William Burns, who led the CIA until early 2025, has described the current erosion of American national security institutions as "a form of slow-motion major power suicide, achieving for some of our biggest adversaries exactly what they hope to achieve over decades." The damage, he said, is mostly self-inflicted.
Burns shared his concerns during a Foreign Affairs podcast conversation on April 1, "Hvylya" reports.
The former director pointed to concrete numbers: 25 percent of career officers at the State Department have been either removed or pushed out. Inside the intelligence community, he described the emergence of "a kind of looking over your shoulder culture" where officers still deliver honest analysis but increasingly wonder whether anyone in the current administration is listening.
Burns contrasted the current approach with what he called the "enlightened self-interest" that six presidents - three Republicans and three Democrats - had generally applied throughout his career. That formula blended hard power with diplomacy, alliance networks, and apolitical public servants. The current administration, he argued, has put a much sharper focus on the self part and less on the enlightened part, treating alliances as dispensable and institutions as obstacles.
"We're doing generational damage to ourselves right now," Burns said. He warned that the erosion of trust from allies also threatens intelligence-sharing partnerships that took decades to build. Even the most committed officers, he noted, operate in a world where "court politics" dominate and "a president who still to this day seems convinced that he knows better than anybody else does."
Burns acknowledged that career public servants do not have a monopoly on wisdom and that serious reform of national security institutions had always been needed. But he called the current treatment of apolitical civil servants "shameful" and said the "gleeful indignity" with which they have been treated will leave the country in a weaker position to compete for years to come.
"Hvylya" also reported on how Gulf states have begun reassessing US military bases as the Iran war erodes trust in Washington.