Editor’s Note: Samantha Vinograd is a CNN national security analyst. She is a senior adviser at the University of Delaware’s Biden Institute, which is not affiliated with the Biden campaign. Vinograd served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council from 2009 to 2013 and at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush. Follow her @sam_vinograd. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
As President Donald Trump and other government officials talk about the country’s road to recovery following Covid-19, they’re focused almost entirely on America’s health and economy. But there’s one recovery they seem to be largely ignoring – the national security one.
While the US government struggles to confront the pandemic and to protect its personnel on the front lines of that fight, there are countless of other threats – posed by Russia, China, North Korea and others – which require time and attention.
Unfortunately, because of necessary measures taken to respond to Covid-19, they may not be getting the full attention they deserve. It is incumbent on Trump that he acknowledges the impact of the virus on our national security apparatus and then develops and implements a strategy to make up for any lost time.
Limits to the national security apparatus
Responding to the catastrophic impact of coronavirus requires a coordinated response at both the global and local levels. Thus far, we’ve seen world leaders like UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, French President Emmanuel Macron and others call for a global ceasefire, so that resources can instead be devoted to saving lives. As Guterres phrased it, “There should be only one fight in our world today, our shared battle against Covid-19.”
Meanwhile, governments, including our own, are attempting to prioritize and coordinate financial and physical resources to respond to the virus. The State Department has assigned personnel to a coronavirus task force to repatriate thousands of Americans from overseas, while the Defense Department has deployed military personnel to some of the hardest hit spots in the US to assist in response efforts.
Our intelligence community is working to identify the source of the virus, and the Justice Department has staff taking the lead in protecting citizens from several virus-related email and advertising scams.
Concurrently, the Trump administration has adopted urgent and necessary measures to protect its personnel. The military has stopped training some new recruits, counterterrorism missions have been drawn back, and the Pentagon has frozen troop movements through at least mid-May.
The State Department has similarly restricted travel, evacuated staff from posts, including in Wuhan, China, and closed our consulates in Wuhan and Vladivostok, Russia. The Office of Personnel Management has issued guidance on teleworking for US government personnel. And staff at key national security locations, like the Pentagon, are working on rotating schedules.
Restricting the number of people who physically show up to work reduces health risks, but it also means that personnel have more limited access to classified information because, for the most part, they can’t receive classified content at home. This means they can’t access a lot of sensitive intelligence on threat streams.
In short, the ability of US personnel to perform their day jobs and the US government to design, implement, and monitor critical national security missions has been greatly reduced.
Our enemies see opportunity
Given the health and safety risk posed by the virus, many of these personnel decisions are understandable. The problem is that there is no pause button on the national security threats we face. North Korea has not stopped testing short-range missiles or carrying out cyberattacks. Countries like Russia and China haven’t stopped their destabilizing information warfare campaigns, and Iran hasn’t stopped its menacing activities, including harassing our ships in international waters.
In fact, many of our enemies will probably try to take advantage of this period to advance their missions against us – and we’ve given them the means to do it.
For starters, the US response to Covid-19 has given the world several insights into US dysfunction and vulnerabilities, including holes in our supply chains – insights that would normally have taken months for foreign intelligence services to gather.
And President Donald Trump’s press conferences have given our enemies daily notes on his trigger points. His biggest one lately seems to be the issue of responsibility in the early days of the pandemic. Despite ample reporting on his team’s early failures to ramp up testing and his initial refusal to issue social distancing guidelines, Trump continues to absolve himself of any wrongdoing.
If our enemies are paying attention, they can use this example to manipulate and distract Trump. If they question his competence during Covid-19, they will infuriate him, but if they blame governors, the media or even former President Barack Obama (as Trump is prone to do), they may find a friend in the US President.
In addition, his “briefings,” which can often clock in at more than an hour, provide Russian President Vladimir Putin content that his Russian bots and trolls can use to spread division, panic and misinformation. Putin has historically promoted the spread of health misinformation to create confusion, and Trump’s claims about an anti-malaria treatment, which has not been clinically proven to be effective on Covid-19 patients, is one example of a half-baked argument that Putin can exploit.
For countries like Russia intent on painting a picture of the US as a weakening power, our inability to prevent the loss of thousands of American lives only strengthens their argument that our time has come – and gone.
Self-inflicted wounds by Trump himself are an added pain point. The decision to suspend US funding to the World Health Organization this week only diminishes the narrative that the US is a leader on global health issues. While WHO reform is an important project, nothing should be more important than saving lives right now, and freezing funding endangers WHO programs on health issues other than Covid-19, including efforts to mitigate polio, Ebola, HIV/AIDS and more.
In short, Trump’s decision may cost lives, as the WHO tries to make up for the sudden shortfall. And it definitely undercuts the image of the United States as both a reliable partner and humanitarian champion at a time when vulnerable populations are also reeling.
This image problem only advantages China. As part of its coronavirus disinformation operations, China is perversely trying to paint itself as a global health leader, despite the fact that it likely contributed to the spread of the virus by not revealing the scope of the threat as soon as they became aware of it. (China, of course, denies withholding such information.) But while the US is cutting and running from the WHO and its critical work, China is staying engaged and sending medical supplies around the world, including to the US.
Honesty really is the best policy
Recovering from Covid-19 will require a leader acknowledging all of the gaps in our national security work during this period of time – along with the failures that allowed the pandemic to reach this point. Our success going forward depends on whether we have a president who will honestly assess – and then move to address – what’s needed to recover from the coronavirus, not just in terms of health and the economy, but also in terms of national security.
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Whether that happens depends on the outcome of November 3: Election Day. Given Trump’s track record of cherry-picking intelligence, he is likely to ignore assessments about new geopolitical realities, threat levels and US vulnerabilities – especially if he views them as a threat to his presidency. And if Trump is unwilling to be honest that US national security has deteriorated under his watch, it’s unlikely that he will take adequate steps to restore it.
You don’t need a security clearance to know that the post-Covid-19 landscape will be a heightened threat environment – with an increasingly empowered Russia and China. Now we just need leadership that acknowledges that and works to address it.
