Name: How Trump made it harder for the US to fight terrorism
Uploaded: 2017-05-19T10:46:24.000Z
Duration: 3 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When Hollywood does any kind of movie or TV show about counterterrorism, about spying,

they tend to have Jack Bauer doing something dramatic.

They have James Bond doing something dramatic.

They have Carrie Mathison doing something emotional and dramatic.

You said you had information about an attack.

But it’s, like, one person, in one dangerous place, doing one powerful thing.

And that’s not the way the world actually works.

In reality, the US relies on a web of intelligence-sharing agreements with other countries.

The best known is the Five Eyes agreement between the US, Canada, the United Kingdom,

But the US also gets intel from countries that are geographically closer to terrorism

Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates , Turkey, Israel,

These countries often have agents undercover inside groups like ISIS.

They get something valuable, they trust us with it.

That could be an intercept of a phone call, drone imagery showing somebody that one country

This was the case in 2010, when intelligence sharing between the US and six other countries

stopped an al-Qaeda plot to bomb two cargo planes en route to the US.

And what makes it all work, what kind of greases that relationship, is trust.

They believe that if they tell us a secret, that it’s safe.

One of the most important of these intelligence-sharing relationships is the one between the United

So, when the Israelis found out about a specific threat from ISIS, that they planned to use

laptops to bomb airplanes, The New York Times reports that the Israelis

shared that information with the US, with the understanding it would stay secret.

But the Washington Post reports that President Trump shared that information with the Russian

foreign minister during his visit to the US.

And in doing so, he seriously jeopardized that relationship with the Israelis.

To understand why, you have to back up a little bit and look at what Russia is doing in Syria.

President Trump has said Russia is a key ally in the fight against ISIS there.

Trump: I say it's better to get along with Russia than not.

And if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS, which is a major fight, and Islamic

terrorism all over the world — major fight —that's a good thing.

The problem is that, in Syria, Russia’s goal is not to fight ISIS.

Russia’s goal is to protect Bashar al-Assad.

Russia fights ISIS only insofar as it sees ISIS as a threat to Bashar A\\al-Assad.

And one of Russia’s main partners in this objective is Iran,

who the Israelis consider to be their greatest threat in the region.

of the hatred for the Jewish people and the

For months, Israeli spies have expressed this fear that any intelligence they shared with

the US could end up, via Russia, in the hands of the Iranians.

If they no longer trust the CIA, that means that the plot that might have otherwise been

stopped or disrupted potentially happens.

Because they don’t trust that if they tell it to us, that it won’t go to an enemy of

Now other allies may become wary of sharing intelligence with the US.

Without trust, these intelligence-sharing relationships break down.

And without these relationships, it’s harder for US intelligence officials to do the very

thing Trump says he wants to accomplish: defeat ISIS and disrupt terror plots.