The Worldwide Threat Assessment: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
US intelligence analysts paint a stark picture of the threats confronting the country. They also suggest the uncertainties surrounding the future for Xi and Putin, and for the US world role.
The intelligence community’s annual worldwide threat assessment invariably provides a comprehensive view of the national security challenges facing the country. The 2024 edition, the coordinated product of 18 intelligence agencies delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee this month, is no exception.
The unclassified assessment doesn’t mince words. From intensifying competition among major powers to unpredictable transnational issues like migration and terrorism, and regional conflicts in Gaza, South Asia, and elsewhere, the analysis lays out not only the dangers posed by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but also the increasing fragility of the international economic and political order.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines acknowledged the uncertainties in her accompanying remarks to the senators. As she put it two weeks ago, “Instability is making it much more challenging for us to forecast developments and their implications.” What Haines didn’t say, given the boundary separating the work in her community’s foreign intelligence bailiwick from the job of its domestic counterparts, is that the unpredictability begins at home.
For nearly 20 years, intelligence officials have provided an unclassified perspective for Congress as well as the public, presenting their community’s top line judgments albeit without the secret details. Closed briefings for the oversight committees typically follow the public event, offering lawmakers the global assessment’s classified version and allowing them to probe the facts, sources, and methods behind the analysts’ work.
This year’s threat assessment paints a complicated as well as uncertain picture. Its nearly 40 pages lay out the capabilities of leading adversaries. They also point to the risks raised by the multiple conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East where, among others, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian meddling raises the danger that local mayhem could metastasize into wider wars.
For most Americans who have at best an incomplete grasp on the intelligence business, the threat assessment is a tutorial on the issues and their complexities that the spies and analysts must address. China and Russia are cases in point.
The 2024 assessment provides ample justification for China’s top billing as a rising threat—from Beijing’s expanding nuclear arsenal, cyber warfare, and espionage to its quest for world class conventional military power. But analyzing China’s capabilities is one thing, understanding its leaders’ intentions another. Haines made that difference clear in discussing President Xi Jinping’s contradictory goals and their consequences.
“President Xi’s emphasis on control and central oversight is unlikely to solve the challenges posed by China’s economy and endemic corruption, demographic decline, and structural economic constraints,” Haines said. “And over the coming year, tension between these challenges and China’s aspirations for greater geopolitical power will probably become all the more apparent.”
The DNI’s statement is noteworthy in several respects, not least in suggesting the analysts have questions about the vulnerabilities of Xi’s regime in the long as well as short run. Citing youth unemployment, Beijing’s limp effort to boost consumption, massive local debt, and a cratering property market, Haines herself offered a bearish view. Xi is “doubling down on a long-term growth strategy that will deepen public and investor pessimism over the near term,” she said, “all against the backdrop of an aging and shrinking population and slowing economic growth.”
As for Russia—batting second on the intelligence community’s roster of threats—the 2024 assessment clearly underscores Vladimir Putin’s dedication to achieving his goals in Ukraine. As in the past, the analysis lists the hardware and software comprising Russia’s threat, drawing the obvious conclusion. Its investment in strategic forces, new space- and sea-based weaponry, cyber, and malign influence operations points to Putin’s commitment to challenge the West across a broad front.
That said, like Xi’s case, the skepticism that Putin can achieve his ends with current means is hard to miss. As the analysts wrote, “(The) so-called special military operation against Ukraine has incurred major, lasting costs for Russia.” The DNI expanded on the judgment and its implications. “Moscow has suffered losses that will require years of rebuilding and leave it less capable of posing a conventional military threat to Europe and operating assertively in Eurasia and on the global stage.”
How important are the caveats, implicit and otherwise, in the intelligence community’s sobering portrait of the threats confronting the country? A cynic could dismiss them as word-noodling. After all, in the sausage-making when analysts from a dozen or more agencies coordinate a draft, the final text often reflects compromises on points of emphasis rather than major differences of view.
That’s true. But there’s reason to think twice about this year’s assessment and what it may imply. In Beijing and Moscow, where Xi’s authoritarianism and Putin’s invasion are taking their tolls respectively, this year’s analysis suggests another possible, if unwritten judgment: the fault lines in both regimes are growing, as will Xi’s and Putin’s vulnerabilities, provided the United States stays its course.
With US military aid to Ukraine in limbo, a Republican Party questioning America’s global engagement, and its presidential candidate threatening to withdraw from crucial US alliances, how US national security policy will unfold in 2024 and beyond obviously is uncertain.
It’s a subject that intelligence analysts aren’t chartered to address. But like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes who solved a mysterious theft by paying attention to what didn’t happen, the main message in this year’s threat assessment just might be the intelligence community’s version of the dog that didn’t bark.
Excellent summary. Thanks.