OPINION:
To borrow former CIA Director George Tenet’s phrase describing warnings before the 9/11 attacks, the global threat landscape is “blinking red.” While understandably focused on domestic priorities, the incoming Trump administration will have to deal with increasingly aggressive threats to our national security that have metastasized over the past four years.
Seeking to impose his own sphere of influence through the conquest of a sovereign nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to prosecute the most devastating land war in Europe since World War II. The Kremlin’s sadistic war on Ukraine is a clear and present danger to our NATO allies, as well as to the $1 trillion worth of trade between the U.S. and Europe.
In Asia, China continues to militarize the South China Sea, aggressively threaten Taiwan’s territorial integrity, ruthlessly steal U.S. intellectual property and expand its nuclear weapons programs. If deterrence fails and China carries out its threat to annex Taiwan by force, the U.S. would see its ability to project power and operate in international waters in the Western Pacific severely curtailed. Valuable trade relations with Asia would suffer, while Taiwan’s world-class semiconductor industry would fall prey to China.
In the Middle East, Israel fights a multifront war against a nuclear threshold state, Iran, and its terrorist proxies. Yemen’s Houthi forces are launching fresh attacks in the Red Sea, severely disrupting and increasing the cost of international shipping, despite the U.S. military’s efforts to stop them.
Now enjoying burgeoning bilateral trade and diplomatic engagement with Russia and producing more ballistic missiles with the range to hit the U.S. homeland, nuclear-armed North Korea is more of a threat than ever.
Terrorism remains the national security threat with the shortest fuse. In the Middle East, the U.S. military and intelligence services still have a small but highly effective presence to target ISIS and al Qaeda. Since the disastrous U.S. and allied withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, however, neither the U.S. military nor the CIA has an official presence there.
The Biden administration characterizes its South Asian counterterrorism strategy as “over the horizon” monitoring — a pleasant-sounding phrase that obfuscates the serious degradation of our previous “find, fix and finish” counterterrorism capability.
Afghanistan has become a failed terrorist state full of ungoverned space that provides sanctuary for ISIS and al Qaeda terrorists. The March 2024 Islamic State attack on Crocus City Mall in Moscow and its failed attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Austria in August demonstrated the terror group is quickly developing its ability to strike beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
Mr. Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are at war with democracy. Relying on military coercion, espionage and cyberhacking, they want to destroy our institutions, toss gasoline on the partisan fires burning all too hot in our political process, and reduce and when possible eliminate U.S. influence overseas. These dictators tout a “multipolar world,” challenging American postwar hegemony, which only cloaks their real intention of breaking up long-standing alliances such as NATO that have deterred great-power aggression and kept the peace so vital to economic growth.
In his farewell address, President George Washington famously warned against foreign entanglements. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrated our vulnerability to determined enemies, despite the expanse of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which had once kept us safe. In this century, the world is too interconnected for us not to be focused on detecting and stopping even geographically distant threats to our national security.
Russian and Chinese propaganda seeks to convince U.S. citizens that any projection of American power is just the first step in another unwinnable “forever war.” But support for allies to deter and defend against China, North Korea, Russia and Iran is the surest way to preserve our nation’s security.
It’s worth recalling that in that same farewell address, our nation’s first president also admonished his fellow citizens about the danger of foreign influence, which he called “one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
President-elect Donald Trump has stated his intention to end wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, but how he does so will be critical. Confirmation hearings for his Cabinet nominees will be valuable opportunities for our citizens, allies and even our enemies to gain an appreciation for how the Trump administration will serve U.S. national security and avoid appeasing our enemies. Effective leadership, as my former boss at the CIA David Petraeus says, starts with “getting the big ideas right.”
The dedicated and talented professionals in the U.S. intelligence community will carry on recruiting spies, stealing secrets and producing sophisticated analysis on these and other national security threats. But it will be up to the Trump administration to make the right executive decisions to keep our nation safe from our relentless adversaries, who — make no mistake — have us in their crosshairs.
• 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.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.