I wouldn’t say it that way, though that’s the end result.
It’s more like, the “cultural victory” was a metric America was light years ahead on through natural circumstance, when people liked us because we actually represented freedom.
The CIA decided to ride the model that we were ahead on and astroturf it into unrecognizable shit, and to push stretch goals like population reduction through castration of minors along with it because that’s what the donor class asked for
Can America exist without intelligence agencies at all? Probably not. We probably need to try to have some understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, and to try to counter some of it. But we should pick our battles, and we should understand that attempting to force change on other cultures is antithetical to the freedom vibes that made us cool, and we should stop aggressively fucking with fence sitter nations (attract more flies with honey, etc) and leave our friends alone.
The CIA has become complacent and ineffective by following the same routine for too long and expecting it to return way more on investment than it can. They need to be cleaned out and divorced from the donor class