"There are many existential threats out there," Amaryllis Fox, a former clandestine services officer who worked to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, told Insider. "But the security challenge that keeps me up at night now is the divisions that we are facing domestically and with our allies."
In recent years, the US has become much more politically divided on a wide variety of issues, and US alliances have been weakened as the Trump administration undermines NATO, distances itself from fractures in the East Asian security architecture, and outright abandons allies elsewhere.
Fox said that adversarial powers like Russia were exploiting these weaknesses — the one thing, she explained, that "has the potential to destroy us as a country."
"There are so many potential military and terror threats out there, but anytime we face one of those, we have the most capable military and intelligence infrastructure in the world to respond," she told Insider. "But when you look at the division that is weakening our house, I'm not sure we have the national security resources to respond."
