Stephen E. Herbits is an American businessman, former consultant to several Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries of Defense, executive vice president and corporate officer of the Seagram Company, advisor to the President's Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, and secretary general of the World Jewish Congress. He was the youngest person to be appointed commissioner on the Gates Commission. Herbits' career has specialized in "fixing" institutions – governmental, business, and not-for-profit – with strategic planning and management consulting.
Three recent events converge to remind us of the importance of U.S. Intelligence operations. It is past time the public became engaged in a discussion of the risks of our own electronic behavior and government’s historic failures.
The most prominent is, of course, our former President’s abuse of and failure to protect the U.S. and its foreign supplied intelligence. The second is the recently published and thoroughly brilliant book by Calder Walton, “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West.” The most recent is the July 3rd New York Times article: “Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain.”
Familiarity with the existential issue we face comes, in part, from the indictment of our former President for his uncontrolled and irresponsible behavior with classified documents while in office and after his departure. We don’t have to wait for a jury decision that may be months, if not years, ahead to know what he did was criminally negligent… or worse.
But why did he do it?
His repeated displays of disregard certainly weren’t done because he was smart. Even our enemies thought his carelessness was risky and stupid, not to mention the problems his behavior created for critical intelligence we need from our allies.
He certainly didn’t use our classified intelligence to negotiate. What has he negotiated? It is important to recall that even as a businessman, he didn’t negotiate. He simply paid his development contractors less than he owed them (or didn’t pay them at all), forcing hundreds, if not thousands of lawsuits. What international organizations did his rare appearances reveal his personal negotiations to benefit the U.S. and the free world? The absence is startling. His foreign policy was the destruction of several multinational organizations.
It is obvious that there is only one criteria Trump uses to make decisions: his ego. His flashing classified documents about and boasting about it proves this. And we’ll certainly be able to conclude that with hard evidence from his upcoming trials.
But the U.S. can’t wait until then. A public discussion, not about the contents of classified information, nor about Trump personally, but about the processes of handling classified information is necessary to protect our national security in the modern era… are long overdue. Here are ten thoughts to be considered in that public discussion that might then lead to Congressional action:
1. Screen candidates for relevant elective positions. That is something the American Bar Association doesn’t even do competently for our Federal judges and Justices.
2. Withhold highly sensitive material from anyone who abuses the classification system, including a president, unless particular highly sensitive information is needed for his specific approval for operational purposes.
3. Screen the Group of 8, the Chairman and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee and restrict that information from any of them that cannot pass a very tight investigation, and if abused even once, deny any further information regardless of their titles.
4. Any office holder – elected or not – found to have abused the system should be moved to positions with no capability of access to such information. In the case of a president committing such acts, classified information should become the responsibility of the vice president.
5. Modernize clearance processes to eliminate the vast backlog. The exact number of temporary clearances awaiting full review is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands (at least it was in the early 2000s) given that the requirement also applies to certain private sector companies doing business with the U.S. government.
6. Test the system by providing designed false information to various holders of classified information to test the efficacy of systems.
7. Sharply increase the compartmentalization of information.
8. Change counter-espionage efforts, leaving officials in that process for short times only. History tells us that the greatest harm has been done by some who have been in their jobs for long periods, including in the counterintelligence offices. Enhance counter-espionage efforts with the requirement that copies of all tax returns for those with access to classified information be provided to the a proposed newly expanded counter-intelligence group, who can then selectively examine lifestyle expenditures for random individuals. Additionally, It would be wise to create a second all-government counterintelligence office. Competition between or among them will enhance our security.
9. Sharply increase enforcement and penalties.
10. Provide the FISA Court (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that now has responsibility for issuing classified warrants), the ability to hold trials with access to classified information and adjust the legal processes to include evidence requirements and punishment related not only to the level of classification, but the assessment of damage done.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.