The Intelligence Community: How Crucial?

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Nothing is harder to change than our basic idea of the world and our role in it. That is why many American policy-makers initially reacted with alarm at the rapidity of change in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Changes were not happening on our timetable. Ironically the instincts of many top government officials actually led them to feel more comfortable with order than with freedom because it was more predictable.

Even today there are those in the intelligence and foreign policy establishment who long for the old days of the Cold War because its challenges were easier to define. In many ways this is the greatest threat to our own national security: the failure to change our thinking to coincide with all of the changes in the world.

History teaches us that the disintegration of multinational empires or the liberation of culturally diverse states often creates a period of instability. In many ways the world of the 1990s resembles more the world of the 1920s than that of the 1980s. It would be foolish to believe that amid the ruins of a major empire and the creation of new nation?states we will not see continuing conflict, at least on a regional basis.

Yet it is clear that to remain a world leader in the next century the United States will require a very different set of assets from those used previously. In the past, military strength was at the heart of our political influence because our allies around the world needed our protection against the Soviet threat. But as our friends feel less threatened militarily, they also will be less willing to follow our lead. Economic and social strengths will in many ways become the primary determinants of world influence.

The implications for America’s intelligence community are clear. The most sweeping changes since the beginning of the Cold War call for the most sweeping changes in the modern intelligence apparatus of the government since the Central Intelligence Agency was erected by the National Security Act of 1947. If the intelligence community fails to make these changes, it will become an expensive and irrelevant dinosaur just when America most needs information and insight into the complex new challenges that it faces.

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