In the wake of 9/11, the newly established Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced the nation’s first National Intelligence Strategy, a document explicitly intended to guide reforms to the intelligence community and help prevent another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland. The challenges U.S. intelligence faces today are no less dramatic. While crises in Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela have each been driven by their own internal logics, together they reflect profound shifts in the balance and nature of power as a new international order begins to take shape. These shifts — a more contested strategic environment; accelerating technology competition; and eroding faith in international rules, norms, and institutions — have significantly increased uncertainty in world politics and elevated the risk and potential costs of strategic surprise.
The Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli famously warned that fortune favors those who prepare. The Trump administration has already laid out its foreign and defense priorities in the 2025 National Security and 2026 National Defense Strategies. As the administration works to complete an accompanying National Intelligence Strategy, we argue that the most urgent adaptations for U.S. intelligence cluster around four mutually reinforcing themes: elevating leader statements as indicators of intent, better mapping elite ecosystems, focusing additional attention on cross-theater dynamics, and treating time horizons as an analytic variable.
Leaders Often Mean What They Say
National security decisions frequently hinge on judgments of intent. Too often, ambitious or threatening rhetoric has been discounted as diplomatic posturing or propaganda meant for a domestic audience. But in a world where states are more aggressive and both global and regional powers are testing the limits of their influence, public pronouncements should be taken more seriously.
To be clear, in many cases, leaders’ statements have been visible and actively debated within the intelligence community. The problem is one of analytic prioritization under uncertainty: how much weight to assign to declaratory rhetoric relative to material capabilities, past behavior, institutional constraints, and the strong incentives leaders face to posture, bluff, or deceive. In the past, discounting public statements has often been defensible. Nationalist rhetoric is noisy, leaders frequently misrepresent their intentions about timing and means, and intelligence organizations are rightly wary of allowing adversary rhetoric to set analytic agendas. When resources and attention are finite, privileging observable capabilities and near-term indicators has been a rational response.
The challenge today is that structural changes in the international system have weakened many of the assumptions that once justified this weighting. As institutional constraints erode, balances of power shift, personalist leadership expands, and ideological and historical narratives become more tightly coupled to policy, the cost of discounting leaders’ own words has risen. Statements that once appeared aspirational or rhetorical increasingly function as commitments — both to domestic audiences and to elite coalitions whose support leaders require to act.
Russia’s war in Ukraine provides a powerful illustration. In the fall of 2021, the U.S. intelligence community correctly anticipated that President Vladimir Putin was preparing a large-scale military assault. This has rightly been celebrated as a major intelligence success. Still, the intelligence community’s conclusion emerged only after specific intelligence on Moscow’s plans became available. Earlier indicators of Putin’s intentions, including his lengthy essay “On the Historical Unity of Russian and Ukrainian People,” published that summer, raised alarm bells but did not convince analysts or policymakers that a Russian invasion was imminent.
In hindsight, Moscow telegraphed its objectives and willingness to use force to achieve them well in advance. U.S. officials already recognized the Russian elite’s obsession with Ukraine in the early 1990s. On multiple occasions, Putin and other senior Russian officials offered concrete descriptions of the steps Russia would take to prevent Ukraine’s westward drift. As early as 2003, for example, Putin reportedly threatened Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych that if he signed an association agreement with the European Union, Russia would occupy Crimea, the Donbas, and much of southeastern Ukraine. Putin’s famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference placed these threats in the larger context of perceived “provocations” in Russia’s near abroad and an explicit goal to reassert an independent Russia foreign policy.
Despite these warnings, as well as the recognition that Russia had taken important steps to modernize its military and intelligence services, U.S. officials were caught flat-footed by Putin’s decision to annex Crimea in 2014 and the deployment of Russian special forces in the Donbas the following year. A similar dynamic played out in Syria, where the United States failed to anticipate that Russia would directly intervene in the war in the fall of 2015. Here again, Russian officials sent repeated signals, including that preserving President Bashar al Assad’s government was essential to regional stability and that they viewed the regime’s disorderly collapse as a direct threat to Russia’s interests. But U.S. officials discounted these statements, assessing that Russia would limit itself to providing Syria with material, financial, and other support.
