The Just Security Podcast
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The Just Security Podcast
25 Years After 9/11: The State of U.S. National Security, Intelligence, and Alliances Today
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Co-hosts Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman are joined by Daniel Fried and Nicholas Rasmussen to discuss how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the United States’ responses to it have shaped U.S. national security, foreign policy, and alliances.
Show Note (related articles):
Welcome to the Just Security Podcast. I'm Tess Bridgman, your co-host today with Ryan Goodman. We are the co-editors-in-chief of Just Security. September 11th, 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in 2001. A quarter of a century later, 9-11 is continuing to shape not only our institutions, our foreign policy, but also, more globally, approaches to national security, counterintelligence, and indeed the rule of law.
SPEAKER_03The topic for today's discussion is about the transformation of U.S. counterterrorism policy, law, strategy, and the rest of it. And we couldn't hope for two better guests to have this conversation with Ambassador Daniel Freed and Nicholas Rasmussen. Dan and Nick, would you mind just introducing yourselves to the audience and then we'll start jumping into a conversation?
SPEAKER_02I'm Dan Freed. I was a Foreign Service officer for 40 years. When I retired, I joined the Atlanta Council, and that's where I now work. I was senior director for European Affairs at the NSC on 9-11.
SPEAKER_00Hello, guys. My name is Nick Rasmussen, and I guess I would say I'm a career national security professional with just under 30 years of government service, which culminated at the end of the Biden administration when I served as the coordinator for counterterrorism under Secretary Majorcus at the Department of Homeland Security. Across the period since 9-11, I had a series of roles at the National Security Council staff and in the U.S. intelligence community, including heading up the National Counterterrorism Center from 2014 through 2017.
SPEAKER_03Thanks. So I thought uh just to start an opening question, uh, first Dan and then Nick. And you've both uh written about this for Just Security this week. Um, and that's the question of just where were you uh on 9-11? Um, what was your professional position at the time? And just where were you in terms of the experience at the moment that the plane started hitting the towers? And I think that can help people, especially uh younger listeners as well, who don't have that as a part of their own personal experience, and just you both have it in a profound way. So if you could just start us out with that, it would be terrific, Dan.
SPEAKER_02I was at the morning senior staff meeting at the NSC when news came that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. Condi Rice, chairing the meeting as usual, called for a core security team to stay, dismissed the rest of us. We were later evacuated from the White House, but I came back within a couple of hours to help out at in the situation room. As I was leaving, I saw a Secret Service hustling the vice president out to a place of greater safety. And I spent much of the afternoon working with my colleagues in the situation room, speaking to allies, trying to gather information about what was going on, and generally dealing with a crisis situation, the extent of which we had to establish.
SPEAKER_00So I was in the uncomfortable position as the attacks unfolded, of being in my small condominium in Alexandria, Virginia, watching on television. I was in the midst of a short one-week break between finishing up a one-year-long CFR fellowship and rejoining government. And I had already interviewed over the summer months with Dr. Rice and Steve Hadley, the deputy national security advisor. And I was set to start the next week in the Office of Transnational Threats under the leadership of Dick Clark, who was then serving as our national CT coordinator. So, of course, my first impulse when I watched what was unfolding was to figure out is there a way I can accelerate things and get onto the team sooner so that I can help. But as you guys would certainly understand, the reality was the last thing they needed was the challenge of onboarding someone as they were dealing with the threat or the challenge of uh managing the post-attack uh situation. So I ended up having to sit very impatiently and wait for next Monday to arrive after six days after 9-11 when I could show up, get badged in, and join Dan and others on the staff of the National Security Council.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so so during those six days, obviously a lot happened. And and Dan, you were a part of that in some really um integral and interesting ways that you've you've recently written about for us. And one of the things that we'd love to hear your thoughts on, uh, and first just your reflections of what it was like in that time, and then we can turn to the present day later. But and your position, being the interlocutor with our European allies, what kinds of things did we need from them in the face of a disaster this big? What kinds of things were we asking for? What kinds of support did we need? What kinds of support did they offer? What did it look like in those immediate days just after the attacks?
