What’s in Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy?
The plan puts drug cartels first and omits right-wing extremism, even as it also targets left-wing groups and legacy Islamist terrorists.
- On Friday, President Donald Trump released the 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy, prioritizing narcoterrorism and transnational gangs in the Western Hemisphere while identifying Islamist terrorists and violent left-wing extremists as major threats.
- White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka authored the strategy, which faced immediate criticism for containing numerous typos and a partisan tone that undermines its credibility as an apolitical document.
- Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, criticized the report for omitting right-wing extremist threats, noting that empirical evidence links far-right ideologies to lethal attacks in recent years.
- The strategy emphasizes a 'kinetic' military approach to counterterrorism, focusing on force while largely abandoning soft power and governance efforts that experts argue are essential to addressing radicalization.
- Critics warn that relying on military force mirrors past strategies that backfired, potentially creating a 'Whac-A-Mole' dynamic that fails to address underlying structural drivers of terrorism.
11 Articles
11 Articles
New U.S. counterterror strategy focuses on drug cartels but omits right-wing extremism
American counterterrorism officials are meeting Friday with officials from other allied nations to coordinate efforts against what the U.S. calls “deadly threats from terror groups and non-state actors.” But the recently released U.S. strategy to fight terrorism contains some unusual targets. William Brangham speaks with Colin Clarke, executive director of The Soufan Center, for more.
Typo-riddled mess of terror report gets Trump hammered by critics: ‘Written by an intern’
Critics hounded the Trump administration on Friday after the White House released its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy report earlier that morning, which onlookers immediately noticed was riddled with typos and grammatical errors.“This entire document looks like something written by an intern,” wrote ...
Seb Gorka Orders Europe to Harbo[u]r His Kind of Terrorists
The Trump White House released the counterterrorism strategy authored by far right extremist Seb Gorka the other day. You’ll be unsurprised that Seb refuses to protect American from the far right terrorist threat, instead choosing to focus on the imaginary Antifa threat and to waste CT resources murderboating fisherman labeled as narcoterrorists. Currently we face three major types of terror groups: Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs Legac…
The Trump administration once again lashes out at Europe in its new counter-terrorism strategy. Europe is said to be a breeding ground for terror due to ‘mass migration’...
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Bias Distribution
- 83% of the sources lean Left
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