In both cases — Syria and Ukraine — U.S. assessments overweighted past precedent and underestimated Putin’s risk tolerance, especially his willingness to use force when he concluded that he had exhausted other means of achieving his clearly and repeatedly stated policy goals.
The Chinese Communist Party has been equally blunt about its policy objectives with respect to Taiwan, the South China Sea, and technological competition. President Xi Jinping and members of the Politburo Standing Committee have consistently described “national rejuvenation” as inseparable from unification with Taiwan, often tying elements of this goal to specific milestones, such as the centenary of the People’s Liberation Army in 2027 and China in 2049. People’s Liberation Army white papers and doctrinal publications explicitly identify any declaration of Taiwanese independence as a red line that would spur conflict, and they stress that they will use force if peaceful reunification becomes impossible. Chinese defense and foreign policy officials have asserted similarly expansive claims over the South China Sea.
Recent experience in the economic sphere provides a cautionary tale that informs how the intelligence community should interpret these statements. Throughout the 2010s, Chinese leaders’ calls for self-reliance in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and other dual-use technologies were widely dismissed because analysts assumed China would be unwilling or unable to endure the trade-offs required to make real progress. Yet those supposedly aspirational goals soon gave way to sweeping industrial policies and a willingness to accept “good-enough” production standards, enabling breakthroughs such as domestic 7-nanometer chips and delivering market leadership in key sectors.
A particularly revealing dimension of foreign leaders’ statements is the way they invoke the past. Decision-makers nearly always anchor foreign policy choices in personal and national narratives about their place in history, but for totalitarian leaders, rewriting the past is essential to legitimating their rule. At a moment of rising nationalism, when leaders are increasingly rejecting international institutions and norms — along with the teleology towards free-market democracy implicit in them — historical narratives are likely to provide more important analytic insights.
Shifts in the substance or emphasis of historical narratives can reveal changes in strategic thinking and, in some cases, foreshadow the timing of major policy initiatives. Sensitivity to these shifts can enhance warning and help U.S. officials calibrate deterrent signals. An uptick in references to periods of humiliation or triumph, for example, may signal a greater willingness to accept risk.
Bluff and bluster will remain staples of diplomatic and public discourse, so U.S. assessments cannot and should not take every statement at face value. While public statements can reveal broad strategic intent, they are far less reliable indicators of near-term or tactical objectives. Leaders may sincerely articulate long-term goals yet deliberately misrepresent the timing, scale, or means of their pursuit. Putin, for example, has repeatedly lied about imminent military action — assuring President Barack Obama that Russia would not seize Crimea and telling German Chancellor Olaf Scholz he would pull back troops just days before invading Ukraine. The challenge for analysts is to distinguish between disinformation about immediate actions and consistent patterns in how leaders describe their ultimate aims. The former may obscure warning in the short run, but the latter often provides a durable guide to a leader’s underlying strategic trajectory.
Power Increasingly Resides in Elite Ecosystems
The nexus between national security, technology, and economic competition is more important today than at any time in recent memory. There are significant implications for the intelligence community, including shifting the balance between state and non-state actors as targets for intelligence collection and elevating the role of elite networks in analyzing strategic risks and opportunities. The clear implication is that competitive advantage will depend less on any single collection discipline than on integration. The intelligence community should continue to invest urgently in fine-grained regional and domain human intelligence alongside exquisite signals intelligence, but pair those capabilities with systematic network mapping of elites, firms, intermediaries, and technical communities. Doing so will allow analysts to connect signals across state and non-state actors; distinguish durable influence from noise; and anticipate where leverage, escalation, and opportunity are most likely to emerge.
