifarious threats to global security.
Be wary of false comparisons of Ukraine to the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of past decades. There are no U.S. or NATO boots on the ground doing the fighting for Kyiv.
This is Ukraine’s existential war to preserve its independence in the face of a Russian onslaught.
But it is also our fight. Brave Ukrainian soldiers are defending Europe from Russia’s aggression, cutting the Russian army down to size, depleting Russia’s weapons stocks, and inducing a crisis of confidence in the Kremlin over blowback from the most destructive land war in Europe since World War II.
Russia’s putative allies, especially China, must be feeling some buyer’s remorse over Mr. Putin’s costly, failed war.
By contrast, the money the U.S.-led NATO alliance has spent to keep Ukraine in the fight has seen an extraordinarily high return on investment.
True, the Biden administration can be faulted for not providing Ukraine with some of the vital weapons it needs, including F-16s, long-range ATACM artillery, and Abrams tanks in time for this summer’s counteroffensive.
But keep in mind President Ronald Reagan’s words from his 1985 State of the Union address, offering a grand strategy for confronting dictatorship: “We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent … to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.”
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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