The Trump Counterterrorism Strategy Is a Dangerous Joke
· The Atlantic
Last week, the Trump administration released the official 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy. The document is a mess, replete with typos, hyperbolic assertions, and an obsession with former President Joe Biden. The bigger problem, however, is that it’s not an actual strategy. It’s more a long set of notes for a campaign speech, a repackaging of President Trump’s various preoccupations and prejudices that frames everything the administration doesn’t like as “terrorism” and any actions it has already taken as “counterterrorism.”
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As the security expert and Atlantic contributor Juliette Kayyem told me, such reports used to be serious documents meant to “guide our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies,” as well as inform “the citizenry, including state and local leaders.” This report, unfortunately, is anything but serious, and good luck to anyone trying to make sense of it. But someone has to figure it out, because it is still an official product of the United States government, and it is still supposed to serve as a guide to policy. With that in mind, I read the report—it’s mercifully short—and I offer here a few samples of what readers are up against in trying to understand it.
The fact pattern under the Biden Administration was clear: individuals at the highest level of the U.S. Government used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections.
(This is an old Trump accusation, but now it sounds a lot like projection, as the administration goes after its perceived enemies and tries to undermine America’s electoral process.)
[Jake Tapper: Trump’s purge of terrorism prosecutors]
Jihadi terrorists have continued to plot against and kill Americans, in part because of the failed “forever war” policies of prior Republican administrations, the empowerment of terror-sponsoring regimes like Iran under Democrat administrations, and a past unwillingness to challenge Islamist ideologies head on.
(As Homer Simpson would say: “Everyone is stupid except me.” Previous administrations did, in fact, devote significant efforts to countering violent extremism, including a program called, oddly enough, Countering Violent Extremism.)
America’s new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy is driven by the principle that America is our homeland.
(Glad we’ve cleared that up.)
The report lists the threat of Islamist terrorism as a top concern, which is fair enough. The other two threats identified in the report, however, make less sense. One is “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” an obvious attempt to reverse engineer a justification for Trump’s boat attacks off the shores of Latin America so that they are not crimes but part of a “strategy.”
The third category is made up of “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” Who could these be? Communists, perhaps? Not quite. The document identified them as “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” and promises 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.” It also promises to “do the same with the state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere.”
Of course, the Trump administration has always tried to portray antifa, a loose affiliation of people who dramatically think of themselves as anti-fascist fighters, as a coherent, organized terror threat. Now the White House is saying they are something like a transgender, anarchist SPECTRE supported by foreign nations—which nations, the report does not say.
And on and on it goes, until it gets to Iran, which the report calls “the greatest threat to the United States emanating from the Middle East.” The danger of Iranian terrorism is a reasonable concern, but only a year ago, the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy downplayed the threat from Iran. This change is significant: It’s almost as if something extremely dangerous happened over the past few months.
The report also notes the real and significant problem of the persecution of Christians in Africa and elsewhere. But even here, a tragedy is draped in the needless overstatement that Christians are “the most persecuted people on Earth.” This grim honor could more accurately be applied to various other groups, but it was likely included to please Trump’s evangelical base.
These various digressions have very little to do with terrorism, and although the report calls itself a “strategy,” it contains almost no strategic recommendations other than to do obvious things, such as identifying “terror actors and plots before they happen”; cutting off “their arms, funding, and recruiting streams”; and then destroying them by “taking necessary and specific actions in self-defense to neutralize imminent threats to the United States.” These generic exhortations are not a strategy. A strategy entails specific discussions of priorities and goals, how the instruments and means of national power will be brought to bear on those objectives, and the risks and rewards of various options.
The security analyst Kabir Taneja wrote on X that the document “looks like something written by an intern,” and Kayyem told me that the report is so badly done that it “mocks the American public” rather than informs it. The terrorism scholar Colin P. Clarke posted that “competent career CT professionals must be aghast at this slop” and that he “would give this a solid D+ grade.” I’m a former professor, and I might have given it something a smidge higher, but only if it had come from a clueless undergraduate who was encountering all of the concepts related to terrorism and counterterrorism for the first time. But it didn’t. Instead, this jumble was apparently the brainchild of Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism.
In Trump’s first term, Gorka was also an assistant to the president, and he lasted all of seven months, during which he did little besides fend off criticism for his alleged ties to a far-right group in Hungary and fight to gain a security clearance. After he was forced out, Gorka took up podcasting, continued to appear on television, and hawked fish-oil pills. Now that Trump has returned without adult gatekeepers in the White House, Gorka is back, and his involvement in this document explains a lot.