Confronting the People’s Republic of China poses a fundamentally different challenge for the United States than did past great-power rivalries. Even at its height, the Soviet Union could not muster the economic heft to compete with the United States and its allies on equal terms, and Cold War leaders waged their struggle primarily through rival blocs between which there was only limited economic or technological exchange. Power was confined mainly within state institutions, with leading-edge, transformational technologies — most notably nuclear weapons — emerging from government laboratories. This structure, while dangerous, created relatively bounded arenas of competition that intelligence agencies could target and track.
Today, the sources of power and innovation are more diffuse. This requires the intelligence community to grapple with elite networks that interact with but remain distinct from governments — and frequently cross national boundaries. Especially in the case of emerging technologies, these actors’ decisions can have tremendous implications for U.S. national security. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, and other frontier fields that will define the future balance of power are driven by private corporations, investors, universities, and regulators, not solely by governments.
The intelligence community must shift its approach in response to these changes, building on the recent reorganization of the Central Intelligence Agency. Across advanced technology, supply chains, finance, and standards-setting, non-state actors such as private firms, research institutions, sub-federal governments, industry consortia, and transnational networks are exerting ever greater strategic influence. A detailed understanding of these entities and their place within a broader ecosystem has become essential to evaluating modern state capacity.
U.S. competitiveness will therefore rest in part on the intelligence community’s ability to penetrate and map elite networks. Doing so will identify chokepoints and channels of influence that can help distinguish between durable and fragile connections. Just as importantly, the intelligence community can provide insight into where adversary ecosystems are overextended or brittle, allowing decision-makers to target seams and avoid costly head-on contests.
China has gone furthest, aggressively working to knit together ecosystems that link capital and innovation in mutually reinforcing ways, while simultaneously reinforcing it with strong party-state control. Its approach fuses political authority with state-owned enterprises, venture capital, and academic institutions to direct capital toward strategic industries, capture global standard-setting processes, and insulate itself from foreign pressure. China’s efforts to dominate 5G, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence demonstrate how ecosystems, rather than single institutions, generate competitive advantage. For the intelligence community, this means tracking not only headline policies like Made in China 2025, but also the informal ties and flows of capital and talent that bind China’s innovation machine.
These dynamics intersect with a second challenge for the intelligence community: as technological competitors converge toward parity, the analytic delta shrinks. With the performance gap between the United States and its competitors narrowing, assessing relative capability becomes substantially more difficult. The unanticipated performance of the DeepSeek-R1 AI model, released in January 2025, provides a clear illustration. More generally, small shifts in capital allocation, research talent, or supply-chain inputs can enable breakthroughs that are not visible from traditional state-centric intelligence sources. Tracking elite ecosystems helps illuminate these inflection points by revealing where non-state actors may be enabling or accelerating progress that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The growing importance of technology also requires refreshing assessments related to Taiwan, where elite networks and traditional security considerations are now intersecting in new ways. The island’s role as the center of advanced semiconductor manufacturing means that a potential conflict would not only disrupt global technology supply chains but also reverberate through tightly interwoven networks of firms, investors, and experts in ways that are hard to anticipate, amplifying the strategic stakes and potential for disruption.
Taiwan’s vital importance to the race to develop artificial general intelligence could also alter Beijing’s timeline for addressing the island’s status, especially if Chinese officials conclude that they are falling behind. These dynamics could shift Beijing’s calculus about how to exert control, making indirect approaches such as quarantine or other coercive measures appear more attractive than a full-scale amphibious assault — both to increase Beijing’s influence over the flow of chips and to avoid significant damage to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry that would carry negative consequences for China’s own economic and technology networks.
