With days to go until America decides who will become the next president, there are concerns among some US allies over one of the most important aspects of their alliance with the world’s most powerful nation – intelligence sharing.
While a Kamala Harris presidency is expected to fit into a more predictable pattern of intelligence handling, security experts say some US allies have more “anxiety” about the alternative: Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The Independent spoke to experts in intelligence, national security, and foreign policy from the UK, Australia, and Canada on the implications of a second Trump term. They all agreed the stakes couldn’t be higher – and suggested the Republican candidate’s track record when it comes to leaking secret intelligence is one of their causes for concern.
“There is trepidation about Mr Trump in the US intelligence community and throughout the Five Eyes network,” Dr Michael Fullilove, executive director of Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, told The Independent, referring to the intelligence-sharing network made up of the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
“The handling of secrets requires people to follow rules,” Fullilove said. “But Mr Trump doesn’t seem to believe that rules apply to him. He sees himself as existing in a rule-free zone. When you’re talking about the handling of classified intelligence, that’s a problem.”
During Trump’s first administration, the White House “leaked like a sieve,” Dr Daniel Larsen, a lecturer in Intelligence and War Studies at Scotland’s Glasgow University and previously at Cambridge, told The Independent.
As a matter of law, a sitting president can declassify the most secret classified information, but US defense experts say even presidents have to transmit declassification orders through proper channels.
Trump and classified information
- Months after taking office, Trump shared classified Israeli intelligence, concerning an undercover operation to infiltrate ISIS, with the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the then-Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, during a meeting at the Oval Office in May 2017. Amid uproar, Trump insisted he had every right to do so, tweeting: “As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”
- In 2019, Trump tweeted a classified satellite image of a failed Iranian rocket launch to his millions of followers. Critics said that by doing so he risked revealing information about US surveillance techniques. Trump responded by telling reporters: “We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do.”
- Trump is accused of illegally hoarding thousands of classified documents – including papers relating to nuclear weapons and spy satellites – at his Mar-a-Lago resort after his term as president ended. Criminal charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith were sensationally dismissed by a federal judge who was appointed by Trump, but Smith has appealed that decision. Meanwhile, Trump has said he would “fire” Smith for investigating him, should he be elected, and has suggested that Smith should be forced to leave the country.
Despite the leaks from Trump’s first term, experts largely agreed that intelligence sharing between the allied nations would continue under a second Trump administration, but they acknowledged there would be some level of risk.
Professor Thomas Juneau, a former defense analyst with Canada’s Department of National Defense, explained that the nation relies heavily upon the network as it “gets way more than it gives”.
“Is Trump going to kill the Five Eyes on day one? No. That’s way too extreme. But it is conceivable,” Juneau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa said. “Is it conceivable that in four years, the Five Eyes are weakened and that we don’t necessarily get as much through as we used to? Yes, of course it is.”
Fullilove, at Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy, maintained that the Five Eyes “will survive” Trump and said the assertion that allies would stop sharing information with the Americans if he is elected was “unrealistic”. But he added an important caveat: “Trust is critical.”
Lord Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US who resigned in 2019 after some of his dispatches that were critical of Trump were leaked, told The Independent the relationship between the UK and US intelligence community “is close, strong and durable” and “will flourish whatever the political climate.
Christopher Steele, the former head of MI6’s Russia desk who found himself at the center of a worldwide controversy after he authored the so-called Steele dossier, a series of startling allegations suggesting Trump might have been compromised by Moscow, had a much graver assessment. He told The Independent that concern from British intelligence officials “should be very high” if Trump is re-elected.
“I don’t think we can feel confident that any information that we give America as part of our very close and very important intelligence and security alliance would be safe,” Steele said. “In my 40-year career, I’ve never felt so concerned about the state of the world.”
In 2019, a US Department of Justice report found that the FBI had “raised doubts about the reliability of some of Steele’s reports”. However, Steele maintains to this day that the dossier – which was an intelligence report collated for a private client – contained “original intelligence [and] was obtained from credible sources”.
In a new book titled Unredacted, Steele warns of “a new world disorder” if Trump takes back the White House next week.
The view on Trump’s home turf was that some of his behavior was “very disturbing” to those in the intelligence world, according to former New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker who covered the Pentagon, the military and national security for the paper.
In June 2023, prosecutors unsealed an indictment that contained photographs of boxes of classified information stacked in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bathroom.
“That’s kind of what really shocked people,” Shanker, director of George Washington State’s Project for Media and National Security, told The Independent.
“They were just in the open where countless numbers of people just walked by and could have reached in and grabbed some or read them. So I think that was very disturbing to a lot of people who work in that world.”
Biden’s home was also raided by the FBI in early 2023 after it emerged he, too, took classified documents home with him when he was vice president. Biden complied with the investigation, and no criminal charges were brought. Trump, however, was accused of a cover-up.
