Picking up the pieces of a world shattered from World War II, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand formally banded together to pool their intelligence.
This Anglophone intel-sharing arrangement, dubbed the Five Eyes, has seen its members through the many decades since, an elaborate web of intelligence capabilities pitted against threats they all agree pose a danger.
But in a matter of days, U.S. President Donald Trump and his top officials have shredded the order, and the consensus, that has dominated for 80 years. Upending U.S. foreign policy, slapping tariffs north of the border and splattering America’s allies with disdain, the new administration quickly had those relying on Washington asking whether they can trust the U.S. to provide vital, and sensitive, capabilities.
Little is more sensitive than the Five Eyes, its gaze long fixed on Moscow and Beijing. It is, in short, the “most important intelligence sharing agreement in history,” said Calder Walton, a historian specializing in national security and intelligence at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
But there are now pressing concerns over whether Trump will pull the U.S. from the alliance as part of his broader brush-off of America’s allies—and whether the remaining nations of the Five Eyes could survive it. One potential scenario could see the White House stymie what it shares with allies.
In another possible path, the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand could deem the U.S. an untrustworthy confidant and attempt to limit the intelligence it shares with Washington. American allies have watched with deepening unease the apparent rapprochement unfolding between the White House and the Kremlin.
Some are now actively discussing reeling in the intelligence they share with the U.S. because of the administration’s Russia stance, NBC reported on Thursday, citing four anonymous sources with knowledge of the debates.
“As long as Trump is president, the Five Eyes doesn’t have value,” a U.S. military official told Newsweek.
What Is The Five Eyes?
The Five Eyes brings intelligence agencies together, forming a 24-hour rolling operation. It covers various types of information, including signals intelligence led by cooperation between the U.S.’s National Security Agency (NSA), Britain’s GCHQ, the Australian Signals Directorate, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) and the Government Communications Security Bureau, headquartered in Wellington.
Newsweek has reached out to the NSA, GCHQ, the Australian Signals Directorate and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service for comment.
The Five Eyes can also pass on distilled or redacted intelligence to its other allies, and there had been chatter about broadening out the alliance to include other countries that have specialized knowledge and understanding on China, like South Korea or Japan, although former intelligence officials are skeptical about the appetite and practicality of this move.
The alliance is “absolutely extraordinary in the history of intelligence and national security,” credited with helping steer the world away from nuclear conflict throughout the Cold War, Walton told Newsweek. “We’re really on a knife-edge here.”
The NSA and GCHQ are so intertwined, he said, that they can act as backups for one another.
“The U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand are literally hardwired into each other,” he said. “They are part of the same system.”
Could America’s Gaze Look Elsewhere?
The Five Eyes, while a product of the early Cold War, “still brings incredible value,” said Christopher Johnstone, a partner at The Asia Group strategic advisory firm and who served as director for East Asia in the National Security Council under President Joe Biden.
“If it were to break down, it would have real consequences for all five parties,” he told Newsweek, but stressed he didn’t believe it to be “an immediate risk.”
“But I do think there’s a risk of an erosion of the cooperation that, over time, could be quite harmful,” he added.
In a hint of Five Eyes fractures, the Financial Times reported late last month that one of Trump’s top officials, Peter Navarro, had lobbied for the U.S. to remove Canada from the Five Eyes.
Navarro swiftly denied the report, telling the media the U.S. would “would never, ever jeopardize our national security, ever, with allies like Canada.”
But it heightened worries over how the new administration would handle the U.S.’s role in the Five Eyes and how belligerent its attitude would become toward its allies in the intelligence realm. The U.S. could, theoretically, force Canada from the alliance, “effectively sabotaging the alliance from within,” Walton said. The U.S. military official described this scenario as unlikely but added, “stranger things have happened.”
For now, Walton said, we are “truly unchartered territory.”
“There is some cause to be worried” about the future of the Five Eyes, a former U.S. intelligence official told Newsweek. Much of the intelligence sharing—particularly with signals intelligence and imagery—is done automatically, but there is a risk that Five Eyes countries “may become more restrained in sharing the most sensitive intelligence,” including human intelligence, if they lose confidence in how the U.S. would handle it, the official said.
Trump has repeatedly railed against America’s spy and intelligence agencies. Tulsi Gabbard, the freshly installed director of national intelligence, publicly parroted Kremlin talking points before committing to “refocus” the intelligence community after being sworn into the role. It is not clear how she intends to do this.
During Trump’s first term in office, he reportedly shared “highly classified information” with Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador during a White House meeting. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies,” an anonymous U.S. official described as familiar with the matter told the Washington Post in 2017.
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s then-national security adviser who was ousted by Trump in 2018, described the report as “false” at the time. McMaster said in recent days that Trump was being “played” by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As it stands, Putin “could not dream of doing better than having the Five Eyes alliance undermined and sabotaged from within,” Walton said. “Whether Trump knows it or not, he’s doing Putin’s bidding for him.”