Russia’s elite ecosystems are more constrained, but Moscow has shown it can leverage them opportunistically. Its networks of oligarchs, energy firms, intelligence services, private military companies, and criminal organizations — both within Russia and along its periphery — provide flexible tools for projecting influence abroad. Sanctions have revealed both the strengths and vulnerabilities of this model: while Russia can rapidly mobilize shadow networks to evade controls, it has bled talent in key sectors, narrowing potential pathways to diversify and sustain economic growth over the long term. Understanding how Russian elite ecosystems adapt — drawing down reserves, mobilizing the private sector to support the war effort, de-privatizing assets to ensure loyalty, shifting resources through illicit finance, and deepening cooperation with China, North Korea, and Iran — is essential to gauging the durability of Moscow’s influence. The structural weaknesses of these networks also help to explain why Russia lags as a serious competitor in critical domains such as advanced technology and global finance.
Friends, partners, and neutral states are also building elite ecosystems. In partnership with the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are harnessing energy resources to make the Gulf a leading technology hub, reshaping the Middle East. European regulators and Dutch, Japanese, and Korean technology firms all play outsized roles in shaping the trajectory of global technology competition. To strengthen coalitions in key areas, such as energy and technology, and prevent adversaries from exploiting gaps, the intelligence community must understand the structure, incentives, and vulnerabilities of both allied and neutral ecosystems.
This approach builds on earlier holistic and net-assessment traditions but adapts them for an era in which power is increasingly dynamic and distributed. While elements of such analysis already exist across the intelligence community, Commerce, Treasury, the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, and other agencies, they are often fragmented and lack an integrating framework. Systematic ecosystem mapping would both sharpen analysis and expand collection opportunities, while highlighting where real leverage and control ultimately reside.
Cross-Theater Dynamics Are Reshaping Deterrence and Escalation
The rise of regionalism and parity among major powers has reshaped how many policymakers and analysts conceptualize contemporary competition. As great powers assert privileged interests in proximate regions — whether Russia in its near abroad or China in its maritime periphery — there is a growing temptation to treat theaters as bounded and separable. This perspective is misleading. Even in an increasingly “spheres of influence” world, cross-theater dynamics are becoming more, not less, important, as competitors exploit linkages across regions to manage risk, stretch adversaries, and alter escalation dynamics. Russia’s close coordination with North Korea in its war against Ukraine — and especially the surprise deployment of North Korean soldiers and military engineers in Europe — illustrates how alignment across theaters can offset localized weakness and complicate U.S. and allied responses. These dynamics present challenges for U.S. policymakers that the intelligence community must prepare them to meet. At the same time, deliberately leveraging or introducing cross-theater linkages can create opportunities for the United States.
Engaging competitors where they are best prepared is often the most costly and least effective option. Horizontal escalation, generated through cross-theater dynamics, can create space to restore deterrence on more favorable terms. For example, Chinese planners worry about “chain reaction warfare” — the possibility that regional conflict, such as a conflict involving Taiwan, could trigger additional, concurrent military actions by other adversaries.
Keeping Chinese leaders off balance through calibrated pressure elsewhere — e.g., in Xinjiang, Burma, or along the Sino-Indian Line of Actual Control — may alter their calculus, thereby raising the costs of aggression without requiring vertical escalation. To provide a genuine advantage, the intelligence community must illuminate where cross-theater leverage exists, the triggers that will activate it, and the tradeoffs these choices entail.
Of course, competitors will draw — and indeed are already drawing — from the same playbook. Russia’s growing reliance on China, North Korea, and Iran to sustain the war in Ukraine underscores how cross-theater relationships have become essential to its survival. These partnerships stretch U.S. resources, complicate alliance responses, and erode American credibility. They also raise important questions about what Moscow’s partners expect in return and how that assistance may alter existing analytic assumptions about their capabilities and intentions. The potential for Russia to share advanced submarine and missile technology is particularly worrying.
At the same time, Russia’s declining economic and demographic base may compel it to employ cross-theater disruption as a substitute for traditional strengths, generating volatility and unpredictability. For the intelligence community, this means tracking how opportunistic partnerships can prolong Moscow’s endurance in Europe and complicate U.S. commitments elsewhere. At times, cross-theater dynamics may also create openings for U.S. interests. A clear example is Syria, where Russian commitments in Ukraine and Israeli attacks on Iran and its proxies left Assad’s government exposed to renewed internal opposition.
