Think Small: Why the Intelligence Community Should Do Less about New Threats

Alex Stark, Candace Rondeaux, and Heather Hulburt's report The Meaning of Security was cited in War on the Rocks.

A week into his administration, President Joe Biden announced that he was “putting the climate crisis at the center of United States foreign policy and national security,” and directed the intelligence community to draft a national intelligence estimate on the implications of climate change. In so doing, the president injected new urgency into an old question: What counts as a national security threat?

For intelligence agencies, the traditional answer has revolved around foreign military powers. The architects of the U.S. intelligence community designed a bureaucracy whose main focus was watching the Soviet Union, assessing its conventional and nuclear capabilities, and searching for signs of attack. After the Cold War its focus shifted to terrorism and support for military operations, as the United States undertook a series of humanitarian interventions and state-building campaigns.

Recent years have witnessed an even more profound change. A growing chorus of analysts argues that security is not primarily about guarding the nation from hostile states or great powers. War is in decline, they say, and acts of terrorism against Americans are rare. The real dangers are transnational threats like climate change and pandemics. Nothing has a more tangible effect on the safety and well-being of American citizens. The odds that any of us will be affected by war or terrorism are vanishingly small. The odds that all of us will suffer from transnational security threats are rising.