Despite our slow start, U.S. intelligence capability is now unmatched. However, our leaders are no less vulnerable to letting powerful preconceived notions affect their ability to process new or uncomfortable information. Certainly, the White House is not operating at the same level of paranoia as the Kremlin, but we are nonetheless seeing an increasing willingness to suspend common sense and analytical rigor in favor of partisan convenience.

President Trump has already made it clear that he does not respect or value intelligence. He labels any information that he doesn’t want to hear as fake news, and intelligence professionals as disloyal or part of a “deep state.” According to Bob Woodward’s new book, Trump commented that “I don’t trust human intelligence and these spies,” and “I don’t believe in human sources.”

More substantively, Trump has failed to accept overwhelming evidence from his intelligence community that Russia was behind the devastating attack on our election in 2016. Trump has also recently tweeted that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea,” and has asserted, nonsensically, that Canada is a national security threat to the U.S. He tends to reject information that doesn’t benefit him personally or fit into his jaundiced and shallow worldview.

Collecting intelligence for someone who doesn’t want it is at best a waste of money, and at worst a prescription for disaster. Again, the Soviet example is a good one. In the lead-up to the second World War, and repeatedly during the war years, the Soviet Union squandered intelligence from the best spy network ever. Perhaps the biggest geostrategic blunder in history was the Soviet failure to anticipate Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 Nazi invasion which almost led to the annihilation of the Soviet state. What’s especially damning is that the Soviets had a brilliant and well-placed spy who provided accurate details well in advance.

Richard Sorge was a Soviet intelligence officer working under deep cover as a German Nazi journalist in Imperial Japan. He was born in Baku, moved to Berlin as a child, and became a communist after serving in the German Army in World War I. Recruited by Soviet military intelligence, Sorge lived in Germany, China, and the Soviet Union. When he arrived in Japan in 1933, his mission was to determine if and when that country was planning to invade the Soviet Union.

Sorge reported accurately that Japan was not planning an attack on the Soviet Union, and instead would invade China. He also developed sources in the German Embassy, including the Ambassador to Japan, with whom he had breakfast almost every day, and reported details of the German-Japanese pact. He further learned of the existence and timing of Operation Barbarossa. However, Stalin refused to consider Sorge’s warnings, which went against the Kremlin’s longstanding assumptions. (Sorge was eventually caught and executed by the Japanese, who initially thought he was a German agent.)