The recently appointed US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and other top intelligence officials appeared before the Senate intelligence committee to discuss the US intelligence services’ annual threat assessment (ATA).
Most of the committee’s time and attention was focused on the revelation by the editor of the Atlantic magazine that he had been inadvertently added to an insecure chat group, in which top security officials discussed detailed plans for an attack on Yemen. Gabbard and her colleagues steadfastly refused to admit that this had been a security breach. It was an unhelpful distraction from the main event, a discussion of the latest ATA report.
Produced annually, the ATA is a combined assessment by 18 US intelligence agencies, headed up by the Office for National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, of the major threats to national security in America. The 2025 version is the first of Donald Trump’s second term and reflects Trumpism’s major shift from America’s previous security priorities in three ways.