SPEAKER_02The morning after the attack, just after dawn, I was walking into the White House complex to go to my office when I got a call from Nick Burns, who was the U.S. uh ambassador to NATO. He told me that the Allies were ready to invoke Article V, the clause of the NATO treaty that says an attack on one is an attack on all. They were ready to invoke it for the United States. And he wanted to know is this something we wanted? So I turned immediately, went into Rice, Condy Rice's office, and said, it's Nick, he's on the phone, they're ready to vote Article V, and you know, you need to make a call. And she decided, yes, this was a good thing. She spoke with the French National Security Advisor because the French were still thinking about it. And I remember her saying, we need this. And we got NATO allies to invoke Article VOS. And the rest of the week that followed, allies were coming to me without being asked to say, we're going to help you. We had I had one senior European official say, We know what you might have to do, and we will be there for you. This was unasked. We weren't yet assembling a coalition. This was spontaneous outreach by our allies. We were down, and they were there for us. I will not forget that. And the allies made good on their commitments. They sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. We'll get into that. But it began within the days, within days, the next morning, you know, after 9-11, that's when that solidarity started to come in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the word solidarity that you use, Dan, I think even for those of us who were watching on television, it was very clear that there was a moment of global unity and solidarity like we had not seen for some time. And it certainly marked, of course, a huge transition from the post-Cold War period to the post-9-11 period. Um, both periods, Dan, that you had very interesting roles in in our government. Um, and you know, I think many of us look back at the immediate post-Cold War period as this moment of opportunity and a moment when it looked like real change was on the horizon globally. Um and then, of course, after the attacks of 9-11, things looked very dark and very different in some ways. But that very immediate aftermath, those first few days, it's it seems like there was still this sense that cooperation would see us through in a very real way. That if if we were going to be going to wars, I assume what you were referring to when you said some allies intimated that they might know what we had to do, right? Um, that they would be with us and that we would not be acting alone. And I think the NATO alliance, the Security Council, you know, acted um in a in a show of solidarity. Um, so kind of thinking back to that time, was the alliance structure kind of humming? Was it something that you had to carefully tend and mend? Was it something that it kind of um took on a life of its own? Or was it uh was it an active kind of consideration on your part, Dan, and those, of course, you were you were working with um to really make that coalition come with you in the ways that that we needed?
SPEAKER_02There were two wars that took place in the aftermath of 9-11. One was in Afghanistan, the other was in Iraq. They had very different politics around them. NATO had not been designed to act, what was the phrase, out of area. It was a European defense organization. So this was new. And and the administration was not sure that our Afghan operation would be better off with allies initially. We we we weren't clear about that. Later, we needed allies to try to stabilize Afghanistan. So we weren't sure that NATO was the right instrument. NATO wasn't organized to do this, so we had to improvise and make it up as we went along. So that was one aspect of this NATO in a new era uh of unexpected contingencies. But what we what we had at our backs was this sense of Allied support. Allies were willing to send their troops to Afghanistan when when when we decided we wanted them to fight with us in solidarity, and some of those troops didn't come back. And when I hear that the Allies are worthless, that they just sit on their butts, they don't do anything, they're not with us when it counts. I was in the position, in my job, it fell to me to encourage Allied governments to send more forces to Afghanistan. This wasn't in the immediate aftermath, it was later. I did it, and some of them did, and some of those troops didn't come home. So I don't want to hear about lazy allies. They were there when we needed them, and that the bad treatment of our allies now is a stain on our honor. I know that sounds old-fashioned, but I keep thinking to the days after 9-11 when we needed the solidarity of the Europeans and they were there for us. NATO is not a worthless drag or a parasite, as you sometimes hear, snarky comments from certain quarters. They were there for us on one of the worst days uh that our country has experienced. And they were there for us in the years that followed, in Afghanistan and many of them, many of them in Iraq.
SPEAKER_03Um, one of the lines in your essay, uh, Dan, that stood out for me is the Iraq one, where you say, you know, that you were told by the Polish foreign minister for the Iraq 2003 U.S. military operation. And I just have the quote here, uh quote, we didn't buy the U.S. rationale for the Iraq War, but we did buy into the alliance with the U.S. And I thought there was just such a profound way of thinking about it, just in terms of the reservoir of credibility and support and goodwill and alliance building that had gone on for something like that to be the precondition for a statement like that. Um, and I and I also thought it was just a really terrifically nuanced analysis of what the debacle of the Iraq war, but at the same time understanding it in its own context. Um and Nick, I guess I want to talk to you a little bit about as well from your perspective of the importance of alliances and intelligence sharing and information sharing that has proceeded over the last 25 years. So, from dealing with Al-Qaeda and core Al-Qaeda to um ISIS and the Operation Inherent Resolve and thinking about threats to the U.S. homeland uh that you've had to grapple with. Um and how, as Dan has described it, how you think about the importance of the United States having NATO allies and other allies in the region in the Middle East, et cetera, for these kinds of uh concerns that are kind of top of mind when you're inside the US government trying to protect the country.
