Last week, the White House released the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy. As far as strategies go, the document falls far short of previous counterterrorism strategies and is riddled with partisanship, misplaced assumptions, and a failure to grasp the nuance of terrorists’ ideology and modus operandi. The document represents a departure from the professionalism and seriousness afforded to previous counterterrorism strategies and appears to mis-prioritize the most imminent terrorist threats.
Despite the fact that the United States is currently at war with Iran, there is minimal discussion of Iranian-backed or -inspired terrorism, although at various points in the strategy, there is ebullient praise for President Donald Trump and his handling of the war.
To be fair, there are a few things that the strategy gets correct: its focus on preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction; the importance it places on hostages and unlawfully detained U.S. persons; and its recognition that jihadi groups like Islamic State Khorasan Province and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continue to be among the most capable actors seeking to conduct external operations against the West.
Yet, on balance, the document is highly political, despite claims that the strategy is “apolitical” and will not be used for “partisan purposes.” It also misdiagnoses the primary threats facing the United States. It focuses on three lines of effort: legacy Islamist terrorists, violent left-wing extremists, and narcoterrorists and transnational gangs. The threat these actors pose to the United States and its interests is undeniable. However, bald-faced partisanship aside, it is the terrorist threats missing from the document that give most cause for alarm.
Take the section titled “The Goals of Our CT Strategy,” using an acronym for counterterrorism. Here, the document mentions the threat posed by “exploitation of new weapons, like drones, by cartels and Jihadists, as well as the provision of these technologies to terrorists by state actors, namely, Iran, China, and Russia.”
This is a wholly inadequate treatment of the threat posed by emerging technologies in the hands of terrorists and violent extremists. Internationally, terrorist groups have exploited drones in an unprecedented manner, as evidenced in the Sahel region, where the al Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin has launched coordinated attacks on strategic Malian government assets using an arsenal of cheap drones. The proliferation of the terrorist drone threat, traceable in part to the battle-tested drone innovation coming out of the Russia-Ukraine war, is clearly not confined to terrorist and conflict hot spots.
Various branches of the Islamic State have encouraged drone attacks in the West, and iterations of drone weaponization manuals continue to circulate widely in the Islamic State-aligned online ecosystem. Just last October, a jihadi drone plot by young Belgians that aimed to target Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, among others, was discovered. A 3D printer was found in the basement of one of the suspects, likely to be used to help construct the payload mechanism attached to the drone. The case indicates the ease with which emerging technologies—and their convergence—can lead to new, spectacular capabilities in the hands of lone actors.
There is almost no treatment of the most axiomatic but worrisome misuse of tech by terrorists: namely, the internet’s outsized role in the radicalization of domestic terrorists. Aside from a passing reference to the need to develop counterpropaganda, the blatant abuse of social media platforms, cloud services, and chat applications by violent extremists—inspiring attacks in the homeland—receives no proper treatment in the strategy. In fact, after reading it, one is left wondering if the Trump administration even knows the extent to which terrorists operate online to recruit, radicalize, and fundraise, since the document is bereft of policy guidance for countering terrorism in the digital space. Consequently, no attention is paid to the significant threat posed by the convergence of accessible generative AI tools with these preexisting online echo chambers and channels of hate.
From the recent Islamic State-inspired plots to the surge in true crime community-linked violence in the United States, the role of digital platforms in violent plots is the sine qua non of domestic terrorism. The increasingly worrisome trend of nihilistic violent extremism, with its extremely young perpetrators, is entirely omitted from the document. Nonetheless, this form of extremism is often highly memetic when it comes to its violent plots: Young perpetrators mimic each others’ aesthetics, and callbacks to previous plots are an inherently digital-facilitated phenomenon. The absence of a comprehensive strategy domestically and abroad to interdict the abuse of new weapons systems and dual-use technologies by violent extremists is highly alarming, and it appears the administration is sleepwalking into the persistent threat posed.