The Chinese and Russian cases highlight the importance of examining cross-theater dynamics as a distinct driver of state behavior in its own right. The intelligence community already devotes significant attention to tracking and identifying opportunities to frustrate alignment between U.S. adversaries. By institutionalizing cross-theater mapping, the intelligence community can augment this analysis by better anticipating sequencing, identifying seams where horizontal escalation could provide leverage, and providing U.S. policymakers with the options needed to rebalance costs and restore deterrence.
Thinking across theaters does not mean reducing focus. Since resources are limited, the U.S. intelligence strategy will rightly emphasize prioritization. But it must also recognize that linking problem sets across theaters can be a more efficient tool for achieving U.S. objectives. Offsetting disadvantages in one theater by creating leverage in another is a classic element of strategy. By tracking, identifying, and assessing these opportunities, the intelligence community will help ensure that policymakers allocate limited resources to maximize the strategic impact of U.S. policy choices. This, of course, must be carefully calibrated, for fear that any act of foreign adventurism might subsequently be framed as part of a broader global struggle to dilute or counter adversarial influence.
Time Horizons Matter
Time is not a neutral backdrop to competition. Competitor time horizons shape outcomes and intersect with U.S. capabilities and choices in intricate ways that require dedicated analysis. Here again, the issue is not that the intelligence community lacks awareness of competing timelines, but that analytic frameworks often privilege long-run structural trends or near-term warning indicators, leaving less room for the compressed, politically driven horizons that increasingly shape autocratic decision-making.
U.S. policymakers and planners face dual horizons: the immediate demands of day-to-day competition and the larger requirements of protracted strategic rivalry. Short-term gains can come at the expense of long-term endurance, just as delaying action can increase near-term vulnerability and multiply future challenges. The intelligence community is charged with providing timely intelligence that delivers decision advantage. To do so, it must communicate not only what crises or rivalries are unfolding, but also how long they are likely to last, what their probable culmination points will be, and how U.S., allied, and adversary actions might alter those timelines.
Reaching these conclusions requires a disciplined approach to scenario-building that explicitly incorporates time as a variable. As the war in Ukraine demonstrated, this is distinct from the challenge of providing early warning. The United States had months to get ready for Russia’s full-scale invasion, but the expectation that Russia would quickly seize Kyiv left U.S. policymakers underprepared to address the industrial and financial requirements of a protracted conventional war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, or to anticipate how Russia’s parallel requirements for such a contest would drive Moscow into the arms of Pyongyang and Tehran.
Sophisticated analysis of time horizons is particularly crucial with respect to China, the most important long-term U.S. competitor. The United States would take radically different approaches to a potential confrontation with China depending on whether it occurred in 2027, 2035, or 2049. Moving too quickly to “war footing” measures may undermine longer-term foundations of advantage, including innovation, economic growth, and alliance resilience. Conversely, overinvesting in long-term strength while underpreparing for short-term shocks leaves the United States open to coercion and surprise.
Managing this balance requires clarity on temporal horizons. Intelligence must also illuminate where competitors themselves are likely to stumble — whether by overextending in the near term or underinvesting in the long term. Given the extent to which protracted conflicts test economic (not just military) strength, it also requires a sharper focus on national resources and leaders’ ability to mobilize and augment them over the medium- to long-term.
This challenge takes on particular salience in the context of the most recent National Defense Strategy, which emphasizes deterring China through sustained strength rather than immediate confrontation. That approach implicitly rests on extended time horizons: preserving U.S. advantages in innovation, alliance cohesion, and economic resilience while managing near-term risks short of war. For the intelligence community, this places a premium on analysis that clarifies how Chinese leaders weigh short-term opportunities against longer-term objectives, how quickly they believe relative power is shifting, and under what conditions they may conclude that delay is too costly or no longer serves their interests. Without disciplined attention to these temporal judgments, policymakers risk either overreacting to short-term signals in ways that erode long-term advantage or underestimating the pressures that could compress Beijing’s timelines.
