Welcome again Foreign PolicyStatus Report.
Well, here’s what’s going on for the day: The new US President Donald Trump counter-terrorism strategyIran considers a the new American proposal to end the warand Israel attacked Beirut for the first time in weeks.
Welcome again Foreign PolicyStatus Report.
Well, here’s what’s going on for the day: The new US President Donald Trump counter-terrorism strategyIran considers a the new American proposal to end the warand Israel attacked Beirut for the first time in weeks.
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a new citizen counter-terrorism strategy which explains the attitude of his administration regarding the threats of terrorism inside and outside the country. The strategy is indicative of the ways Trump has tried to reshape US national security priorities and reframe what should be considered a terrorist threat.
The document marks the fight against drug gangs in the Western World as the administration’s first priority, moving away from the anti-terrorism strategies of Trump’s predecessors that placed more emphasis on emerging threats. from the jihadists or groups of white people who believe they are white in America.
The release of the strategy comes more than eight months after the Trump administration began a controversial campaign of deadly attacks against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Trump has mentioned these strikes as part of the fight against “narcoterrorists” who produce and sell drugs that kill Americans.
Legal experts they have said strikes violate local and international laws. They have also pushed back the notion that drug cartels or traffickers can be considered terrorists.
“Criminal organizations are not terrorist groups,” Colin Clarke, senior counterterrorism expert and executive director of the Soufan Center, told SitRep. That doesn’t mean such groups aren’t a threat, Clarke said, but the U.S. shouldn’t use its military to counter them. “That should be a law enforcement action,” he said.
Sebastian Gorka, the controversial White House counterterrorism director behind the strategy, was expected to release the document months ago and has faced scrutiny over the delay.
Common sense? The strategy also focuses heavily on less well-known left-wing extremist groups. “Our national (counter-terrorism) efforts will also prioritize the rapid identification and elimination of violent secular political groups whose ideologies are anti-American, sexist and anarchist,” the document says.
Although the strategy says that Trump has returned the United States to “common sense and the fight against terrorism,” that is open to debate. For example, the document makes no mention of far-right or far-right politics or white supremacist groups—despite the well-documented threat.
Clarke described the document as “Orwellian” and “an exercise in gaslighting.” It begins by pledging to implement a “truth-based” strategy to combat political terrorism but continues to repeatedly criticize former US President Joe Biden and “continue to completely ignore the threat from right-wing terrorist groups or people motivated by far-right ideas,” he said.
Although the experts it raised concerns about the growing support for political violence across the spectrum in the United States, Clarke emphasized that empirical evidence shows the worst terrorist attacks in recent years have been linked to far-right extremism—pointing to the 2022 shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and the 2018 shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among others.
‘Toenail deep.’ In addition to emphasizing drug cartels and left-wing extremism, the strategy also lists “legacy Islamic terrorists” as among the “major types of terrorist groups” the United States is currently fighting. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” Clarke said. “Yes, we still face the jihadist threat.”
But the strategy is “nail-in” in this regard, and provides few specific details about the capabilities of the jihadist groups that Washington is dealing with, Clarke added: “It’s not a strategy and more of a worldview.”
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Iran’s waiting game. Trump’s efforts to find a way out of the Iran war continued amid another week of chaos, with Iran saying Wednesday that it will consider the US peace proposal and submit its response to Pakistan, which has been a mediation between the countries.
In Social Reality post on Wednesday, Trump threatened Iran with more bombings “at a higher level and with more severity than ever before” if it does not agree to US terms and expressed hope later in the day that the Iranians “want to make a deal,” saying that the war was “very good” and “would end quickly.”
The remarks came a day after Trump suspended “Project Freedom” — a naval operation to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz — over widely reported opposition from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to using military bases in their region for the operation. However, The Wall Street Journal information that both countries returned the opposition, paving the way for the operation to resume.
Meanwhile, a secret CIA assessment information and Washington Post showed that the Iranian regime could survive Trump’s sanctions on Iranian ports for several months.
Israel bombed Lebanon before the talks. Elsewhere in the region, Israel threatened a ceasefire with Lebanon air attack about Beirut that killed more than a dozen people, including the top leader of Hezbollah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said. “This is how it is done and this is how it will be done,” Netanyahu said in a post on X.
Efforts to broker a ceasefire continue, however, with the US State Department saying that talks between Israel and Lebanon will resume in Washington next week.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio leaving the courtyard of San Damaso in the Vatican after a private audience with Pope Leo XIV on May 7. Andrew Medichini/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Saturday, May 9: The Hungarian parliament is holding a session to vote for Peter Magyar as prime minister.
Russian President Vladimir Putin leads a military parade in Moscow to mark Russia’s World War II Victory Day.
Tuesday, May 12: The Bahamas is holding a general election.
Thursday, May 14: Trump begins a bilateral visit in Beijing.
Commanders of US Central Command and US Africa Command testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Friday, May 15: Jerome Powell’s term as chairman of the US Federal Reserve is coming to an end.
228-The number of US military assets in the Middle East that Iran has damaged or destroyed in the war, according to for a Washington Post analysis of satellite images.
“That’s a low-T (testosterone) approach to threats to the United States.”
-Gorka on opposition to the Iran war, after denouncing critics of the war as “with a prostate challenge.”
