- We’ve long relied on US intelligence to spot threats. Now that dependence is a threat of its own
by Wesley WarkUpdated 14:51, Nov. 5, 2026 | Published 6:30, Nov. 3, 2026
If you were ever the recipient of messages stamped “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY,” you belonged to the ultimate secret club.
The classification was eventually shortened to “Five Eyes (FVEY).” It stands for the world’s most powerful intelligence partnership, linking Canada with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. In the natural world, praying mantises and honeybees can have five eyes, but in the world of global power politics, FVEY is a unique species and has no rivals. It has existed for seventy-plus years but is now being tested and weakened from within by the Donald Trump administration.
Canada has benefited enormously from being one of the eyes. The FVEY is critical to our ability to anticipate and respond to threats—from terrorist plots to espionage and foreign interference. In 2025, for example, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, joined intelligence services from allied countries in warning about a Chinese state-linked cyber campaign targeting telecommunications networks around the world. As a smaller player within the group, we are dependent on the capabilities of the biggest (by far) of the powers, the US. Membership has helped Canada devote the bulk of its intelligence resources to domestic security. We didn’t need, for example, a foreign intelligence service when we could rely on reporting from MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency.
FVEY grew out of the wartime fight to crack Nazi communications, with British and American code breakers working side by side. The partnership was formalized in 1946, then widened to include Canada three years later after Ottawa signed an intelligence-sharing agreement with Washington. Australia and New Zealand joined in 1956, producing the current structure. FVEY initially focused on signals intelligence, or SIGINT: the interception and analysis of adversaries’ phone calls, radio transmissions, emails, and satellite communications. Its remit has since expanded considerably, with the five countries co-operating across virtually every domain of national security, constituting a dense web of partnerships between agencies.
Canada’s involvement in the Five Eyes has weathered many storms, including disputes over US McCarthyite practices, which ensnared Canadians such as diplomat E. H. Norman, and bouts of antagonism between Canadian prime ministers and US presidents. The depths of Diefenbaker–Kennedy and Pearson–LBJ friction were almost as bad as Trudeau–Trump or Carney–Trump. Intelligence sharing outlasted Canada’s refusal to join the Vietnam War as a combatant in the 1960s and, more recently, the Iraq War in 2003. Canadian distrust, even disgust, over US practices after 9/11 in its global war on terrorism didn’t fundamentally shake it. Major spy betrayals, such as the case of Canadian Jeffrey Delisle, who provided Russian intelligence with FVEY (mostly US) secrets, were patched over.
Five Eyes officials even joined together in February 2022 in an unprecedented, collective, last-ditch effort to warn Russia against launching any war on Ukraine.
But the foundations of the partnership are now being threatened in unprecedented ways by internal disruptions to the US intelligence community and by the country’s antagonistic policies toward allies, including those directed at Canada.
The impacts are mostly sub rosa and never the subject of official confirmation from any of the Five Eyes partners. On the one occasion when a Trump administration official, Peter Navarro, was reported to have threatened to use expulsion from FVEY as a lever against Canada, there was some immediate back-pedalling. Navarro, a senior counsellor on trade in the White House, a man close to Trump, known for his animus against Canada, denied he had ever suggested any such thing, calling it “crazy stuff” and elaborating that “we would never jeopardize our national security . . . with allies like Canada.” Even right-wing influencer Steve Bannon weighed in with a comment about Canada being the US’s “best ally.”
Senior Canadian spy chiefs are unequivocal about the ongoing strength of the Canada–US intelligence partnership. CSIS director Dan Rogers told the CBC in an interview earlier this year that the relationship is “excellent and productive” and added that the two countries still have a “tremendous amount of common interest” in facing key national security threats, including espionage, cyberattacks, and terrorism.
The sentiment is echoed across the other members of the Five Eyes.
The UK is the number-two intelligence power in the FVEY, trailing the US at a distance. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament produced a report in December 2023 that highlighted the value of the Five Eyes as a “truly exceptional arrangement” that is “wholly in the U.K.’s interest, providing access to intelligence and capabilities far beyond that for which the UK Intelligence Community alone can obtain.” It urged that sustaining the Five Eyes alliance “should be the Intelligence Community’s highest priority in relation to international partnerships.”
