Are We Safer Now Than We Were 18 Months Ago?

A cross-outlet briefing on three simultaneous purges — the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the FBI — as covered by The New York Times and The Economist.

Let’s begin with a few facts. Since reclaiming the Oval Office, the Trump administration has gutted the FBI’s counterterrorism and cyber leadership, disbanded the task force built to catch foreign influence operations, and left Cyber Command headless for over a year. At the very same time, it has spent the last eighteen months publicly questioning whether the U.S. would even honor Article 5 — the one NATO guarantee that’s actually been invoked, and it was invoked for America after 9/11.

Given all that, my answer is that you don’t get to hollow out your own domestic security apparatus and simultaneously signal to allies that the mutual-defense pact might be conditional on an invoice, and call the result a stronger America.

That’s not toughness. That’s a country in dissent making itself less defensible from the inside and less trusted from the outside, at the same time.

Having said all that, I felt compelled to seek out more learned conclusions from people who make a living studying these sorts of heavy questions.

And so, I went to the Economist and The New York Times for answers way above my pay grade.

Eighteen months into Trump’s second term, three of the government’s most sensitive institutions are being remade from the inside, largely through personnel purges rather than legislation:

1. The Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined two dozen-plus generals and admirals.

2. The intelligence community, where Tulsi Gabbard’s cuts gave way to Bill Pulte’s five rounds of ODNI layoffs.

3. The FBI, where Director Kash Patel has spent a year firing agents connected to Trump-related investigations while redirecting the bureau toward immigration enforcement.

The Times and The Economist cover these stories very differently — the Times with deep, sourced investigative reporting plus an unusually blunt Editorial Board, and the Economist with analytical pieces that read more like verdicts than dispatches. But their conclusions converge almost entirely: both describe a systematic effort to convert nonpartisan institutions into instruments of personal loyalty, at real operational cost.