Europe needs to embrace the incoming Trump administration’s priorities if it wants to strengthen transatlantic relationships.

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office has spurred a barrage of panicky essays about the future of European security. Alongside critiques of NATO members’ inadequate defense spending and promises of a swift end to the war in Ukraine, the new administration has signaled it will shift priority to the Indo-Pacific.
The White House looks set to marry economic and trade concerns with the security threat posed by China. If Europe wishes to secure strong relations with Washington — a key aim for the continent during the past eight decades — it will have to offer something in return. In a more transactional transatlantic relationship, what can Europe offer to demonstrate it is not merely a security taker but also a giver?
Intelligence could be a good area. European intelligence services need to go on the offensive against Russian and Sino-Russian strategic cooperation. They should also invest more in covert activity.
A model for a European intelligence concept might be Five Eyes, the Anglophonic alliance of the US plus the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand formed in World War II and bound by a strong trust between the US and the former British Empire, reinforced by its signals intelligence (SIGINT) and cryptological focus. Interestingly, a former head of MI6 said recently that intelligence cooperation between the US and the UK had been unaffected during Trump’s first presidency from 2016 to 2020. It’s clear that both sides see the benefits of working together.
European intelligence agencies are not in a position to exactly replicate the sheer mass and reach of Five Eyes. But they have significant capabilities for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and other technological collection efforts, and these would be the primary beneficiaries of such an alliance, with European capitals investing in programs and working with trusted allied agencies and their appropriate cleared employees.

Photo: From left to right, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess, Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault, FBI Director Christopher Wray, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Director-General of Security and Chief Executive Andrew Hampton, and MI5 Director General Ken McCallum pose for a group photo during the Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Summit in Palo Alto, California, on October 16, 2023. Credit: FBI
Vetting is crucial to any intelligence project, especially a joint program with genuinely valuable material. A pan-European project would attract close interest from Russian, Chinese, and other spies. The best and first solution to this is always prudence over who receives access, its handling, and its use. The process of protecting sources and methods is as old as espionage itself, although European agencies have not always been good at this.
An immediate effect of a closer integration would also be the design of new collection methods. Agencies and cleared defense contractors working together in Europe — and across the Atlantic — could better develop their requirements and debug faulty programs and devices.
However, the collection is only part of intelligence operations. A wide-ranging and diverse effort of all-source intelligence analysis would provide a constant stream for policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing on the full range of expertise across the region.
Some European agencies have skilled staff able to contribute, and some have exceptional though little-known abilities (look at Ukraine for an example of agencies doing real harm to the much bigger Russian state.)
This is especially true of countries bordering Russia, who have taken to heart the old injunction of knowing the enemy. The Baltic states have long been acknowledged as leaders in cyberspace, for example, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has introduced many to the expertise of Estonian military intelligence analysis, which could be applied to evaluating military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.
European intelligence agencies should broaden their scope to tackle the Sino-Russian partnership and China’s infiltration into both Europe and the continent’s interests abroad.
Foreign relations experts have reached no consensus on how to define the relationship between Beijing and Moscow. Some, like Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, have confidently labeled it the “axis of authoritarians.” Others are more reluctant to embrace a comparison to the 1940 Tripartite Treaty between Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Eugene Rumer of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace views ties between the two countries as a “pragmatic, transactional relationship with strategic consequences for both sides, but one that is motivated by complementary rather than identical interests.”
Both thinkers come from the US intelligence community — DeTrani was the CIA’s Director of Operations for East Asia, and Rumer was a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia on the National Intelligence Council from 2010 to 2014.
It is absolutely critical that allied intelligence communities understand this Russo-Chinese relationship. They need to gather, share, and analyze strategic intelligence on the Beijing-Moscow connection to comprehend these revanchist actors, their plans, what they think about their adversaries, and what they think about each other.
That will require penetration of their political, diplomatic, and military bureaucracies. It should be added that this doesn’t have to mean intelligence operations inside these countries, which are police states. It could mean work at home, where Russia and China run large espionage operations, or simply by hacking into their computer and data systems, Something Beijing’s spies already do to the West at an extraordinary scale.)
Greater integration between Western agencies will also help counter Chinese and Russian intelligence and covert operations. The sabotage campaign against Europe is becoming a coalition affair, as highlighted by evidence that a Chinese-flagged ship sailing to Russia intentionally severed undersea communication cables in the Baltic Sea in November, mirroring a similar attack last year.
European intelligence services shouldn’t just focus on countering Sino-Russian sabotage efforts or strategic competition but partner with prosecutors to crush campaigns to infiltrate and manipulate European affairs.
The judicial effort against Chinese spies in Europe has received attention in the last year, with the arrest of what may have been components of a PRC spy ring across the continent in April. The UK’s famed counter-intelligence service, MI5, also hasn’t minced words about the Russian threat, saying Russian agents are seeking to cause “mayhem” in Europe.
More and better should be the watchwords of allied intelligence services. Every country likes to keep a tight lid on what it discovers, but in this new age, sharing will be everything.
By Michael C. DiCianna. Michael C. DiCianna is a research fellow at the Center for Intermarium Studies at the Institute of World Politics and a research assistant at the Yorktown Institute. He has been a research consultant in the US intelligence community for several years, focusing on military affairs in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. He is a Master of Arts Candidate at the Institute for World Politics. Article and pictures first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.