That outlook persists. Despite their own tensions with the Trump administration, the government and British spy chiefs continue to extol the value of the Five Eyes. In a recent statement in Parliament, the governing Labour party said this: “We work incredibly closely with our allies, particularly our Five Eyes partners, to ensure our collective national security.” The MI5 director general, Ken McCallum, has called the Five Eyes partnership the world’s oldest and most significant intelligence alliance and added that “the strength of our partnership saves lives in our countries and around the world.” Despite all this, one anonymous British official described the UK–USA relationship, in the Observer, as “all smiley faces on the surface, but beneath there is real anxiety.”
The view of the FVEY down under? Australia, sometimes described in defence terms as “America’s aircraft carrier” because of its value as a forward-operating base for US forces, remains heavily invested in the Five Eyes partnership and its own deep intelligence ties to the US. A recent Australian Strategic Policy Institute paper notes that Australia “is mostly keeping its head down” on the issue of strains in the FVEY under Trump. The author, Chris Taylor, worries, in particular, about exchanges of intelligence assessments, which he describes as the “cornerstone of the intelligence alliance.”
New Zealand officials are also, seemingly, keeping their heads down. In preparation for a New Zealand podcast series on spying in 2026, a spokesperson for the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service had this to say: “Our relationship with our Five Eyes counterparts remains strong and enduring, regardless of political change within partner administrations.”
Beneath the official, supportive, smiley-face, keeping-our-heads-down attitude, there is another, unvoiced story. The cultural bonds that hold the partnership together are being rapidly weakened by Trump administration practices, especially when it comes to shared values. Public Safety Canada describes the FVEY as “guided by a commitment to protecting shared national interests and democratic values.” But that Canada and the US share such interests and values is simply no longer the case. US national doctrine is now defined by “America First” and intended dominance of the western hemisphere, the hemisphere where Canada lives. Democracy in the US is fast eroding. Looking outward, Americans polled no longer feel their country provides a democratic model for the world.
Absent the cultural quotient of shared national interests and democratic values, what does that leave? It leaves a hard calculation of mutual benefit, and that benefit is asymmetrical for Canada, as it is for all the other FVEY partners. The US has, by far, the largest intelligence apparatus in the alliance, with much greater global reach. Canada doesn’t come empty handed. It brings cyber muscle, military intelligence, Arctic surveillance, North American Aerospace Defense Command warnings, and diplomatic expertise—specialized strengths that complement America’s surveillance empire.
But there’s no question Canada receives vastly more reporting from the US and other FVEYers than it can supply in turn. In a crisis situation—say indications of an imminent Russian attack on a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally in the Baltics, or signs of a possible Chinese assault on Taiwan, or a takedown of a vital satellite system—Canadian decision making would be blinded if it were flying on its own.
Despite the asymmetry, the FVEY and the Canada–US FVEY partnership was seen traditionally by both parties as a benefit. That view may now be lopsided: held by Canada, disregarded by the American leadership.
Even for Canada, the benefit calculation is troubled by a host of factors, including the unreliable political leadership of the US intelligence community, appointed for their loyalty to the president. Efforts by the Trump administration to target so-called “deep state” officials embedded in the Washington bureaucracy—opposed to Trumpian policies and allegedly working in a secret conspiracy against the president—have hollowed out senior talent in US intelligence agencies and inculcated a climate of fear and enforced obedience.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in one of the premier elements of the US intelligence community, called the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC has been in existence since 1979; its predecessor, the Office of National Estimates, dates from the Korean War. Its purpose is to generate strategic intelligence assessments for senior decision makers in the US government. Since 2004, the NIC has operated from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), who is a cabinet-level political appointee.
Trump’s first DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, had the NIC in her sights as harbouring elements of the Trump imaginary “deep state.” She moved against its topmost officials, the acting chair and his deputy, after the release of an NIC report that contradicted Trump claims about links between the Venezuelan government and the Tren de Aragua gang. The official reason given for the firings was that “the director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community.” Gabbard eventually was sidelined by the Trump administration, and an internal battle for influence was won instead by CIA director John Ratcliffe.