SPEAKER_00So I think one of the things you you learn very quickly if you're engaged in the work of counterterrorism is that it is the ultimate team sport. It's the ultimate team sport internally in the US government. Um, we can talk about the effort we we undertook to create a whole of government approach to dealing with our terrorism and counterterrorism challenges over time. But by team sport, I also mean we rely and have relied every single day since 9-11 on the close cooperation and much more than close cooperation with a whole set of partners, starting with the five eyes, but moving beyond the five eyes to include um other regional partners across different regions of the world. We rely on those partners not just um for, as Dan outlined, strong shows of political support and tangible um applications of their own military power in support of U.S. objectives, but we rely on them every day for information and intelligence that allows us to stay ahead of a dynamic, ever-changing terrorism threat. Um, my focus in that immediate period after 9-11 was really quite narrow as I joined the team at the NSC. We were, as Dan will certainly recall, terrified that follow-on attacks were were coming. We there was no way for us to think that, for us to have any reason or confidence to conclude that the 9-11 attack was a one-off and that Al-Qaeda had shot its last bullet at the United States. And so every day became a threat analysis and threat triaging exercise. And we were often relying on the intelligence gained from foreign partners and gained by up by the capabilities of our own intelligence community and trying to figure out where we needed to engage in disruptive activity in order to prevent follow-on attacks. And so that was a very granular bit of business, and it relies in in an incredibly granular and specific way on the inputs and contributions of close allies all around the world.
SPEAKER_02Listening to Nick brings it all back for me. That sense that there could be more attacks coming. Now, much has been made of the mistakes the Bush administration made in the aftermath. And the Iraq War usually ranks high. I get all that. But I was working closely with Vice President Cheney's staff, and the overwhelming sense I had working with them is that they felt that they had failed to protect the country. I mean, Kick Cheney had been Secretary of Defense. He was experienced, he had more experience than the president at that point in foreign affairs, and this attack happened on his watch. And I would bet dollars to rubles that the vice president in his guts was never ever going to allow another attack like that to happen on his watch. And you have to judge the decisions of the Bush administration in the light of that sense of responsibility. I get all the mistakes. I could list them. I lived through some of them. I had to fix some of them during the Obama administration or try to. I get that. But there is a difference, and frankly, a moral difference, between decisions you make because you have a sense of responsibility to the country and to protect people that is based on a on real-world experience and real threats and stuff that is made up. And listening to Nick, man, yes, I remember that sense of imminent threat. You know, it is hard to recall. I wish, Nick, that I could get in a time machine and give you and me in our in our the earlier years a message, guys, whatever else happens, there won't be a huge attack on the United States like this for 25 years. You're gonna do at least you're gonna get this done.
SPEAKER_01You know, I think that's that's a really important thing for us to remember that, and and and Nick, you write about this, that the CT community saw it, sees it as its reason for being to keep us safe and that there is no margin for error there, right? Because any error could be a missed attack. Um and that's something that I think through to today has become a pervasive part of the mindset of what has become known as the CT community, um, the counterterrorism community. But Dan, just to draw you out a little bit more on what you were just saying, and and you were referring in part, I think, to the extraordinary efforts you made, and let's let's not undersell them of trying to close Guantanamo. You were the special envoy for Guantanamo closure, um, by the president to try to make good on one of his signature campaign promises, um, drawing in part on all of that goodwill that you helped generate with our allies well before 9-11, uh, in previous roles in your longtime serving, but also after 9-11 working with our allies. And it's it's really no small feat how many of those former detainees you were able to not only repatriate, but to resettle. And that means they weren't able to return to their home countries for fear of torture, persecution, et cetera. And you had to find things for them to go where they would be safe and we would be safe. Um, and you know, that was uh a Herculean effort. Um, but I think at the same time, when we look back at this idea that there was no margin for error, we had to get the job done. I think we can see the differences between working flat out, you know, using all of the tools at our disposal in terms of it being a team sport, in terms of the authorities that were lawfully given to the president by Congress, et cetera. And making choices that were immoral and making choices that were not just strategically unwise, but were known at the time to be unlawful, right? And to be a stain on us that we're still digging out of now, right? The torture program, the disappearances, holding people in communicato. Yeah. And I think it's important to reflect on that in our current moment when we see people in positions of power advocating for those kinds of policies. I think we can draw a clear line between those two things, right? The the things that we knew even at the time were beyond the pale. And when when I say we, I mean those few people who were read in, right?
