President Donald Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy, which he signed on Tuesday, “prioritizes the neutralization of hemispheric terror threats,” according to Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism in the administration.
The prioritization of cartels and gangs in the Western Hemisphere is not surprising, rather, it’s in line with the president’s National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy, both of which emphasize the importance of stopping these entities.
Recommended Stories
“Our new counterterrorism strategy first prioritizes the neutralization of hemispheric terror threats by incapacitating cartel operations until these groups are incapable of bringing their drugs, their members and their traffic victims into the United States,” Gorka told reporters on Wednesday.
“At the same time, we will continue to find and remove the cartel and gang members who were let into our country under the Biden administration, while using the FTO, Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, to strangle the commercial and logistic sinews of their lethal organizations,” he said.
Gorka also acknowledged that this represents a shift compared to most of his career, in which U.S. counterterrorism was primarily focused on the Middle East.
The administration’s secondary priority is the targeting and destruction of “the top five” Islamic jihadi groups. Gorka mentioned al Qaeda, specifically its branch in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); the Islamic State group, mostly its branch in Afghanistan and Pakistan (ISIS-Khorasan); as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.
With terrorist groups losing territory over the last decade, many have resorted to trying to radicalize lone wolf possible attackers who are already living in the area of a possible attack and can be persuaded to carry out attacks that do not require specialized training.
“The surviving remnants of the world’s most dangerous terrorist group of the modern age
were forced to relocate to Africa and Central Asia, in turn exploiting the ungoverned spaces there,
especially during the years of failed counterterrorism policies under President Biden,” the strategy states. “As a result, today there are parts of Africa where a resurgent terror threat is the reality.”
Gorka said, “They’ve had to revert to other ways to incite violence and recruit. They don’t have the terror camps, the assault courses with the monkey bars, the old AQ videos that we saw, those terror universities don’t exist anymore as a result. What have they done with the rise of social media, they’ve exploited that means to say, we’re not going to recruit you, move you to the Middle East, train you and deploy you back. We want you to just, you know, get that F1 50 pickup truck, and that’s happened in New Orleans, drive your vehicle through that innocent crowd of people celebrating New Year’s, and kill them in the name of jihad.”
U.S. Central Command said in December that the Islamic State group had inspired at least 11 plots or attacks against targets in the United States over the past year.
American law enforcement also thwarted an Islamic State group-inspired attack that would have taken place on Halloween this year. The subjects, three Americans from Michigan, had multiple AR-15 rifles, tactical gear, and a detailed plan to carry out an attack on U.S. soil, according to the charging documents. On New Year’s in 2025, a lone man drove through a crowded street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. U.S. authorities found an Islamic State group flag in the perpetrator’s vehicle.
The New Orleans attack, similar to others, highlights how radicalized individuals do not direct military training or even guns to carry out an attack: instead, they can use a car to drive through pedestrians.
CEASEFIRE IS ONGOING DESPITE IRAN’S MISSILE ATTACKS: HEGSETH
Another aspect of the White House’s counterterrorism strategy focuses on stopping domestic radical, politically motivated violence, and Gorka specifically referred to both the murder of Charlie Kirk and the three assassination attempts against Trump.
Now that the strategy has been unveiled, he said it’s time for the interagency process to begin where they “make this incredible document the president signed turn into a reality.”
