Violating that trust has always been the nightmare scenario for the intelligence community. The day after his inauguration, U.S. officials and analysts were said to fear the possibility that other countries would hesitate to share information with President Trump due to his close ties to Russia. “Trump’s off-the-cuff communication style also alarms observers in the U.S. and abroad who worry he may, inadvertently or out of bravado, reveal classified information,” Politico’s Shane Harris and Carol E. Lee wrote. Days later, the Wall Street Journal reported that intelligence officials had been withholding sensitive information out of concern that it might be leaked or compromised by the president or members of his administration.

Now, it seems, those worst fears have been confirmed. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the classified information Trump revealed to the Russians was provided, at least in part, by Israeli intelligence—raising the possibility that those secrets could be passed to Iran, a Russian ally that has vowed to annihilate Israel. (In a statement to the Times, Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, said “Israel has full confidence in our intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and looks forward to deepening that relationship in the years ahead under President Trump.”) According to the Associated Press, at least one European intelligence agency is already considering ending its policy of sharing information with the U.S., citing “a risk for our sources.”

“The combination of ignorance and boastfulness is a dangerous one.”

“Many of our closest allies detest this administration . . . they basically see Trump as a betrayal of their worldview,” James Jeffrey, who served as assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor during the second Bush administration, said. “[They] will believe the worst about him and they see his tweeting and everything as ill-disciplined and this looks like another ill-disciplined thing.” He continued, “It's another chink in the armor of our relationship with allies.”

Sanderson, who studies terrorism, insurgency, criminal networks, and intelligence issues, agreed. “They have no, no indication that this president learns from his mistakes,” he argued. “They know he craves approval from the Russians and from others, that he craves being seen as at the vanguard of leadership and that he loves to talk about what kind of access he has to intelligence. They know that he is prone to these kinds of poor judgmental moments and that this will absolutely not be the last one he does.”

On Tuesday morning, Trump defended sharing intelligence with Russia as “humanitarian,” explaining that he wants Russia to “greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.” But according to Jeffrey, the president’s belief that Vladimir Putin is an ally in the fight against terrorism is misguided. “He just doesn’t get how real the Russian intervention in the election really was and how troubling that is to Americans, both from a standpoint of their institutions and from the standpoint of the kind of situation we have with Russia. It is not a potential ally in the fight against ISIS. All they can do against ISIS is carpet bomb civilian areas,” he said. “The last thing Russia wants to see is Make American Great Again. It wants to see it collapse.”

Other experts agreed that Russia presents a unique threat to U.S. interests. Breaking an intelligence-sharing agreement to share information with a close ally “would be a problem,” Lowenthal told me. “Sharing it with the Russians is a tremendous problem because they are a hostile intelligence service.” Worse, the intelligence that Trump disclosed was reportedly “code word” level information—a classification above Top Secret that means only a select group of people within the government had access to it. As Stengel explained, “That level of classified information is highly siloed, in the sense that the information and the source of the information are not shared, especially not with a nation that has an adversarial relationship with both of the other countries.”