Transatlantic Intelligence Sharing Is Under Pressure
European reliance on U.S. intelligence is increasingly seen as a vulnerability.
The 2026 NATO summit in Ankara took place amid friction between Washington and its European allies over defense spending and the Iran war, and the alliance found itself at a crossroads. The U.S. president’s frequent criticism and threats to leave NATO, along with announced U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe and a review of the U.S. military presence on the continent, have created uncertainty within the alliance.
U.S. support to NATO and Europe has long been critical to European security. Europe remains heavily dependent on the United States for its overall defense, particularly for strategic enablers, including satellite-based early warning systems, air-to-air refueling, and heavy transport capabilities, and for nuclear deterrence. Intelligence sharing with the United States has been a critical component of the collective transatlantic security architecture.
The current U.S. administration’s aggressive and unilateral foreign policy, hostility and eroding commitment to European defense, tariffs, repeated threats to annex Greenland, and siding with Russia have led to a rapid deterioration in transatlantic relations. Cutting aid to and temporarily withdrawing intelligence support to Ukraine, the treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House followed by the launching of the Iran war without consulting with or even informing its European allies, and, most recently, the decision by the Trump administration to cut access to Anthropic’s frontier AI models Mythos 5 and Fable 5 to all foreign nationals, a decision that the White House just reversed — a reminder that American frontier AI models are politically contingent — have created a climate of distrust among transatlantic allies.
Driven by concerns about the reliability of U.S. security commitments, European nations have significantly increased their defense budgets and are pursuing initiatives to close critical capability gaps, are investing in the development and production of defense technologies, and are increasing joint procurement to reduce the continent’s dependence on American security guarantees. Intelligence has been seen as different and to a large degree immune to temporary political and diplomatic disagreements. For many decades, intelligence sharing among allied countries has been critically important. Intelligence has also primarily been the responsibility of career professionals, not politicians, which allowed intelligence agencies to overcome political disagreements. Even when transatlantic allies were involved in disputes about each other’s foreign policies, including the Iraq war and the war on terror, intelligence sharing continued.
Unfortunately, this has begun to change. On top of the broader foreign policy discord between Europe and the United States, certain developments affecting the U.S. intelligence community, principally the politicization of intelligence, have eroded mutual trust and had a corrosive impact on the future of transatlantic intelligence sharing.
Politicization of Intelligence
A key concern for allied European governments is the seeming politicization of intelligence under the current U.S. administration to advance its political agendas and to exact retribution against the president’s political opponents. Some of America’s worst national security failures, notably the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle, have involved intelligence shaped by political influence. The appointment of Trump loyalists with limited national security experience to lead several agencies, rather than career officials, reflects an effort to align these agencies closely with the White House’s political and ideological priorities.
Since the beginning of his second term, the president has also pursued an extensive personnel purge within the intelligence community, effected through firings and revocations of security clearances designed to weed out the president’s perceived political enemies. The cuts have largely involved senior professionals closely associated with assessments that contradicted the president or with cases perceived as anti-Trump, and included the director, the deputy director, and the chief data scientist of the National Security Agency, all perceived to be insufficiently loyal to the president. The CIA’s principal White House intelligence briefer and senior Russia analyst also were dismissed for similar reasons.
Pete Hegseth, the secretary of Defense, removed the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who had produced a damage assessment of America’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities that infuriated the administration.
Recently departed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard fired the head of the National Intelligence Council and his deputy after the agency published an intelligence assessment finding a lack of coordination between the Venezuelan government and the Tren de Aragua gang, contradicting the administration’s stated justification for using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants. Gabbard also revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former officials, in the process inadvertently revealing the identity of an undercover CIA officer serving overseas. The newly appointed acting DNI, Bill Pulte, has just ordered staff members to identify 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center.
At the FBI, Trump-appointed Director Kash Patel has dismissed multiple high-ranking officials, including at least a dozen agents and staff who previously investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents and several members of the FBI’s Middle East counterintelligence unit.
Furthermore, the intelligence community has seen an unprecedented wave of resignations of career professionals, frustrated with the direction the agencies.
Purges of experienced U.S. intelligence officers risk undermining intelligence relationships with allied countries built over decades, as trust fundamentally relies on personal relationships. Various European agencies are increasingly concerned about the damage their U.S counterparts have sustained amid these purges. In Moscow, officials are likely popping the champagne.
