Ex-CIA Analyst: America Is Choosing to Self-Destruct. And It Will Only Get Worse

Ex-CIA Analyst: America Is Choosing to Self-Destruct. And It Will Only Get Worse

Author: Decoding Geopolitics August 15, 2026 Duration: 34:06

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This is a conversation with Julia Curlee, who spent 25 years in U.S. national security, including 20 years as a CIA analyst, serving at the National Security Council and briefing senior U.S. officials. She recently left government and is now speaking publicly about what she believes is happening inside the system she spent her career working in.


The United States has spent decades building an extraordinary system for having the best possible intelligence and using that to make the best possible decisions which was always a big part of what made the U.S. as powerful as it is. But Julia thinks that this system is now breaking down and when that happens, even a superpower with enormous resources can become unable to recognize reality, anticipate the consequences of its own actions and can start to increasingly make self-destructive decisions. 


She argues that this is what explains the Iran war and why the US failed so badly to achieve its goals but also a lot of other foreign policy decisions - and that this is about to get a lot worse and the United States is about to make a lot more potentially catastrophic decisions. 


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