Information Assurance is not at odds with improving security. It is literally the NSAs mandate to improve the security of the federal government (and other US entities).

You’re making an assumption that in order to gather signals intelligence, that they need to trick people into using compromised cryptography.

A fact that is not in dispute is that huge portions of the US federal government implement NSA recommendations and standards. For your assumption to be true, the NSA must be intentionally weakening federal systems. Nothing about that seems nationalistic to me.