The purges have increased the anxiety levels of European security officials who were already rolling their eyes at other chaotic episodes in the U.S., including Signalgate, i.e. the most senior national security officials discussing sensitive plans of military strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on the Signal messaging app, with a journalist inadvertently included. This grave breach of operational security protocols left allied intelligence services to question whether sharing sensitive information with U.S. government officials could compromise sources, methods, or operations.
Many U.S. allies have also become increasingly worried that information they were sharing with the U.S. could, without their permission, find its way to countries that do not share their commitment to human rights or international law.
There are signs that U.S. allies are beginning to reassess their intelligence cooperation with the United States based on these concerns. The United Kingdom, Colombia, and Canada may have stopped or limited their intelligence-sharing on suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean based on their shared view that the U.S. military strikes against the boats clearly violate international law.
In October 2025, the Dutch military intelligence chief expressed concerns publicly that the United States might use shared intelligence to violate human rights or even to support Russia, an extraordinary concern. The Danish military intelligence, following Trump’s repeated threats against Greenland, went so far as to designate the United States as a national security threat, alongside China and Russia.
In addition, the fiscal 2027 intelligence appropriations bill, expected to be approved by Congress, which mandates intelligence sharing with Israel, is viewed with great concern by European governments keen to ensure that the U.S. firewalls information it gets from them to prevent it from being used by the Israeli military for targeting purposes.
As a result, the high level of European reliance on the United States on matters of intelligence is increasingly seen as a vulnerability. This has led European countries to contemplate reducing their cooperation with the U.S. and expanding their bilateral sharing agreements with regional partners to protect their national interests.
Derisking Intelligence Sharing
The United States remains an unmatched intelligence partner with capabilities that far exceed those of its European friends. Intelligence cooperation among transatlantic allies has been a key component of the European security architecture, which has sustained peace and prosperity on the continent for decades. This cooperation continues: In the past couple of weeks, the CIA has been sharing warnings with European allies about the growing danger of Russia escalating the Ukraine war with limited strikes or military incursions against NATO countries such as the Baltic states or Poland, counting on the United States not to intervene, as Russian President Vladimir Putin is struggling on the battlefield in Ukraine and increasingly under growing pressure at home.
However, the aggressive and unilateral policies of the current U.S. administration, including threats to withdraw from NATO, and the politicization of intelligence threaten these relationships and erode the trust underlying such cooperation.
Last week’s NATO summit in Ankara went better than many feared and the appeals to President Trump’s vanity by Secretary General Mark Rutte and the concrete plans to reach the agreed defense spending targets to salvage the alliance presented by European heads of state worked to a degree. The summit yielded a recommitment to collective defense and renewed support for Ukraine, including a license to Kyiv to manufacture Patriot interceptor missiles.
Still, questions about the U.S.’s commitment will remain. It is also yet unclear whether the trust will completely return after Trump’s term ends and whether the U.S. foreign policy priorities and approach will realign with European interests or if the U.S. focus will continue to shift to the Indo-Pacific and Western hemisphere at the expense of Europe post 2028.
However, it is precisely because of this uncertainty that reducing its reliance on U.S. intelligence must be part of the efforts to increase Europe’s indigenous defense and security capabilities This does not mean Europe decoupling from the U.S. but rather diversifying its intelligence-sharing network: Europeans will continue to work with and share information with the U.S. where necessary and possible while reducing their unhealthy dependence on it. However, the relationship can no longer be taken for granted and needs to be derisked.
The process of reducing its dependence on a U.S. security umbrella and building strategic autonomy to protect itself in the increasingly volatile and dangerous security environment requires Europe to continue to invest in and develop its intelligence collection and analysis capabilities and to deepen its intelligence sharing with its regional partners, whether through the planned EU Commission’s fusion cell or, most likely, bilaterally or within small groups of countries. It should also expand its intelligence liaison with other friendly nations and expand its network intelligence partners in certain parts of the world, including the Gulf and East Asian nations, with whom intelligence sharing has been more limited. Only this will ensure that the continent is as well-prepared as possible in the event that U.S. security priorities continue to diverge from those of Europe or that it finds itself cut off from U.S. intelligence by an administration seeking to punish or pressure its allies or by one with other priorities.
Tapio Vaskio is a managing director and co-founder of ERG Partners, a New York-based advisory firm focused on the defense and national security sectors. He graduated from Helsinki University in Finland and has a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.