Signal Chat Leak of Military Plans Makes the US Look Reckless

Bloomberg

25-03-2025

If Europeans didn't already know what the new administration in Washington thinks and wants of them, they now do: 'PATHETIC' and cash, respectively. This is thanks to the hard-to-credit decision of President Donald Trump's top security officials to chat about an imminent military strike against targets in Yemen on a publicly available texting app, and to include a journalist by mistake.
For a continent already worried that Trump may not honor any NATO Article 5 request or would be willing to shake down allies by withholding the spare parts and software upgrades needed to keep their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters flying, the content of this unintentionally leaked discussion has provided confirmation.
In the short term, that may have few real consequences. Although insulting, the administration's assessment of Europe's weak military capabilities is correct. The resulting dependency on US military might has made European states highly vulnerable to extortion by their now-former ally. Longer term, though, the drive to move away from buying US arms and build European will be overwhelming. Charles de Gaulle, the postwar French president who in 1966 pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's integrated command structures to avoid just such dependencies, has been vindicated from his grave.
US allies in the Asia Pacific and Middle East can only conclude that this might soon be them, too, should Trump and his officials ever decide that they aren't paying enough for their defense or making sufficient trade concessions.
Russia and China, meanwhile, will also draw conclusions, though viewed from their perspective this offers exploitable opportunities. At least as important as all this is that America's friends and foes alike are finding out what happens when you get group of poorly qualified ideologues to run the most powerful military in the world. The short answer is either recklessness or, under a more generous interpretation, a group with a steep learning curve.
John Ratcliffe, director of the Central Intelligence Service, was on the call. He never thought, however, to question the exposure to potential foreign espionage in discussing the most highly classified subject possible — an imminent military operation — on personal cell phones open to loss or hacking, and while using Signal, a public, albeit encrypted, messaging service.
It's because of those vulnerabilities that the US government has a dedicated secure communications system. It's less convenient than a phone chat, but that's because it's safe. Ratcliffe, a Texas lawyer, had no intelligence qualifications for the job when he was appointed, either this year or for a brief stint as director of national intelligence in Trump's first term. It shows.
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser now heavily involved in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, set up the Signal chat and included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, by error. Waltz has an impressive military background as a former special forces officer, and he served as a policymaker in the George W. Bush administration. Yet this isn't a mistake you could imagine Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft or Zbigniew Brzezinski making.