Earlier this week, the White House forced its allies like the U.K. to stop sharing U.S.-derived intelligence with Ukraine, a move with huge implications for Kyiv’s military effort against Moscow and for detecting Russian missiles and drones heading for Ukrainian cities. This is reported to include GCHQ.
Signals intelligence provided by GCHQ and the NSA “are the big engine rooms of intelligence gathering, collection and dissemination,” Walton said.
“Without intelligence, information, we might go blind,” the head of Ukraine’s foreign affairs committee, Oleksandr Merezhko, told Newsweek on Wednesday. The ban came days after Trump suspended all U.S. military aid to Ukraine, including supplies waiting just miles from the Ukrainian border in Eastern Europe. The pause followed Trump, along with Vice President JD Vance, publicly scolding Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in front of the world’s media, accusing him of ingratitude.
Some of the U.S.’s Five Eyes partners were among those throwing their weight behind Zelensky in the wake of the disastrous meeting, but they are also publicly doubling down on the stability of the intelligence-sharing network.
Senior intelligence officials are likely split in the behind-the-scenes meetings, remarked Bob Ayers, a retired intelligence officer with the Pentagon and other agencies like the NSA, currently working as an international security expert.
Some will lobby to limit America’s access to intelligence on topics like Russia, while others will try to push a limited approach to information sharing, he told Newsweek. A select group will be pushing for business as usual—a view unlikely to have a long shelf-life, Ayers added.
A British defense official told Newsweek on Wednesday that the Five Eyes cooperation was holding “very, very strong,” despite the turbulent rhetoric and public discomfort between the U.S. and its closest allies in recent days.
The U.K. is still keen to project an impression of unity, with British Defense Secretary John Healey arriving in Washington on Wednesday, as the nation plows on with attempts to portray America as a stalwart ally.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said Ottawa “deeply values its partnership with the United States, and we believe that it is in the strategic interest of both countries to continue our strong national security cooperation.”
“While we are always alive to the geopolitical environment, strong bilateral collaboration will continue as it is mutually beneficial and keeps both our countries safe,” the spokesperson added in a statement to Newsweek. “Our alliance, which includes partnerships in intelligence and national security, remains strong. This is especially true in the face of growing global threats.”
Echoing this statement, a spokesperson from Canada’s CSE told Newsweek that U.S.-Canadian “collaboration extends well beyond transactional support into a very comprehensive intelligence-sharing framework.”
What Could a Four Eyes Do?
It’s not clear just how much of the intelligence swirling between Five Eyes countries comes from the U.S., but it is a “significant and major” contributor, likely eclipsing what smaller countries like New Zealand can generate, Walton said.
“The sheer size of the U.S. intelligence community means that it is the big dog within that relationship,” he added.
The strongest signals intelligence capabilities lie with the U.S. and the U.K., while America is the only one able to leverage its satellites to scoop up intelligence and imagery, said Ayers. The rest of the Five Eyes are dependent on the U.S. for this, he said.
But the intelligence burden is too vast for any one nation—even the U.S.—to handle alone, Walton said. Former officials say Washington would be clawing up its own national security if it tampered with the Five Eyes.
“The United States government needs the Five Eyes alliance in order to collect intelligence on China,” Walton said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told European allies last month that the U.S. “is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing trade-offs to ensure deterrence does not fail.”
Without Five Eyes, the U.S. risks being cut out of intelligence on what the Chinese and Russian leadership are doing, what they’re planning and where they’re cultivating influence, the former U.S. intelligence official said. American allies “bring a lot to the table,” they added.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service told Newsweek that it was a “significant contributor to the Five Eyes” and a “trusted intelligence partner that brings unique capacities to the table.”
Australia inked the AUKUS security agreement with the U.S. and U.K. back in 2021 to work “hand-in-glove to preserve security and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” as London’s Downing Street phrased it at the time. Canberra is well-positioned to provide intelligence on the region.
But should the White House recoil from the Five Eyes, the remaining members could forge ahead with beefing up bilateral agreements on intelligence sharing between individual countries.
Underwriting the Five Eyes, the U.S. and the other member countries already have bilateral intelligence agreements that would likely stay in place, even if there was a seismic shift to the formal alliance, experts say.
This is a “safety valve” of sorts, the former U.S. intelligence official said.
But there is also the sense, according to former U.S. officials, that much of the meaningful intelligence sharing is done by employees more toward the middle of the food chain in these agencies. Should mandates from above pull away from the spirit of sharing, it could be these officials who keep the flow of information running.
U.S. allies outside the Five Eyes would likely respond to any breakdown of the alliance by strengthening their intelligence relationships with individual Five Eyes countries, said Johnstone.
It could present an opportunity for nations like Japan or South Korea, who could build on their ties with Australia, he said, but a fraying of the Five Eyes would likely also be seen as “a symbol of a fracturing international system that poses risks for them.”
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