U.S. allies get a Signal chat's worth of red flags

If Europeans didn’t already know what the new administration in Washington thinks and wants of them, they now do: "PATHETIC" and cash, respectively. This is thanks to the hard-to-credit decision of President Donald Trump’s top security officials to chat about an imminent military strike against targets in Yemen on a publicly available texting app, and to include a journalist by mistake.

For a continent already worried that Trump may not honor any NATO Article 5 request or would be willing to shake down allies by withholding the spare parts and software upgrades needed to keep their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters flying, the content of this unintentionally leaked discussion has provided confirmation.

In the short term, that may have few real consequences. Although insulting, the administration’s assessment of Europe’s weak military capabilities is correct. The resulting dependency on U.S. military might has made European states highly vulnerable to extortion by their now-former ally. Longer term, though, the drive to move away from buying U.S. arms and build European will be overwhelming. Charles de Gaulle, the postwar French president who in 1966 pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s integrated command structures to avoid just such dependencies, has been vindicated from his grave.

U.S. allies in the Asia Pacific and Middle East can only conclude that this might soon be them, too, should Trump and his officials ever decide that they aren’t paying enough for their defense or making sufficient trade concessions.

Russia and China, meanwhile, will also draw conclusions, though viewed from their perspective this offers exploitable opportunities. At least as important as all this is that America’s friends and foes alike are finding out what happens when you get group of poorly qualified ideologues to run the most powerful military in the world. The short answer is either recklessness or, under a more generous interpretation, a group with a steep learning curve.

John Ratcliffe, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was on the call. He never thought, however, to question the exposure to potential foreign espionage in discussing the most highly classified subject possible — an imminent military operation — on personal cellphones open to loss or hacking, and while using Signal, a public, albeit encrypted, messaging service.

It's because of those vulnerabilities that the U.S. government has a dedicated secure communications system. It’s less convenient than a phone chat, but that’s because it’s safe. Ratcliffe, a Texas lawyer, had no intelligence qualifications for the job when he was appointed, either this year or for a brief stint as director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term. It shows.

Mike Waltz, the national security adviser now heavily involved in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, set up the Signal chat and included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, by error. Waltz has an impressive military background as a former special forces officer, and he served as a policymaker in the George W. Bush administration. Yet this isn’t a mistake you could imagine Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft or Zbigniew Brzezinski making.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former major in the National Guard and Fox News commentator, distributed operational plans for the strike to the group, including, inadvertently, to Goldberg. It was Hegseth who described the Europeans as "PATHETIC" for lacking the capabilities required to carry out the coming Houthi strike alone.

Twice in the chat, parts of which Goldberg published on Monday, Hegseth assures his colleagues on this inherently leak-prone forum that he had OPSEC (operational security) firmly under control. Hegseth served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, if at a relatively low rank, whereas some U.S. defense secretaries have had no military experience at all. Yet concerns over his judgment that were raised in Senate approval hearings now seem relevant.

Trump has said the March 16 air and missile strikes on Yemen were designed to end Houthi attacks on Israel and international shipping lanes once and for all, where numerous less extensive strikes ordered by the Biden administration had failed. More than 50 people were killed in the operation, according to the Houthis, who vowed to continue their campaign and to retaliate.

It’s hard to know whether this strategy of bigger airstrikes will succeed. The Houthis had already shown signs of reduced capabilities in recent months as a result of dozens of smaller U.S. attacks, and more might do the trick without a need for boots on the ground. But it’s hard to defeat any enemy with airstrikes alone. It’s also unclear how they might retaliate. What’s more interesting is that the political appointees in charge raised none of these questions of effectiveness and potential blowback. They don’t appear to have been discussed.

Instead, the chat focused on how to persuade U.S. taxpayers that this was the right and necessary thing to do. The conclusion was that messaging should focus relentlessly on Joe Biden’s failures and the Iranian threat, because so few Americans would know who the Houthis are. Vice President JD Vance’s main concern was whether the strike would send the wrong message, by defending an international seaway through which far more European than U.S. trade passes. Vance said he just didn’t want to be "bailing Europe out again." If he was aware that European ships and aircraft have taken part in patrols and previous punitive missions against the Houthis, it didn’t show.

I have never served in any military or intelligence agency, so I can’t judge from experience just how unusual or shocking this kind of sloppiness around a mission would seem to those who do serve. But as my colleague Paul Davies reminds me, when employees at some of the world’s leading investment banks used WhatsApp for messaging without authorization just a few years ago, it cost several senior executives their jobs and the banks $200 million in fines each.

Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian army, had this to say in a Substack post: The "shortfall in security is appalling. In normal times, this would see people sacked. I don’t expect that in this case though because these are not normal times."

That seems about right. Or, to use the U.S. defense secretary’s less careful language, this whole episode was pathetic.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East.