SPEAKER_02Um this is I'd put it this way. In the days and weeks after 9-11, I kept hearing that the old rules don't apply. It's a new era. The old rules don't apply. And that argument was used to justify, frankly, inde not only indefensible, moral, morally indefensible programs, but ineffective programs. You know, torturing detainees is a bad interrogation technique. Offering cigarettes is a better one. Acting within the law is not being soft. We hear all this talk now, you have to be tough. You can't be hampered by legalisms, you gotta be, you gotta, you know, take testosterone or something. We hear all of this, and I saw the results, which were not good. It turns out that if you discard the principle that custom, law, and good practice should not be overthrown easily. A conservative principle, by the way, if you discard those conservative principles, you often pay for it. So I saw that up close. Following the rules doesn't make you a wuss. The rules are there for a reason, the accumulated wisdom of generations and of centuries. All right, that no, I have learned greater respect for Catholic just war doctrine, which is which is a century. Years of tradition. Don't throw this stuff away because you're mad this week. I mean, I get the anger. I understand the sense of panic and there's no margin of error. I get all that. I respect the place it's coming from, but there needs there needs you need adult supervision to say, no, this we will not do. And it also, as it turns out, violating the rules is not rough but necessary. It's rough and it hinders you. Yeah. It gets in the way. And I'm a look, there are plenty of, I'm not a purist. There are places for in in in the business, diplomacy and intelligence for all kind of chicanery. But there are also moral lines and legal lines. And it really, you know, it isn't that hard to keep it straight. Okay? It's not that hard. Sorry to go on about this, but I've had to think about this over the past 25 years. Yeah, it's a it's a comes out on occasions like this.
SPEAKER_03And it also helps, I think, um, inform as you're as you're touching on present-day uh situations and policies that are being driven with, as you describe, you know, like the idea of maximum lethality, or um what you describe makes me think of the boat strikes, which is out beyond the pale of law, radically alienating our allies who don't now share counter-narcotics information with us. And I think it's the Washington Post or New York Times, I think it's the Washington Post had recent reporting on internal U.S. intelligence analysis showing that it has not actually reduced uh the level of drugs coming into the country. Um, so just the kind of productiveness of it or the ineffectiveness of it, um, but the kind of the show of force uh because of and dealing with, as I think, Dan, what you're bringing to the foreground as well, and then what Nick you had done as well with talking about 9-11, the concerns. I mean, there really is a significant concern, obviously, with respect to fentanyl and drug-related uh deaths from cocaine and the rest of it for our country and trying to figure out ways to um respond. But um once again, it just seems as though those have gone in a direction that's um some senior leaders um leading the country well off the rails, um, and in a way that isn't making us any safer. Um so uh it makes me think about that in similar terms of like what hindsight can tell us, but then what's actually happening uh present day.
SPEAKER_01And I pivot to you, Nick, on picking right up on that because towards the end of the time um that our friend Christy Abizade was running NCTC in the Biden administration, and and perhaps even prior to that in the first Trump administration. Um and for our listeners, um, Nick was, of course, the head of NCTC um later in his career after the role that he described uh immediately following 9-11. Um to try to get our counterintelligence apparatus, our counterterrorism apparatus to shift towards threats from fentanyl and and the you know, the so-called drug wars more broadly. And just kind of zooming out, looking at the threat picture today, we also and and what Dan alluded to momentarily uh a moment ago is that you know, there are real threats and there are manufactured threats. Um what do you think is the real threat picture today from a serious CT professional perspective? Because I think we um, you know, we have to be pointing out to people the manufactured threats that are being used by the president, you know, to go after, for example, political opponents, like immigrants, uh, you know, people on the left who doesn't agree with the press corps. Um, but that doesn't mean that there aren't real threats, right? And it doesn't mean that we we should be taking our eye off of those. So, what is the actual threat picture today?
