Writing for Just Security in November, Michael Schmitt, Marko Milanovic, and Ryan Goodman set out the legal risks for U.S. allies that continue to provide intelligence related to the alleged “narco-terrorists” whose vessels the Trump administration says it is striking in the Caribbean and Pacific. The authors explained why narrowing particular streams of intelligence by some U.S. allies “was a sensible decision from the perspective of international law,” and warned that continuing to share information that facilitates the strikes could itself amount to an unlawful act.
As those legal risks were being debated, new reporting described European leaders giving fresh political backing to a different kind of intelligence adjustment: the European Commission’s effort to strengthen its internal fusion capacity, building on years of work to make better use of information already held by member states and EU institutions. The Venezuela-related carve-outs did not create that initiative, and the Commission’s plans long predate the U.S. boat strikes. But both raise a larger question: are European partners just managing discrete problems, or are they beginning to hedge more systematically against U.S. volatility in the intelligence domain?
Isolated decisions to limit intelligence sharing would matter under any administration. They may carry a greater weight, however, in the current U.S. political context. A second Trump term introduced a variable absent under previous presidents: a U.S. leader more inclined to view alliances as short-term transactions and who openly uses intelligence support as leverage over other countries. Against that backdrop, adjustments to intelligence sharing that might once have passed for routine housekeeping now take on sharper significance and risk hardening into more conditional, guarded cooperation.
This is not to suggest the transatlantic intelligence relationship is collapsing. No intelligence organization—on either side of the Atlantic—is likely to make a clean break with its closest partners. That would be operationally catastrophic and strategically pointless. The Five Eyes alliance—the intelligence-sharing arrangement between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—remains the most deeply institutionalized part of the Western alliance system. Meanwhile, European intelligence services still depend heavily on U.S. technical and collection capacity. But actions across both Trump administrations have left partners wary enough to start treating U.S. reliability as something to be managed, not assumed.
In March, I argued that the clearest indicator of any U.S. strategic realignment toward Russia would show up in Washington’s adjustments to intelligence flows rather than threats to Article 5 or summit theatrics: who is written into “REL TO” dissemination markings—the list of foreign partners allowed to see a given product—and whose access is quietly thinned, and whether ad hoc contacts with Moscow become routine exchanges. That remains a “canary in the coal mine” for a deliberate tilt toward Moscow, and there is still no evidence of that threshold being crossed.
What has changed since the spring is not a single decisive move, but the accumulation of background noise. The mix of signals that worried European officials then—CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s outreach to Moscow, pauses and threats in support to Kyiv, public disparagement of NATO allies—has been joined by fresh episodes: a White House “peace plan” for Ukraine drafted largely over European heads; an ever-shifting “war on narco-terrorists” that casts Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro as a drug kingpin even as Trump pardons former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted cocaine trafficker serving a 45-year sentence; and a Pentagon inspector general report on “Signalgate” detailing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of a personal Signal chat to share Yemen strike plans in violation of Pentagon policy and with acknowledged risk to troops. The administration’s newly released National Security Strategy, which elevates the Western Hemisphere and treats Europe more as a secondary theater expected to shoulder more of its own risk, points in the same direction.
Each can be debated on its own terms. Taken together, they deepen an existing unease about Washington’s steadiness as a security partner without yet amounting to a clear break.
How Intelligence Officers Think About Limits on Sharing
Public debate tends to treat “intelligence sharing” as an on/off switch. For practitioners inside CIA and NSA, and their counterparts across Europe, it looks more like overlapping networks of pipes and valves. Some of those networks are formal: Five Eyes, NATO structures, and liaison officers embedded in U.S. combatant commands and European headquarters. Other networks are quieter bilateral or trilateral channels that have matured over decades: analyst to analyst on secure systems, Station chiefs to counterparts, desk officer to long-standing liaison contact. Unless a sharing arrangement is revoked, information keeps moving through these less formal conduits.
From the intelligence officer’s perspective, limits inside this architecture are routine, not alarming. Intelligence is born with markings that specify who may see it and under which national “flags.” Those caveats are meant to protect sensitive sources and methods. The Five Eyes partnership enjoys the broadest and most automatic access. But the same mechanisms used to manage that cooperation—originator control rules, “no foreign” restrictions, topic-specific exclusions—are applied every day in U.S.–European and intra-European exchanges.