Structural pressures, including slowing growth, demographic decline, and external technology chokepoints, further compress time horizons, creating incentives for opportunism and risk-taking in the near term. Personalism under Xi exacerbates this tension: where Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping embodied strategic patience, Xi increasingly prioritizes ideological campaigns and legacy politics that may sacrifice long-term resilience for short-term political or strategic gains. Underlying this is biology — Xi and Putin both calibrate their options not only against official timelines but also against the actuarial realities of human lifespans, a point underscored by their recent musings about organ transplants and immortality. For China, the result is leadership that projects long-range ambitions but often acts with a compressed sense of urgency. This dynamic can lead to miscalculation.
Moscow also faces trade-offs between its long-term ambitions — reasserting great-power status, weakening NATO, and securing influence in its near abroad — and more immediate imperatives. In many respects, this is a challenge of Putin’s own making. While the Russian president succeeded in turning the corner from the chaos of the 1990s and modernizing Russia’s military, his major foreign policy initiatives have alienated neighbors, isolated Russia internationally, and narrowed near-term options. Finland and Sweden joining NATO and Russia’s slowly ebbing influence in Central Asia are salient examples of the reverberations of these actions. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine sharpened this tension still further: while framed as a generational struggle for national survival, sanctions, battlefield attrition, and increasing dependence on former clients have undercut Russia’s capacity to sustain protracted conflict without sacrificing long-term goals.
Putin’s highly personalist rule means that decisions are shaped less by institutionalized planning than by short-term calculations aimed at avoiding an embarrassing military loss, preserving regime security, and demonstrating relevance on the global stage. In today’s Russia, there is no parallel to the Chinese Communist Party to temper short-term personalism. This combination of expansive long-term goals with acute short-term vulnerability creates volatility; Moscow often signals grand horizons but is structurally compelled to engage in opportunistic, risky behavior. For the intelligence community, recognizing where Russia’s rhetoric outstrips its capacity is critical to avoiding overestimation of Moscow’s staying power and to identifying opportunities where short-term overreach can accelerate longer-term decline.
Autocracies are not uniformly long- or short-term planners; instead, their horizons shift based on idiosyncratic understandings of relative momentum and opportunity, as well as structural factors like leadership centralization, domestic constraints, and regime security. Incorporating these insights into the National Intelligence Strategy will enable the intelligence community to anticipate decision-making rhythms more effectively, identify when regimes are vulnerable, and provide policymakers with realistic assessments of how long rivalries and crises are likely to last — as well as how these timelines might be influenced.
Conclusion
The United States faces a rapidly evolving and increasingly uncertain international environment. Our call is not for mission creep, but for prioritization and economization. While these four themes are analytically distinct, their value lies in how they interact, pointing toward an intelligence posture that reallocates effort rather than expanding it. Treating leaders’ statements and historical narratives as baseline indicators of intent helps narrow the set of contingencies that require sustained attention, reducing the risk of diffuse monitoring. Ecosystem mapping, in turn, provides a way to focus collection and analysis on nodes that shape multiple problem sets simultaneously, rather than requiring parallel, siloed efforts. Cross-theater analysis helps identify where pressure in one domain can offset disadvantage in another, and to anticipate and address potential crises that could escalate in ways that directly threaten U.S. interests. Finally, explicit attention to time horizons further sharpens tradeoffs by clarifying when risks are likely to mature and when delay or sequencing can work to U.S. advantage. The result is an analytic framework that helps the intelligence community manage scarcity for the greatest marginal strategic return.
Alexander Bick is associate professor of practice at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He previously served on the National Security Council staff and at the U.S. Department of State in the Biden and Obama administrations.
Philip B.K. Potter is professor of leadership and public policy at the Frank Batten School at the University of Virginia. He is executive director of the National Security Data and Policy Institute and has served as a University Expert in the Intelligence Community and a Senior Advisor in the Department of Defense.
Image: Midjourney