SPEAKER_00So, you know, this may be a bit of the curse of the CT professional or the member of the CT community, but the the threat landscape that you're confronting at any one time always seems like it's the worst ever or the most challenging ever. But I truly do have a tremendous amount of empathy for my colleagues who are in that CT community now, because what they're dealing with is a very complex and dynamic threat landscape. Um, it's one that includes all of those legacy threats that you would expect. Um, individuals who are motivated by the ideology of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, potential lone actors, homegrown violent extremists, people inside the United States who may choose to act on that ideology and carry out an act of violence or terrorism in the name of a terrorist group like Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Then, on top of that, you have a whole series of different forms of racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism here in the United States that are targeted at one group or another. That can be the African-American community, the Jewish community, the Islamic community, the Muslim community, rather, um, the LGBTQ community. Almost any minority um group that you can think of has found itself to be a target at one point or another in our relatively recent history. And then just to get test to your point about the transnational criminal organizations that had become the focus of this administration's counterterrorism policy. I don't think any of us would argue with the idea that those transnational criminal organizations and their efforts to move narcotics into the United States are a real national security problem that deserves a coherent whole-of-government national security response. Absolutely. Um, that's a given in my mind. But do you want to use the CT, the counterterrorism toolkit and playbook in the way that we are to achieve those effects? That is a much more complicated question. And I think the answer is probably not. You certainly want to use some of the tools that we developed and honed in the CT fight, the ability to map and networks, the ability to identify key targets, but what you want to use is is the is the toolkit that has been very successful for us in dealing with those challenges over the years. And that's that's principally depending on effective law enforcement in order to mitigate those threats. Um and you know, to Ryan's point, uh I I I've seen the same reporting you refer to. The the the work that we've done to kind of take out a small number of small boats transiting to the United States makes for headlines, but it's probably not having a material impact on the flow of narcotics into the United States. And it's just as importantly, it's potentially serving as a distraction to the CT community that is already dealing with this kind of very complicated threat landscape that I mentioned earlier, that includes components of both international terrorism and domestic terrorism, as I was describing earlier. So at a time when government is getting smaller, when I worry about our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus becoming somewhat hollowed out with departures and individuals moving out of positions and loss of significant loss of experience, significant loss of um expertise, but to have that um that remaining um capability spread more thinly to me leaves us potentially less safe.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um and it's you know it's a sobering conversation to have in the sense that what I think you're both identifying is um we're less prepared and we might not be able to anticipate the threat that might be coming from these different um organizations and forces. And if that threat does materialize into some kind of attack on the United States, then we're also less prepared because of the erosion of allied support, um, undermining of NATO, uh distancing of the America's closest allies, uh, like getting into a you know trade war with Canada, for example, is um almost dystopian to utter that phrase. Um But I think that's you know, it's a it's just good to have your expert uh assessment of where we are, because it's a better way of trying to understand how to uh course correct or write the ship.
SPEAKER_00So Brian, just to jump in a second, I find myself here in Australia teaching in a classroom setting with graduate students yesterday, and I was literally outlining that threat landscape to them in just the way that you guys posed the question. And I'm I'm having to kind of walk through the logic of a counterterrorism strategy that seeks to highlight Antifa and transnational criminal organizations as our among our most profound counterterrorism threats. And again, I'm trying to do so in a value neutral kind of way and not be you know pejorative as I'm sitting in front of a group of students who are simply trying to learn and understand. But you can imagine that what I was what I was trying to contend with as I tried to explain that those were the singular priorities of the current counterterrorism approach.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. And we also we recently just published a piece by Matthew Levitt, Matt Levitt, and similarly, it's just a very sober, hard-nosed analysis of what are the facts, what are the priorities, where are where what are the current day political priorities of the administration and and just and it resonates exactly with the your pieces that you've both written, the this conversation in ways that um maybe the you know the 25th anniversary of 9-11 becomes a bit of a consciousness raising for people to kind of really reflect as to where we're going and what direction we're currently steering. Um and I guess one yeah, one way to just kind of end the conversation is where we're at in the conversation now is thinking forward-looking um and practical solutions, um, ways of building governmental approaches to dealing with these issues. I guess one way of thinking about the question for both of you would be um in a new administration that gets a fresh start, uh, whatever that administration might be in uh 2029, what would be your priorities in the CT portfolio for what you would be thinking about would be the best ways to change policy day one? Policy, whatever you think must be changed, um day one, week one, to better effectuate uh protection of the US from a national cure, national security perspective.
