The Trump administration's decision to take a different approach from Western Europe to almost every international conflict means that concerns over global security are "increasing, rather than decreasing," German Foreign Intelligence Service President Bruno Kahl told DW on Monday.
This is particularly so as Moscow has boosted its spying on Europe and NATO member states.
Kahl also stressed that the West needs to cooperate together in order to protect Ukraine from Russia.
"We very much hope that the Americans will soon be at our side again to help protect Ukraine from the aggression coming from the east," he said, in his first public statement after President Donald Trump's decision to restrict the sharing of military intelligence with Kyiv.
Kahl said the German Foreign Intelligence Service was redoubling its attempts to cooperate with other EU intelligence services "to see what we can do to keep Ukraine as informed as possible and to equip it so that it can defend itself," DW reported.
He cautioned that the kind of quick end to the war that Trump wants would "enable the Russians to focus their energy against Europe."
"We have seen hybrid influence operations, including during the elections that took place in Europe, right up to acts of sabotage ... in a manner that is unprecedented in the recent past," he said.
Kahl warned that Moscow may be wanting to test the "reliability of NATO's Article 5," the collective defense clause that is at the heart of the alliance.
"We very much hope we won't face the dilemma of it being tested. But we have to assume that Russia wants to put the unity of the West to the test," he said.
Kahl rejected the notion that the Trump administration's more Russian-friendly position meant that Germany would stop sharing information about Moscow with the Americans.
"We all check our phones every morning to see what happened overnight, so we're not immune to surprises, even the radical ones," he told DW. Citing trust built up over decades between intelligence officials, he said that "we have an interest in maintaining these working relationships."
Kahl also stressed that intelligence sharing was vital to averting threats from international terrorism.
"No country can fight all the threats by itself," he said. "And that is why our friends on the other side of the Atlantic are very dependent on our information, just as we are on theirs."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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