Published Elsewhere
Below is a selection of my most recent articles, op-eds, and interviews published outside The Safehouse Briefing.
For a complete archive, visit my LinkedIn profile, where you can find every piece I’ve written for external outlets.
Click any title below to read the piece at its original source.
Published on June 5, 2026
Trump’s counterterrorism strategy turns toward the culture war
The Trump administration’s new counterterrorism strategy shows how quickly a security framework can be pulled toward the culture war. The danger is not that Washington is naming threats that do not exist. Rather, ideology, identity, and cultural suspicion are being treated as warning signs before evidence of movement toward violence is established. Counterterrorism works when it is precise. When it becomes a tool for sorting political and cultural enemies, it becomes less credible, less effective, and less able to see the threats that matter.
Published on June 3, 2026
The Acting DNI and the Intelligence Office Trump Wants
Editor’s note: This piece was a cross-post of my new article for Just Security. I posted it on the Friday “Signals to Watch” newsletter on 5 June 2026, with added context on developments for which one should be alert.
Published on May 21, 2026
Leadership decapitation has long appealed to policymakers because it offers something strategy often does not: a visible result.
A senior leader is removed. A government claims momentum. The public sees action. But the harder question is whether the strike changes the political trajectory of the conflict.
This article in The Conversation uses recent developments in Iran to revisit the academic literature on leadership decapitation — the targeted killing or removal of senior leaders — as a tool of statecraft. The evidence suggests a narrower conclusion than political leaders often imply: decapitation can disrupt, degrade, and impose costs, but it rarely produces strategic transformation.
Published on April 9, 2026
Iran war redefined America’s alliances. Allies won’t wait out U.S. volatility.
The Iran war showed that U.S. alliances still run on dependence, but no longer on shared expectations about how American power will be used. Allies are not questioning whether Washington can act. They are questioning what aligning with it will require, how those terms might shift mid-crisis, and whether participation comes with costs beyond the conflict at hand. The United States can still call—but its partners are no longer sure what answering commits them to.
Published on February 5, 2026
National-security professionals recognize this problem immediately: when leaders apply the label “domestic terrorism” before investigators can establish intent and context.
In the Minneapolis cases, senior officials publicly described Renée Good and Alex Pretti—both killed during federal immigration enforcement—as “domestic terrorists” in the first news cycle. The article explains why that sequencing matters: once a label hardens, institutions can feel pressure to validate it, and the public learns to treat “terrorism” as messaging rather than diagnosis.
At bottom, this is about credibility. “Domestic terrorism” is a serious designation tied to coercive intent. If officials have evidence of that intent, they should say so and show what can responsibly be shown. If they don’t, they should describe what happened in ordinary investigative terms until the facts mature.
Published on December 25, 2025
How Trump’s ‘America First’ national security strategy frames China threat
The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy treats the Indo-Pacific like a box it can check with big declarations and a weapons shopping list. The document says the right words about Taiwan and China. The problem is that the administration’s behavior—and the NSS’s own internal emphasis—telegraphs something else, but Beijing isn’t waiting for Washington to prove it means what it writes.
Published on October 14, 2025
Weaponizing the Espionage Act: What It Means for Whistleblowers, Reporters, and Democracy
Editor’s note: Today’s Safehouse Briefing is a cross-post of my new article for Just Security on the quiet ways Europe is recalibrating its intelligence relationship with Washington. The piece starts with the legal fallout from the Trump administration’s “narco-terrorist” boat strikes, then pulls back to look at a larger shift: European services are not walking away from U.S. intelligence, but they are building more of their own insulation and leverage than before.
European governments are tightening legal valves on intelligence tied to the boat strikes—not to sever ties, but to avoid being dragged into contested uses of force.
Brussels is moving to create a more coherent EU-level intelligence baseline, so that Europe has something to fall back on if U.S. policy turns erratic.
Key capitals are experimenting with “managed reliance”: keeping U.S. access, but making sure it no longer fully determines their picture of Russia, China, or regional crises.