When Trump took office at the beginning of his second term, one of his first actions was to designate a range of drug cartels and transnational criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs): the Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Noreste (formerly Los Zetas), Cártel de Golfo, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, and Cárteles Unidos (an alliance of several criminal groups), as well as two transnational Latin American gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Tren de Aragua, which were also designated. This is not to say that countering drug-trafficking organizations and transnational gangs should not be a priority. These groups are dangerous and ship drugs into the United States, contributing to a fentanyl epidemic that has led to death and addiction, destroying lives and contributing to a public health crisis.
But counterterrorism resources are finite, and shifting personnel and funding to combating gangs takes these assets away from countering the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and their affiliates worldwide. Moreover, it remains unclear what the benefits are of designating drug traffickers as FTOs. This has traditionally been a law enforcement issue and, as former counterterrorism official Jason Blazakis has noted, “The result of conflating criminal groups with terrorist organizations will be an FTO list so diluted that it loses its meaning.” After all, terrorists are motivated by politics and affecting political change, while criminal groups seek profit and largely want to avoid confronting the state head-on. Dead bodies are bad for business, even as cartels remain highly violent organizations.
Omitted entirely is any discussion of far-right extremism, which has proved to be among the most lethal forms of terrorism over the past decade in the United States. Far-right extremists launched highly lethal attacks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018 (11 killed); El Paso, Texas, in 2019 (23 killed); and Buffalo, New York, in 2022 (10 killed), motivated by white supremacy, neo-Nazi beliefs, and antisemitic and anti-immigrant ideology. Online far-right extremism is thriving and has helped create a transnational network of like-minded individuals who revere Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 people after attacking a mosque in New Zealand in 2019, and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who attacked a camp in Utoya and Oslo in 2011, killing 77 people. Moreover, what the U.S. government previously labeled racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists are left unaddressed in this strategy, even as far-right groups such as the Atomwaffen Division and The Base have menaced the U.S. and maintain transnational connections. Additionally, plots that can be labeled as nihilistic violence often draw on elements of accelerationist, far-right, and neo-Nazi ideology.
The strategy’s failure to address the threat posed by far-right extremism is deliberate and seems particularly egregious given the amount of space dedicated to left-wing violence, including anarchists, antifa, and what the document calls “radically pro-transgender” ideology. Left-wing extremism has been on the rise over the past several years, but this should come as no surprise. Following seminal events in the United States over the past decade—including the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol, both perpetrated by far-right extremists—it was inevitable that far-left actors would mobilize in response. There is a concept known as reciprocal radicalization, which stipulates that extremist groups fuel the rhetoric and/or actions of other groups, including political violence and terrorism.
In another section of the document, the report states: “Europe must significantly increase its CT efforts immediately.” The section on Europe echoes U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s lecture to attendees at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, harping on issues of immigration and traditional values. And while pointing out lax immigration policies and their connection to terrorism is not inherently wrong, browbeating allies into cooperating with U.S. objectives is myopic. It also ignores the rich history of intelligence sharing and counterterrorism collaboration that helped the United States deal with the foreign fighter threat during the peak of the Islamic State’s caliphate.
The offloading logic features elsewhere in the strategy, too. While African governments in the Sahel deal with insurgencies, coups, and remain continually the epicenter of terrorist violence, the strategy posits that the U.S. will “expect regional and nearby partners to accept a greater portion of the CT burden.” Such a worldview, seemingly based on a zero-sum logic of winners and losers, those that pay too much and those that pay too little, is diametrically opposed to and incompatible with sound counterterrorism, which remains an issue of collective security.
As a whole, a partisan counterterrorism strategy makes the United States less safe as a nation. Real threats lurk on the horizon, but the Trump administration would prefer to play politics with terrorism instead of demanding a data-driven assessment that would help prioritize which threats to counter with already finite resources. For an administration that often eschews accountability and introspection, the end result could be deadly.