SPEAKER_01Maybe that that's our question for you, Nick, and for you, Dan. Maybe it's what would we need to do day one, week one to mend our alliances, uh bolster our ability to work with our friends such that responding to attacks, but also having the intelligence available, for example, to understand what the threat streams are that we're facing, right? So that so that that becomes uh possible for us.
SPEAKER_00I guess Ryan, I would break my my answer to your question into kind of two components, one slightly more structural and one more a matter of kind of policy priority and focus, which I think was where you were going with the question. But I think the structural stuff is important here because, again, as I alluded to uh a few minutes ago, I've been kind of very I'm very much concerned by the kind of hollowing out of some of our national security institutions, whether it's the Foreign Service, uh Dan's colleagues, you know, the kind of downsizing of capability and expertise in our foreign service. But if you look across our law enforcement and intelligence enterprise, our CT community, they use the phrase I used earlier, the the number of senior level, mid-level, uh truly expert people who do the work who've departed government service prematurely. Either by either either they were compelled to do so or or did so voluntarily to escape an environment they found intolerable, it has left us with less capability than we will need to manage these challenges going forward. So I think any new administration, again, uh regardless of party, I would hope would think about maybe finding ways to even break the rules a little bit to bring people back into service who might have some of those capabilities. Um folks who are now working at places like OpenAI and Anthropic and a whole bunch of other places, um, and contributing to national security, I have no doubt. But I would just like to think about ways where we could restore some of that capacity into whether it's the FBI, the CIA, the National Counter-terrorism center, the Department of Justice, any of the places where we know the hard work of counter-terrorism um gets done. So that's that's one point. And then the second point I would make is just a prioritization exercise. Um, you know, the reason strategies get written by administrations is to set the course for the administration and to drive resources. And at the beginning of the Biden administration, you'll remember, of course, that our colleague and friend Josh Geltzer was tasked with doing a 90-day strategy on domestic terrorism challenges. Why? Because the incoming Biden administration felt that was something we were way behind on as they took office. I think there'll have to be something slightly more encompassing than just a domestic terrorism strategy when the next administration takes office again, regardless of what party it is. But I think there'll be a need to have a real hard-edged review driven by intelligence of where our threat landscape sits at that particular moment in time. And that needs to drive a significant prioritization exercise so that we know that we're asking CIA, the FBI, our other collecting agencies to focus on the hardest and most challenging terrorism problems we face and not have them have their efforts um diverted to more political tasks. I'll try to leave it slightly more um opaque that way.
SPEAKER_02Everything Nick said, I agree with. With respect to alliances, let's remember who our friends are. Or the the Hunger Games line, let's remember who the real enemy is. China is our most profound adversary. Putin's Russia is our most virulent adversary. Denmark is not our adversary. Canada is not our adversary. Just knock it off. Stop punching using your friends as punching bags. For what national security purpose is thereby advanced? Rebuild the alliances. Alliances are not parasites. We don't know where the next dangers are going to come from. Okay? Nick Rasmussen, some future Nick Rasmussen, could come to some future Dan Freed and say, we've got a threat in area X of the world. And I want to be in the position of being able to call up a friend in a senior position in some government who owes America favors because we've been there for them and say, look, we need some help, and to have the answer be yes. Okay. Diplomacy is not just being nice at cocktail parties. It's working relationships. So when you need a friend, you've got one. We need our friends in ways we can imagine and in ways we cannot yet imagine. Stop stop trashing them. Stop scoring political points.