Taken together, these are early moves in risk management, not a break—but they point toward a future where U.S. reliability is treated as a variable, not a constant.
Published on October 17, 2025
Trump’s foreign policy is proving to be unpredictable, muddled and dangerous
Unlike Richard Nixon’s calculated “madman” strategy, Trump’s foreign policy is not a deliberate show of unpredictability but a persistent condition of incoherence. Allies and adversaries are whipsawed by shifting signals on NATO, Ukraine, China, and ceasefires, making long-term planning impossible and encouraging Moscow and Beijing to wait out the churn. At home, this volatility erodes institutional steadiness and democratic oversight, turning what some defend as “flexibility” into a structural vulnerability for U.S. strategy.
Published on October 14, 2025
The Quiet Rebalance in Transatlantic Intelligence
European intelligence services are adjusting to U.S. volatility, but not breaking from Washington. The article examines how narrow legal limits on sharing intelligence related to Trump’s “narco-terrorist” boat strikes have prompted quiet institutional reflection in Brussels, not a wholesale realignment. EU efforts to build limited fusion capabilities and coordination frameworks reflect a search for resilience rather than independence. The piece argues that while selective pullbacks suggest prudence, they stop well short of a structural hedge against the United States. The more likely trajectory is a managed adaptation—one that treats U.S. reliability as a variable to be watched, not a premise to be abandoned.
Published on September 16, 2025
Charlie Kirk killing shows once again that U.S. faces a radicalization crisis
President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is not Richard Nixon’s scripted “madman” gambit but a pattern of incoherence—conflicting signals on NATO, China tariffs, and Ukraine that shift by the week. The whiplash undermines allied planning, erodes oversight at home, and invites adversaries like Putin and Xi to wait out U.S. positions. Volatility here is not deterrence; it’s a condition that weakens strategy..
Published on August 27, 2025
Federal hiring diversity pushback ignores that outsiders help protect America
Drawing on lessons from the CIA and the example of Dame Stella Rimington, the first woman to lead MI5, I explain how broadening the range of experiences and perspectives in leadership improves accuracy, strengthens resilience, and helps institutions see threats others overlook. Homogeneous teams may feel cohesive, but they miss blind spots. Heterogeneous teams — shaped by people once seen as outsiders — are better equipped to manage surprise and ambiguity.
Published on July 28, 2025
The Real National Security Betrayal Isn’t Who Leaves—It’s What Gets Dismantled
The Trump administration’s mass purges of national security and foreign policy professionals are eroding both operational capacity and the counterintelligence systems designed to detect insider threats. The piece challenges the “numbers game” narrative that mass firings make betrayal statistically inevitable, emphasizing that espionage risk arises from motive and tradecraft rather than headcount. The greater danger lies in the dismantling of layered safeguards—continuous vetting, exit protocols, and oversight—that once kept betrayal rare, leaving the United States strategically exposed.
Published on July 26, 2025
Tulsi Gabbard abandoned intelligence standards with Obama ‘treason’ allegation
ICD 203, the U.S. intelligence community’s core tradecraft standard, was designed to ensure objectivity, transparency, and acknowledgment of uncertainty in analytic judgments—a discipline born from the Iraq WMD failure. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s recent claims of a “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump disregarded those principles, presenting a partisan House report as definitive while omitting alternative explanations, misrepresenting sources, and politicizing intelligence in ways the directive was created to prevent.
Published on June 30, 2025
What Counts as a Win?: Battle Damage Assessments and Public Messaging
Following the June 22 U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the Trump administration declared the operation a decisive success, even as a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment—issued with low confidence and not coordinated across the intelligence community—indicated Iran’s most fortified facilities remained intact. The episode underscores a long-standing tension between the political impulse to claim quick victories and the intelligence community’s slower, more cautious battle damage assessments, where early certainty risks eroding analytic rigor and public trust.