“When confronted with it, one cooperated with investigators, one obstructed,” Shanker said. “Taking the classified documents home is less telling than how they responded once they were confronted with it.”
So what do US allies think Trump 2.0 might look like?
Darroch said he is more concerned about a potential second term.
“Back in 2016, Trump had never served in any level of government, so was entirely inexperienced on how to make things happen,” he told The Independent. “And he brought some mainstream Republican figures into government who turned out not to share his ideas and objectives.”
He continued: “If he wins a second term, it’s clear that he will appoint only supporters to positions around him, and he will have learned from his first four years how to deliver. So bad ideas are much less likely to get stopped.”
Juneau said it would be “naive” to assume Trump’s second term would be like the first.
“My fear is that Trump two will be different,” he warned. “And the assumption that many are making here in Canada, but elsewhere too — that we survived Trump one, so we’ll be okay with Trump two — I find that that’s a naive assumption, even if it’s not completely impossible. Trump two will hit the ground running.”
Allied security services will be keeping a watchful eye on anyone Trump potentially nominates to head up the CIA and the NSA if he wins a second term.
“The thing that British intelligence would be watching like a hawk would be who he appoints to those positions,” Daniel Larsen, the British intelligence historian, said. “There would obviously be more anxiety about a Trump administration just because of the much greater uncertainty as to who he might appoint and what those appointees might do.”
British officials, Larsen added, would consider whether Trump appointees “might do something that would fundamentally change the bureaucratic relationship between these agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. [Whereas] with the Harris administration, you could count on the pretty traditional appointees to these organizations who would leave the relationship in place as it is,” he said.
Differences in foreign policy could include Trump’s attitude to NATO, the 32-member Western defense organization, which he has repeatedly criticized. In February, he said the US would not help defend members which failed to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense, as per NATO targets. Instead, he said, he would tell the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want.”
John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, has said he feared Trump was planning to pull the US out of NATO completely. Some observers suggest he may do that in a second term, or perhaps just make clear he would not back NATO’s Article 5 commitment to come to the defense of any member that is attacked.
Trump has also repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, among other dictators. At a joint news conference in Helsinki in July 2018, Trump surprised onlookers by taking Putin’s word over that of US intelligence agencies on the issue of whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 US election.
Unlike the first administration, Juneau said Trump would “surround himself with people who will loyally implement his true vision from day one.”
“Jim Mattis, the first Secretary of Defense, some of [Trump’s] first national security advisors, some of the people at the CIA, like [Mike] Pompeo, they were Republicans. They were conservatives, but they were professionals, and they were actively blocking Trump’s craziest ideas,” Juneau said.
“The fear has got to be, from a Canadian national security perspective, is that won’t be the case under Trump two.”
Fullilove agrees that Trump “lent on the so-called adults in the room” when he was first in office. “This time, he has said that he doesn’t want those kinds of people in the room, and many of them will choose not to be in the room with him because they’ve seen what happened to the people who served him in his first term,” he added. “So you are likely to see more MAGA characters in senior positions.”
But Fullilove stressed that while “it would be harder” a second time around, Trump would not be able to go completely unchecked. “On the other hand, don’t underestimate the resilience of the American system: the permanent civil service, the military, the Congress, the courts.”
He was also encouraged to hear JD Vance express his support for AUKUS, the trilateral security and defense partnership between Australia, the UK, and the US — but warned there was still “some nervousness” because of his running mate.
“I asked JD Vance about AUKUS at the Munich Security Conference in February, and he said that he’s a fan,” Fullilove said. “The problem is that Mr. Trump has no personal stake in AUKUS, and he has made it a habit of ripping up deals that his predecessors signed. So, there is some risk to AUKUS. I wouldn’t overstate it, but there is some nervousness in Canberra.”
When approached for comment, the Trump campaign claimed the Harris-Biden administration has “put our national security at risk more than any administration in history.”
Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement to the The Independent: “When President Trump was in office, NATO was strong, there was no war in Ukraine, and the Middle East was stable. Under Kamala Harris, the entire world is on the brink of a major war as Putin continues his crusade into Ukraine and Iran is funding terrorist attacks against our ally, Israel.”
Leavitt added: “President Trump will restore world peace through American strength and ensure European nations carry their weight by paying their fair share to our mutual defense to lighten the unfair burden on American taxpayers.”
As Americans head to the polls on Nov. 5, the world holds its collective breath as the count to determine the most powerful politician in the world goes down to the wire.
“The world is in the most fragile and dangerous state that it has been for a generation with war in Europe, conflict in the Middle East, and tension with China,” Darroch said. “Against this backdrop, the American people’s decision on who leads them for the next four years is more consequential than ever.”
