The Trump administration’s sharing of sensitive military information on Signal has shocked allies, while further eroding trans-Atlantic trust thanks to group chat messages from top U.S. officials expressing contempt toward Europe's “freeloading” on security.

“I think every allied intelligence agency that read that article is probably having their own internal panic attack about what this implies,” Craig Kafura, the director of public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said of the bombshell report in The Atlantic earlier this week.

In the article, Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg detailed how Trump’s top Cabinet officials used the open-source messaging app to debate and detail planned attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen, while also expressing loathing for America having to defend European economic and military interests.

“I think because this is such a public scandal, such a public lapse of judgment in so many ways, it's going to continue to push public attitudes in — especially Europe given the contents of those messages — a more negative direction towards the United States,” Kafura said.

President Trump’s controversial America First foreign policy has rapidly transformed even Washington’s most “ironclad” relationships, with Canada’s new prime minister saying this week that the historical relationship with the U.S. was “over.”

Tariff wars are just one issue that’s rattling America’s partners. The Trump administration’s hard turn toward Russia in its push to end the Ukraine war has jolted Europe, and nationals of friendly countries have been wrapped up in hard-line domestic policies toward immigrants and anti-Israel protesters.

The Houthi attacks group chat — revealed by Goldberg after he was inadvertently invited into the chat — has added incompetence and carelessness to the mix of unprecedented concerns for foreign governments.

“I wouldn’t use Signal to cheat on my wife,” said one foreign diplomat in Washington, D.C., capturing the shock.

“Mistakes happen,” the diplomat added, but he quickly followed up with, “OK, not this mistake.”

When mistakes do happen, openness with allies........

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