Gorka has no real experience in national security; his reputation in the MAGA movement rests on his devotion to Trump (of course), and his ostensible expertise as a scholar of terrorism and counterterrorism. Not that there’s anything wrong with academic expertise as a foundation for policy—I’m a big supporter of that idea—but Gorka isn’t much of a scholar. Other experts have noted that Gorka’s academic work is, to put it gently, subpar, including his 2008 Ph.D. from an undistinguished Hungarian university and his later paucity of scholarly publications.
Gorka has always brushed away such criticisms. “What I care about is if somebody in the field is reading my article,” he told The Washington Post in 2017. “I see myself as somebody who supports the bravest of the brave—the warfighter. Publish or be damned? I’ll be damned, thank you very much.” Part of serving the bravest included a stint at Marine Corps University, where he was hired, according to the Post profile, not as a government employee like other faculty, but as a chair funded by Thomas Saunders III, a major Republican Party donor.
Once he was at MCU, the Post report noted, “enthusiastic officers eagerly packed Gorka’s lectures, even as many faculty members took a dim view of his work.” Much like the shallow report he has now produced, Gorka’s teaching about terrorism, a former military faculty member told the Post, “made a difficult and complex situation simple and confirmed the officers’ prejudices and assumptions.” Another professor added: “The guy he was on Fox News is the guy he was here—bombastic and a showman.”
Gorka has taken some criticism for calling himself “doctor.” (I have no objection to that, although most of us with doctorates do not insist on the title.) The more substantive issue, however, is that Gorka claims to be an expert on jihadism and terror in the Middle East despite the fact that he speaks none of the languages of the region and until recently had never even spent time in the area. He is, like so many in the Trump administration, a mediocrity who holds a job for which he is not qualified, solely because of his connection to the president.
In any number of policy areas, appointing someone like Gorka might be merely an annoying waste of taxpayer money. In national security, however, allowing an unprepared nonexpert to handle counterterrorism strategy and advise the president of the United States—in the middle of a war with Iran, no less—represents an especially serious risk.
It is possible that Gorka’s “strategy” is meaningless and that his advice never reaches the Resolute Desk. Trump clearly likes Gorka, but less clear is whether Gorka is part of the small and informal circle that surrounds the president. In any case, every administration churns out its share of bumf. Some reports, such as the National Security Strategy, are required by law; when I was at the Naval War College, professors had to teach these documents, and the process that creates them, to our students. Not all of them are of equal importance, but they usually manage to explain a president’s goals and priorities to Congress, to the American people, and in some cases, to the world.
The 2026 Trump Counterterrorism Strategy fails even at this basic task of communication, which raises the question of why this undercooked report was released at all. As it turns out, Gorka may have been goaded into it by a journalist. Last month, the ProPublica reporter Hannah Allam wrote a story titled “The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan,” in which she noted that Gorka had repeatedly promised a strategy without delivering one. Nearly a year ago, she wrote, Gorka declared that the report was “imminent.” Gorka, she added, said last summer that “he was ‘on the cusp’ of unveiling the plan—a phrase he repeated three months later in October. And again in January.”
When Allam reached out to Gorka for comment, Gorka refused and instead posted on X that Allam was an “anti-American hack” and that she should go ahead and write her “putrid piece of hackery.” On May 4, Allam noted in a follow-up article that “exactly two months into the Iran war, Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy has yet to appear.” Two days later, the White House issued the document.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Trump’s security strategy is incoherent babble]
The poor quality of this putative strategy is a reminder of what happens when unserious people are asked to undertake a serious job. The United States always needs experienced national-security officials, especially in the field of counterterrorism during a war with a fanatical Islamic regime. Normally, these professionals formulate policy by meeting and cooperating in a complex interagency process that includes the National Security Council, the various agencies of the intelligence community, the Defense Department, and the FBI.
Gorka, however, is not only unqualified in the subject but also apparently winging the process. The National Security Council is moribund—its director, Marco Rubio, is busy also being the secretary of state—and both DOD and the FBI are led by immature men who are far out of their depth, one of whom, as my Atlantic colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported last week, even uses a bottle of bourbon as his calling card. Meanwhile, Iran has just survived two months of a military onslaught; the CIA reports that the regime in Tehran continues to maintain substantial capabilities and, more important, is nowhere near close to collapse.
At a time like this, Gorka’s Counterterrorism Strategy is worse than useless: It is dangerous. Its simplistic formulations loudly signal the Trump administration’s incompetence to the entire world. Foreign adversaries are unlikely to be intimidated; instead, they might even take some pleasure in knowing that the American government thinks drug dealers, transgender activists, and a bunch of street goons calling themselves “antifa” are as much a threat as transnational terror organizations and their state sponsors.
A document that should have explained the president’s plan to keep the American people safe during wartime is now on global display as a pathetic—and dangerous—joke. More than anything, it is a faithful reflection of the Trump administration itself: To judge from this report, America’s counterterrorism policy is unfocused, run by amateurs, and concerned more with Donald Trump’s many grievances than the security of the United States.