I don't want to alarm anyone unreasonably, but the heads of the entire United States intelligence community went before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday morning and testified that the President* of the United States doesn't know enough about foreign affairs generally, and the threats to this country in particular, to throw a cat. From the Washington Post:

[Director of National Intelligence Dan] Coats, speaking on behalf of the assembled officials, gave a global tour of threats, focused mainly on Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Coats said that North Korea was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities,” which the country’s leaders consider “critical to the regime’s survival.” That assessment threw cold water on the White House’s more optimistic view that the United States and North Korea will achieve a lasting peace and that the regime will ultimately give up its nuclear weapons...And throughout the hearing, officials found themselves repeating earlier assessments on subjects that also were at odds with other public statements from the president.

Win McNamee Getty Images

The officials assessed that the government of Iran was not trying to build a nuclear weapon, despite the Trump administration’s persistent claims that the country has been violating the terms of an international agreement forged during the Obama administration. Officials told lawmakers that Iran was in compliance with the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as some officials had previously said privately. But Iranian leaders are discussing reneging on the deal if they fail to reap the economic benefits it was supposed to bring after international sanctions were lifted, Haspel said. The Trump administration has reimposed U.S. sanctions.

The intelligence community has earned every speck of every grain of salt with which its evaluations are taken in the wake of what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War. (So, in fact, has anyone associated with the late Avignon Presidency, no matter what their opinion of the current president* is.) But these are people saying now that the administration* is being unreasonably naive towards North Korea and unreasonably bellicose toward Iran. This comes out to being hilariously and dangerously incompetent on all counts.

Trump continues to equivocate on whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf, contradicting the unanimous assessment of all the top intelligence officials currently serving. At last year’s threats hearing, leaders focused much of their remarks on Russia, unanimously concluding that the country was trying to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections by sowing discord and confusion via social media, as it had two years earlier in the U.S. presidential race.

Yeah, that, too.

Coats and the rest of them have done everything except sound an air raid siren about this administration*'s bungling attempts to develop a foreign policy, and there's no indication yet that the Senate Republicans have mustered the gumption to act on the alarm. And John Bolton is making policy. This will all end splendidly.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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