Countering Terrorism

The White House has unveiled its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy. There are some noteworthy improvements over previous editions of this strategy. Most notably, it ends the ridiculous pretense that white supremacism is the chief counterterrorism problem in the United States. I have no use for white supremacists whatsoever, but the KKK is barely a shadow of a memory compared to what it was in my youth, so much so that it turns out the SPLC was propping it up financially in order to have someone to fight against; the SPLC also funded the 'Unite the Right' rally that drew so much attention in 2017; and the Aryan Brotherhood probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for our prison system creating and sustaining conditions in which gangs organized by race are important tools for prisoners to avoid rape, assault, and murder. The government could most usefully fight white supremacist groups through prison reform and by visibly prosecuting the SPLC's funding of such groups. 

The identification of the problem that the intelligence community has been deployed politically is a second good outcome: 

Our nation has not been well served by its Intelligence Community (IC), which has been mired in old ways of looking at threats, or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool. Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at schoolboard meetings, Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this Administration will continue to prohibit the IC from being used politically against innocent Americans. As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing 6 extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.  

Another notable improvement is the recognition that the collapse of border security during the Biden administration allowed for the infiltration of bad actors from various cartels as well as actual terrorist groups. A third is the willingness to name "Islamist" terror groups, which are of course the core of the terrorism problem worldwide -- if you asked a random person almost anywhere to name a terrorist group, unless they come from a region that experiences localized terror they'd probably come up with the name of one of the Islamist groups as their first thought.

The one real issue I see with the document is that it commits the very sin it warns against in the paragraph I quoted: it intends to use the counterterrorism tools to target Trump's political opponents. 

It expands on this:

In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. 

While this is framed in terms of  "before they can maim or kill," that's also true of how the Biden and Obama administration framed their targeting of their political enemies using intelligence and counterterror resources. It's not a frame the government can be trusted to keep to in practice. Just as the Patriot Act was intended only to be used to surveil terrorists but has in practice been used to spy on all Americans, so too here. It's objectionable regardless of who is doing it. 

On a personal note, I'm not especially pleased to see "anarchists" included in a strategy whose signed Presidential note ends, "We Will Find You and We Will Kill You."