Published on June 13, 2025
The Israeli Strike on Iran the U.S. Saw Coming, but Couldn’t Stop
Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure marks the first major geopolitical escalation of Trump’s second term, upending nuclear talks and exposing gaps in both Iranian and U.S. planning. While Tehran’s miscalculation left key sites vulnerable, Washington’s response showed improvisation rather than coordinated strategy, raising questions about whether the Intelligence Community’s politicized leadership will deliver objective analysis in shaping the U.S. role. The attack also risks triggering proxy retaliation—particularly from the Houthis in Yemen—threatening to unravel a fragile ceasefire and widen the conflict into a broader regional war.
Published on June 12, 2025
When Intelligence Stops Bounding Uncertainty: The Dangerous Tilt Toward Politicization under Trump
Early actions by DNI Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in Trump’s second term—mass firings, structural reorganizations, the addition of political review layers, and punitive measures against dissenting analysts—signal a shift from analytic independence toward political reinforcement. While presented as reforms to restore objectivity, these measures risk embedding a doctrine in which intelligence validates presidential preferences rather than bounds uncertainty, eroding the tradecraft protections of ICD 203. If sustained, this transformation will degrade intelligence utility from within, making future failures less accidental and more the result of deliberate politicization.
Published on April 10, 2025
When the world cries for help, America shrugs
The Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID’s disaster response capacity has left the United States absent from global crises, eroding soft power built through decades of rapid humanitarian deployment. Myanmar’s recent earthquake response—led by China and India while the U.S. offered minimal aid—illustrates how deliberate policy choices have traded moral leadership and strategic goodwill for short-term cost-cutting. The author warns that this abdication not only cedes influence to rivals abroad but also foreshadows weakened disaster readiness at home.
Published on March 26, 2025
Intelligence Sharing Is a True Measure of U.S. Strategic Realignment with Russia
The clearest indicator of a U.S. strategic realignment toward Russia under Trump would be changes in intelligence-sharing practices rather than public statements about NATO or Article 5. While recent outreach by CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Russia’s foreign intelligence chief and omissions of Moscow from U.S. threat lists suggest a shift, the decisive sign would be the institutionalization of structured intelligence exchanges—especially adjustments to “Releasable To” classifications, expanded analytic cooperation, or coordinated collection. Such moves would represent a rupture in longstanding doctrine, reshape alliances, and, once embedded in policy and practice, could prove difficult for future administrations to reverse.
Published on February 28, 2025
The President’s Declassification Power is a Double-Edged Sword
The president’s virtually unchecked authority to declassify information—illustrated by Trump’s recent sweeping release of JFK, RFK, and MLK records—poses significant risks when used for political or personal advantage. Without statutory guardrails, declassification can be weaponized to mislead the public, damage reputations, undermine intelligence sources and methods, and erode trust in institutions, all while adversaries exploit partial disclosures. If normalized, such selective exploitation could entrench politicized use of sensitive information across administrations, weakening U.S. security and alliances.
Published on February 6, 2025
Trump’s misguided CIA overhaul puts national security at risk
CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s “deferred resignation” scheme—paying employees to quit—will drive out top performers while leaving underperformers, draining talent and institutional memory vital to mission continuity. Coupled with risky personnel moves like sharing a list of probationary employees with the White House and potential hiring freezes, the policy jeopardizes counterintelligence, morale, and readiness—creating exploitable gaps for adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran. Effective reform, it contends, requires targeted performance management, not blunt workforce purges.
Published on January 24, 2025
Trump’s shortcutting of security vetting endangers national safety
President Trump’s order granting interim TS/SCI access to Executive Office appointees without full vetting, along with his mass revocation of former officials’ clearances, politicizes a process designed to safeguard national security. Such shortcuts bypass critical scrutiny meant to prevent insider threats, undermine nonpartisan trust in the clearance system, and create vulnerabilities adversaries can exploit. The author argues that clearance delays should be addressed through funding and staffing improvements, not by dismantling the protections that form a cornerstone of U.S. defense.