From 2006, the US intelligence community has released its threat assessment early on each spring, with as many as nearly 20 agencies contributing.

An analogy is Estonia's annual report, also issued in the spring, published by the Foreign Intelligence Service (Välisluureamet).

While in Estonia the impetus for this public assessment derived from the intelligence agency itself, in the US the decision was made in the wake of intelligence failures surrounding the 9/11 attacks and controversies over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The threat assessment was intended to bring a degree of transparency to threat assessments and to protect intelligence from political pressure and manipulation.

This year's US report also pledges in its foreword to reflect the "shared understanding of the US intelligence community" and to offer policymakers, military leaders, and homeland security forces "detailed, independent, and unaltered intelligence."

Donald Trump's second administration has been more assertive than his first in curbing the sort of defiance that surfaced during that first term.
For instance, in January, the president dismissed several intelligence officials.

Additionally, the CIA laid off a number of junior officers, as part of Trump's broader initiative overall to downsize the federal government.

The current US threat assessment was compiled under the tutelage of [US Director of National Intelligence and former Democrat] Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump loyalist who propagates Kremlin talking points via social media and frequently criticizes Ukraine's president.

Comparing Gabbard's report with last year's, one could argue that the Trump administration's priorities have sharply influenced the US intelligence community's threat assessment.

This need not mean that reports issued during Joe Biden's administration were ideology-free, but it is evident that within just a few months, the new president's preferences have found their way into the report at a speed unexpected for a supposedly independent, analytical process, coordinated among more than ten agencies.

Last year's report didn't mention the issue of Greenland at all, yet this is now presented by the new administration as one of the major US security concerns, discussed in the context of both Russia and China.

At home, while last year's report listed white supremacist groups among extremist movements, describing these as posing a significant threat to US citizens, this year's report doesn't even mention such groups.

Whereas the 2024 report referred to migrants solely as victims of human trafficking, the current one clearly frames them as a threat.

"The total number of migrants trying to reach the United States has dropped significantly since January 2025 due to a surge in border security enforcement," notes the report, even as traditionally evaluating government policies had been avoided.

While threats from the Mexican drug cartels were a topic of discussion during Biden-era reports, in the new version significantly greater prominence is given to them.

Some sections that were present in previous years are also missing from this year's report.

Climate change, which received an entire page of coverage last year, is no longer mentioned at all, and the section on pandemic threats is also gone.

Joe Biden-era reports painted a grim picture of a pandemic-stricken world, citing avian flu, cholera, dengue fever, Ebola, monkeypox, and polio and the critical strain these place on global healthcare systems.

These clear differences suggest the current president's administration has influenced the public intelligence assessment, and raise the question of whether this also affects the section most relevant to Estonia: That concerning Russia.

In the first threat assessment from Trump's second term, US intelligence concludes — unlike before — that Russia's growing capabilities and a heightened nuclear risk require the US urgently to find ways to end the Ukraine war, and that the manner of ending it (for instance defeating Russia militarily) does not affect any future threat posed by Russia.

This is a fundamentally different position from that which European governments have so far expressed.

In Europe, the prevailing view is that if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, it will pose an even greater threat to the continent.

Whether that view has been backed by solid public reasoning is another matter.

Unlike in last year's intelligence report, this year's finds that the continuation of the Russia-Ukraine war itself poses a threat to the US due to the increasing risks of escalation — including nuclear war — and rising heightened threats to NATO allies, particularly in Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe.

The continuation of the war is claimed to encourage China and North Korea to act more aggressively.

With this, one could read the report as implying that even a bad peace would be safer for the US than a prolonged war.

It is noteworthy that this time, the US public intelligence report also attributes a stance to the Ukrainian president on US-initiated negotiations.

It states as a point of fact that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "probably understands that his position is weakening, the future of Western assistance is uncertain, and a ceasefire may ultimately become a necessary recourse."

What is left unsaid is that the US government itself is one of the main factors in this wavering Western support.

Naturally, there is no reason to consider the entire US intelligence report as a political pamphlet — there are statements in the assessment that Trump likely wouldn't appreciate, such as the point that a ceasefire under unfavorable conditions would not solve Ukraine's security issues and that Russia remains motivated to continue the war.

But the extensive changes in this US public intelligence report demonstrate that the Trump administration has a direct and clear influence on what officially gets declared as independent intelligence analysis, and that his administration's intelligence assessments should be read in careful comparison against previous issues, even as these may not have been free from political interference either.

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