The historical logic of this system remains straightforward. No single service can collect everything. The United States relies on partners with better access in particular regions, communities, and problem sets. Those partners rely on U.S. reach, technical mass, and global analytic capacity. Foreign intelligence liaison, as Jennifer Sims has put it, is a form of subcontracted collection based on barter: States enter these arrangements to expand access, lower costs and risks, and speed information to decisionmakers. When partners worry intelligence will be misused, they don’t dismantle entire frameworks. Instead, they rely on the familiar tools—tighter caveats, narrowed subject-matter, additional conditions—to make some flows slower and more contingent.
Seen through that lens, the United Kingdom’s reported decision to narrow what it shares on suspected drug-trafficking vessels is not a sign that British and U.S. intelligence agencies have stopped talking to one another, nor that Five Eyes is coming apart. It is a partner fencing-off a specific operational line within a larger relationship. London has not publicly implied that it has stopped intelligence sharing on maritime issues in general with Washington.
The transatlantic intelligence-sharing system rests on three assumptions. First, that partners broadly agree on who the main adversaries and problems are, and what kinds of attacks or crises matter most, even if they rank those threats differently. Second, that their legal frameworks and targeting practices are close enough that shared intelligence will not routinely drag one service into another’s gray zones. Third, that all sides can trust each other’s internal controls: vetting, auditing, and resistance to politicization. When any one of those assumptions is strained—because definitions of terrorism expand, because the boundary between law enforcement and military action blurs, or because domestic politics call institutional neutrality into question—intelligence and policy senior officials on one end of the network start reaching for those “valves.”
All three assumptions face periodic tension, but the Trump administration has put unusual and sustained stress on the third. For European services, the concern is not one scandal in isolation but the pattern developed over two Trump terms. They have not forgotten the first term’s controversies over handling classified information, including the 2017 Oval Office meeting in which highly sensitive counterterrorism intelligence was disclosed to Russian officials, alarming the Middle Eastern partner that had provided it, or the subsequent criminal case over classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, with photographs in the 2023 indictment showing boxes of national defense information stacked in a ballroom and even a bathroom. Allies know those episodes do not reflect everyday tradecraft, but they still raise doubts about discipline at the top.
In European capitals these episodes are part of the story services must tell their own oversight bodies when they are asked whether U.S. national security agencies still merit the deference they have long received—especially in a climate where recent polling shows most Europeans now see the United States less as a trusted ally than as a “necessary partner.”
Such Caution Has a History
Friction in intelligence relations is common. In the post-9/11 period, European services repeatedly tightened or recalibrated cooperation with Washington over Iraq, renditions, drone strikes, surveillance programs, and privacy law. Each time adjustments were made cooperation continued.
Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, European courts and parliaments pushed back against CIA rendition and secret detention programs, and later against lethal drone strikes in places such as Pakistan and Yemen. Council of Europe inquiries, national investigations, and litigation in the United Kingdom, Italy, and elsewhere forced governments to account for their role in U.S.-led operations. The result was familiar: liaison relationships survived, but partners added caveats and narrowed categories of cooperation that made some forms of sharing slower and more conditional.
After the disclosures of Edward Snowden revealed that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had assisted the NSA in monitoring European officials, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Berlin temporarily halted certain NSA-tasked internet surveillance while parliamentary and legal reviews ran their course. Cooperation resumed, but not on the old terms. German oversight bodies demanded clearer limits and more formal tasking. Both sides accepted tighter auditing and documentation of what could be collected, on whom, and under which authorities.
In parallel, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has repeatedly narrowed the legal space for bulk data retention and for transatlantic transfers exposed to expansive U.S. surveillance powers. Judgments striking down indiscriminate metadata regimes, together with rulings that forced the EU to adopt more stringent conditions and safeguards for data transfers to the United States, did not target intelligence liaison directly. But their message was unambiguous: legal exposure does not disappear because information comes from a trusted ally. Governments are expected to interrogate how foreign-sourced data is obtained and used, and to ensure that cooperation with U.S. agencies does not sidestep domestic and EU-level protections.
These episodes reflect a caution among European partners that predates Trump. Services and courts have learned to live with friction by using the same instruments now visible in the Caribbean case. What is different now is that familiar friction is operating against unusually visible doubts about the steadiness of U.S. leadership. Unlike in the past, that unease is showing up not only in case-by-case caveats, but also in quiet efforts to give Europe more internal resilience within an alliance system it still relies on.