Gabbard’s first replacement, a wholly unqualified appointee named Bill Pulte, who also headed federal housing agencies, served only for a couple of months. He was put in the job to ensure Elon Musk–style cuts to the directorate of national intelligence and spent his final day boasting about the number of terminations he had accomplished, putting the figure at around one-third of the entire ODNI staff. He posted on X: “The Intelligence community must protect the American people, NOT the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class.” His replacement, another Trump loyalist and former US attorney, Jay Clayton, is likely, according to officials who spoke to the media, to oversee its obsolescence. In his confirmation hearings, he was vague about his plans.
The story of the damage wrought to the NIC by the Trump wrecking ball illustrates many of the concerns that FVEY partners have about trust in the US and the truth of US intelligence reports. With senior professionals replaced by loyalists, how much reliance can be placed in international working arrangements between intelligence heads? If the NIC product is bent to administration desires, and politicized, can intelligence assessments shared by the US with the FVEY still be valued? How can embedded liaison officers from all the FVEY countries function in Washington when their interlocutors might feel constrained in what they can say?
Another major question is about the two-way flow of intelligence. Will Trump loyalists throttle the flow of US intelligence to its FVEY partners, as has reportedly been done in the case of intelligence reports bearing on peace negotiations with Russia and Ukraine to end the war? Will FVEY partners, including Canada, have to consider turning off some of the taps of their flows of intelligence to the US over concerns that it could be used for human rights or international law violations?
This is not a hypothetical question; it has raised its head over lethal US military strikes against alleged drug traffickers in international waters. According to reporting by CNN, British intelligence restricted some intelligence sharing in response to US drug strikes in the Caribbean. Canada may also be implicated through its co-operation with the US military in counter-narcotics interdiction in the Caribbean, but official silence has prevailed about whether Canada is involved in any intelligence sharing on the matter.
As Trump belittles, and even threatens, traditional allies, will that ultimately mean he will belittle the importance of maintaining the Five Eyes itself?
Five Eyes partners of the US may, for obvious reasons, embrace a “speak no evil” approach while they wait out the Trumpian storm. Whatever the dimensions of the storm and its after-surge once Trump departs the White House, there are already centrifugal forces at work, which are likely to see the UK pull closer to European partners, while Australia and New Zealand hew to the US as a hoped-for guarantor of stability in the Asia-Pacific.
For its part, Canada has been engaged in an extensive effort to diversify its intelligence relations beyond the Five Eyes. The most recent announcement came during Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Canada in September 2026, during which the two countries signed a 100-year partnership in defence and economic security. The campaign has included new security and intelligence arrangements with France, Germany, and the Nordics and reached into the Indo-Pacific with agreements with Japan and South Korea.
An intelligence diversification strategy makes sense for Canada. But like the economic version, it will take time and will require more investments in Canadian capabilities. Nothing can replace the access provided through FVEY. But diversification and enhanced sovereign know-how for foreign intelligence are a hedge against all the problems that now beset the FVEY and, within it, the Canada–US intelligence partnership. They are also a hedge against default nostalgia, which the Canadian prime minister has repeatedly warned against, starting with his Davos speech in January 2026. Warning or no, nostalgia is deeply embedded among Five Eyes members. It might even be called a preferred strategy.
So, for now, the official FVEY chorus is strong and united. The FVEY endures. In recent months, it has come together to issue joint public statements on a range of current threats, including Chinese military intelligence’s efforts to use professional networking sites and online job platforms to gain access to people and information. Five Eyes cyber chiefs have warned that artificial intelligence will enable far greater cybersecurity risks—saying “the timeline is not years; it’s months.”
Ministers from the Five Eyes countries met in Australia in August 2026 and reaffirmed “our unwavering commitment to promoting shared values, and acting decisively to protect our borders, our economies and the safety of our communities.” The message seemed to tilt in the direction of US preoccupations, though it did note collective FVEY concerns about hybrid threats, transnational repression, the targeting of critical infrastructure, and harmful foreign investment.
A former “C” (chief of the British secret service), Sir Richard Dearlove, has said that the Five Eyes owes its existence “more to historical accident than deliberate design—it could never be rebuilt.” I think that’s true, a testament to what the UK ISC called its “truly exceptional” nature. But we live in exceptional times which demand new intelligence partnerships—with Europe, the Nordics, and the Indo-Pacific. Shared interests and democratic values must shape Canada’s next alliances. Nostalgia cannot keep us safe.
