Usually, they dealt with whatever bad thing around the world merited his attention: terrorism, a worrisome trend in the Middle East, a new development with China or Russia. I was always struck by the exclusion of large global trends—climate, governance, food, health—in favor of an intricate level of detail about terrorist plots. After 9/11, the intelligence community was going to let any president know anything it knew about a potential plot, even if there was little he could do about it.