A Slow-Building European Baseline
That search for a more autonomous baseline is now taking institutional form in Brussels. The Commission is moving ahead with plans to build an intelligence “cell” in the Commission’s Secretariat-General. The initiative is designed to fuse information already held by member-state services, EU institutions, and open sources, and to improve how Brussels uses information it already receives. The timing invites an easy narrative of cause and effect that the facts do not support. Whereas the carve-outs over maritime strikes are a narrow legal hedge, the push for a more integrated intelligence network has grown in the face of sustained Russian aggression and spreading instability in the Middle East and Africa. These developments intersect in their logic, not their origin: both reflect a quiet effort to make sure Europe is less exposed when U.S. choices become harder to predict.
Calls among EU nations for a more integrated intelligence network have been ongoing but have intensified over the last year. In November 2024, Sauli Niinistö, the former Finnish president and now a special adviser to the European Commission, delivered a mandated report that recommended strengthening the EU’s Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity—the combined civilian Intelligence Analysis and Situation Centre (INTCEN) and the EU Military Staff’s intelligence directorate that serves as the EU’s main hub for strategic warning and situational awareness—and, over time, developing it into a “fully fledged intelligence cooperation service” for EU institutions and member states. The aim, Niinistö stressed, was not to create a European CIA, but to give EU leaders a clearer, timelier understanding of threats based on intelligence that capitals already hold.
Officials in the European External Action Service—the diplomatic service in charge of executing the EU’s international relations—worry about duplication with INTCEN, and several capitals remain wary of giving Brussels a larger formal role in handling their reporting. But the political intent is clear enough: the Commission wants a more direct hand in how information already inside the EU system is fused and fed into decision-making, so that leaders in Brussels are not reliant on occasional national briefings or U.S. readouts to understand their own security environment.
The instinct behind this effort—to have a European baseline that does not rise or fall with U.S. domestic politics—did not begin with Trump. His presidency has, however, turned a long-standing worry into a present problem. In Trump’s first term, European governments watched a U.S. president cast aside his own intelligence services when their findings were personally or politically inconvenient. He publicly discounted U.S. assessments of Russian election interference while standing beside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. And he brushed past the CIA’s judgment on Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi’s murder while deepening security and investment ties with Riyadh. In his second term, his administration paused battlefield intelligence support to Ukraine and delayed in arms transfers at politically sensitive moments to try to shape Kyiv’s negotiating posture.
European concerns are intensifying. Diplomats have reacted with open frustration to a Trump-backed “peace plan” for Ukraine negotiated largely over their heads. The plan would ask Kyiv to accept territorial losses and it contains clauses about “profit-sharing” from frozen Russian assets that many in Brussels regard as nakedly self-interested. The White House is once again pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to express public gratitude while hinting that future U.S. support will depend on Kyiv’s willingness to accept such unfair terms. For Europe, the message is not subtle: intelligence and military backing are bargaining chips, not joint commitments. For many European officials, the practical response is not to walk away from U.S. intelligence, but to make sure that when Washington swings, Europe has enough internal capacity to ride out the turbulence and repair the relationship later.
U.S. intelligence services are not blind to Europe’s anxieties. CIA Director Ratcliffe reportedly made a deliberately low-key stop in Brussels at the end of October, officially to brief the North Atlantic Council, but with a parallel set of meetings with EU High Representative Kaja Kallas and senior officials from INTCEN and the EU Military Staff. The subtext, as several European officials described it, was that European partners should distinguish between the volatility of the Trump White House and the steadier posture of U.S. intelligence agencies. That kind of reassurance mission would have been unnecessary a decade ago. It now takes place alongside accelerated intra-European cooperation, talk of “coalitions of the willing” to sustain support to Ukraine, and selective carve-outs such as the Venezuela issue.
Taken together, these steps are best understood as a layered insurance policy: modest institutional reforms in Brussels, pragmatic efforts to keep cooperation intact through a turbulent American presidency, and a recognition that Europe cannot afford to be wholly dependent on the reliability of any one administration in Washington. The open question is whether this remains a bounded adjustment—an extra set of valves around a still-shared system—or is it the first stage of a more lasting shift in how defaults on both sides of the Atlantic are set? That uncertainty is the backdrop for asking, in concrete terms, what a more serious hardening of European caution would look like in practice.
