Other presidents distrusted their intelligence teams — often with dire results.
A Washington Post article Friday night reported that the U.S. intelligence community issued multiple classified warnings throughout January and February about the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus from China to other countries, the Chinese government’s initial efforts to play down the severity of the looming crisis and the increasing likelihood it would reach America’s shores. Throughout this time, President Trump continued to play down the threat in public.
Of course, there’s much we still don’t know. Nevertheless, Trump’s apparent decision to ignore his own intelligence experts’ warnings in the early stages of this crisis — to say nothing of the warnings from other experts and organizations — has important implications for how we think about the relationship between policymaking and intelligence broadly, and with respect to public health in particular.
A top priority of the U.S. intelligence community is to alert policymakers to dangerous events before they happen so they can respond accordingly. Sometimes this process breaks down. Roberta Wohlstetter’s classic analysis of Pearl Harbor offers one of the most tragic examples of an intelligence failure. Robert Jervis’s analysis of the failure to predict the fall of the Shah just before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 provides another.
That doesn’t seem to be the case here — the intelligence community apparently provided repeated warnings early on about the threat that covid-19 posed to the United States. To be sure, some have pointed out that “the intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores.” Such uncertainty may well have contributed somewhat to delays in formulating a meaningful U.S. response.