SPEAKER_00Can I just offer one bit of bit of hopeful commentary in line with what Dan is saying? I think one of the things we've learned about our closest friends is that even when the the surface level turmoil that Dan is alluding to is ongoing, and as offensive as some of that is, a layer or two or three below that in the relationships between professionals who are doing the hard work of intelligence, law enforcement, diplomacy, there's often a steadiness to that that continues on, even as the political level, the political relationship that seems to be floundering or deteriorating. We found that, I think, during the periods when many of our partners were disagreeing with us on Iraq. That didn't stop them from doing what we needed them to do with us on other really hard and challenging terrorism and counterterrorism problems. And that was one of the encouraging things I felt as I was in government during the early part of the first Trump administration. And even today, I hear it from colleagues. Our colleagues and friends at the FBI, at CIA, still have the ability to have productive, meaningful, useful relationships with partners, even if at a political level we are not treating our allies with the respect that they deserve. And that to me is tremendously heartening. And it's it's essential for good counterterrorism work to have those relationships. One can only hope that we don't burn those relationships even further over time.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's exactly right, which gives me hope. Because the capital of three generations of American building alliances around the world cannot be drained away as quickly as either skeptical media commentators would have it, or as some people in, you know, some people in this administration would like it. I hate to say. But that capital is real, it can be renewed. Look, the genius of American diplomacy since 1945 is that we invested in these relationships for so long and so widely that we had them when we needed them. Now, you want to argue that Europe has to provide more for its own defense? Fine. You want a more balanced relationship? Great, all for it. But then you can't trash those relationships. You have to be able to take the win and do the work. And you look, Nick's made this point a couple of times, and I'm in profound agreement. It is hard to say you love your country and then trash, demean, threaten, and try to traumatize the people who serve that country. The people on 9-11 in the White House Situation Room were patriots. At one point, and I won't forget this, Steve Adley, the Deputy National Security Advisor, in the situation room said got everybody's attention, said, listen up. We are a soft target. There may be other planes in the air, but we don't, we are, we are a potential target. Anybody who wants to leave can do so. And without a word, without a beat, everybody turned back to their work. No, but of course nobody left. These were the people who were often demeaned as being the deep state. The military officers, intelligence officers, foreign service officers, civil servants that were staffing the nation on 9-11. They are the people who should not be trashed as deep state of questionable loyalty. They put their lives on the line that day and other days. And they do so all the time. Spend my career adjacent to the IC. So yeah, I do feel strongly about this. And other countries' services were working with us. So let's not make it harder for them to do the right thing and the things we want them to do.
SPEAKER_03And just one other thought that it makes me reflect on is it kind of ties together parts of what you've both been saying. And uh, Nick, what you put an emphasis on with respect to the departures of people and the ability to potentially have them return. Um, is that I've also heard as well the point made that in the IC in particular, but it's also in Foreign Service as well, that you go two, three layers deep. And those are the personal, professional relationships, country to country, that really hold a lot of the glue for U.S. national security. But it's not just that those are so easily replaceable by just taking one person out and putting another person in, but that being built up relationships of trust over several years, decades for some of the people that serve. So those are the very same people we would want to have in those positions, um, neither demoralized nor uh forced out one way or another, or thought uh or thinking about getting uh jobs um outside of the public sector in the sense of how much is lost by that and the ability to try to retain them or maybe bring them back at a later point. And, you know, one can even hope, and as you say, you know, regardless of party, and one can maybe even hope with uh some of the leadership, like in the State Department or something like that, they would even get a refresh or rethink what's going on in terms of the erosion of US national security and uh try to, you know, either maintain uh a better equilibrium or restore something that's been lost in these uh past couple of years, I think would be of enormous value given what you all have both identified. And I just want to say in closing for myself to just really appreciate your service um and the ways in which you all you both continue to um think through these ideas and um engage with your own ideas in the public square. And it's just so important to have uh folks like you who have you know served at the most senior levels and dealt with some of the most serious threats to the country to think through um how we've you know reacted to the last 25 years and how we're reacting now to some of the major national security threats that we're facing and will face. So just really appreciate the conversation and just the contributions that you continue to make.
SPEAKER_01Couldn't say it better. Thanks to you both.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. I enjoyed it. And uh I'll also say I really appreciate what just security does to illuminate not only what we do well, but what we've done less well and what where we have to to this to the discussion earlier, where we've strayed from either our values our or our principles. Um, and that helps hold us to account as we think about dealing with challenges in the future.
SPEAKER_01This episode was hosted by me, Tess Bridgman, and Ryan Goodman. It was produced by Daniel Hojnaki and edited by Pooja Shaw. We want to give special thanks to our guests, Dan Freed and Nick Rasmussen, for sharing their expertise with us today. Additional resources for further reading, including Dan Freed's article and our 9-11 Then and Now collection featuring an essay by Nick, are linked in today's show notes. You can listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Just Security's YouTube channel. Thank you for joining us.