What Deeper Hedging Would Look Like
A deeper European hedge against dependence on U.S. intelligence would show up less as a formal rupture than as a reset in default settings—from “share unless there is a clear reason not to” to “hold back unless we are sure this will not create legal or political exposure.” That kind of reset would show up in the structure of cooperation itself: how categories of activity are defined, which channels remain open by default, and which are treated as exceptional.
One visible sign that caution has crossed into something more serious would be the spread from a handful of tightly defined exclusions to a walling off of broader categories of cooperation. Each carve-out could still be justified on its own terms—domestic legal constraints, parliamentary pressure, proportionality concerns—but the accumulation would matter. It would mark a move away from treating differences between U.S. and European targeting practices as manageable friction and toward assuming that those gaps are large enough to warrant narrower, more qualified sharing as the default.
The clearest signal of a shift—and the most consequential—would occur below the surface: administrative rather than declaratory. Services can tighten their control over who else gets to see and reuse the material they collect, adjust dissemination markings, and require additional legal sign-off before certain products are shared or used operationally. Analysts can be told, formally or informally, to privilege national or commercial collection when building key assessments and to treat U.S. reporting more to fill gaps than as the backbone of their picture—a significant change for services that still depend on U.S. reach and persistence they cannot easily replicate. Liaison embeds can be reduced by a few billets at a time, or their access to particular databases and working groups trimmed back. Over time, those choices add up to a different pattern of who sees which products, on what issues, and with how much delay.
Those disruptions would be asymmetrical. European States would gain resilience and political room to maneuver, but they would also assume more of the burden of fusing and defending their own intelligence in contentious cases. The United States would retain unmatched technical capacity, yet find that some of the most valuable “crown jewel” access held by European partners is only available later, on narrower terms, or not at all. The alliance would still function, but with less of the easy presumption that information will move quickly and fully across the Atlantic just because it always has.
A System Under Strain, Not in Free Fall
However the Venezuela episode is resolved, the more important shift is in the default settings of the U.S.-Europe security relationship, not in any single carve-out. European services are not weighing whether to walk away from U.S. intelligence; they are working out how much exposure to U.S. swings their own law, politics, and publics will tolerate, and building a little more slack in the system. The risk for Washington is the opposite: that these adjustments are treated as background noise rather than as feedback about how allies now think about American reliability.
As of today, liaison channels remain open, Five Eyes still sits at the core of Western cooperation, and European governments continue to rely on U.S. reach in ways they cannot quickly replace. The risk at this stage is not collapse; it is normalization of a more conditional, more guarded partnership.
That is one reason the day-to-day relationships between analysts and operators are likely to endure even through a turbulent presidency. Joint targeting cells, embedded liaison officers, and long-standing case-specific channels are built on habits of cooperation and professional trust that do not vanish with an election. The strain shows up first at the upper tiers: general counsel offices, directorates that set foreign-disclosure policy, and political appointees who decide how tightly to keep sensitive reporting inside national systems. That is where allied services are now recalibrating.
The United States’ intelligence advantage has never been only about its own collection; it has rested on partners’ willingness to route their best reporting through American systems and to take U.S. assessments as a starting point for discussion. If those habits weaken—even without a single embassy protest or formal suspension—the United States will feel it at the margins: fewer early warnings from European coverage, more delays, more caveats at exactly the moments when speed and confidence matter most.
The system can absorb strain. Five Eyes and related networks were built to survive political swings and policy disputes, and they have done so before. What would be harder to manage is a gradual thickening of legal and political hedges that makes “hold back unless we are sure” feel like the safer default. That tendency did not begin with Trump, but his second term is giving it new tests and, at times, sharper visibility.
For Europe, the path forward involves building more tools to compare notes internally and more confidence in its own legal and analytic judgments, while keeping U.S. access where it remains clearly in their interest. For the United States, the choice is more practical than dramatic. It can treat episodes like the Venezuela carve-out as irritants to be pushed past, assuming that allies will always come back because they need American power. Or it can read them as reminders that even close partners will fence off parts of cooperation when domestic law, politics, or public opinion demand it.
If that pattern widens, the consequences are likely to be incremental rather than spectacular: more issues where European services decide to keep certain streams narrower, more moments when Washington learns that some of what it once saw automatically now arrives later, with more conditions attached, or not at all. That is still a system under strain, not in free fall—but it is one in which the United States should no longer assume that what reaches its inbox is the whole of what its allies know.
