The New US Counter-Terrorism Strategy: Selective Amnesia

On 6 May 2026 the White House released the new United States Counterterrorism Strategy, the first comprehensive articulation of terrorist threat priorities for the second Trump administration. There has been significant reaction to what has been included in this strategy and its politicised tenor, despite insistent claims of being “apolitical”. The strategy’s domestic priorities in particular have drawn wide commentary, including the questionable elevation of Antifa as a core terrorist threat and the conspicuous omission of Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism (REMVE), the US category that encompasses far right extremism. This analysis focuses on a less examined dimension: the consequences for the multilateral counter-terrorism (CT) framework the US helped construct.

It is fair to characterise this strategy as an exercise in selective amnesia. What is specifically – and perhaps strategically – missing are any references at all to a policy of prevention, the relevance of human rights and rule of law in CT, and the existence of the substantial body of international legal, policy, and institutional obligations that the US largely helped develop. The consequences of this omission extend well beyond politics. This analysis argues that the new US CT Strategy holds not only concrete implications for the stability of the multilateral CT framework, but also the viability of prevention-focused programming in regions most acutely affected by terrorism. This piece traces what has been built, what is now being abandoned, and how this is likely to impact our collective ability to address the very real and evolving threat of terrorism.

The Dawn of Multilateral CT

The period of counter-terrorism following 9/11 was marked by the US-led Global War on Terror. The impact of this political-military campaign was multi-faceted - much of it negative - but it spurred two important outcomes: a galvanising of human rights responses to CT excesses, and a shift in CT from being solely a national security and law enforcement matter to an exercise in multilateral security coordination. With the globalisation of the terrorism threat, this evolution was both necessary and overdue.

In 2006, the UN launched the first Global Counterterrorism Strategy which included a dedicated “Pillar” focused on human rights and rule of law as an intentional guardrail against the potential abuses of CT policy. The establishment the previous year of the position of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism was another clear sign of this priority. What had become foundational to CT policy post-Global War on Terror (GWOT) era was the understanding that hard security responses that violated human rights often fostered terrorist recruitment and produced a backlash effect.

The multilateral counter-terrorism framework, however, faced critical challenges, most importantly the inability of the UN to develop a consensus on the definition of terrorism.  That definitional void has been more than a political or academic inconvenience; it created structural ambiguity that states could exploit. Human rights advocates, legal scholars, and the UN Special Rapporteurs have warned repeatedly and very recently that this definitional gap  could lead states to misuse CT laws against legitimate dissent, stigmatise minority populations, and restrict civil society. These concerns are not hypothetical, but documented risks, and relevant to this new US CT Strategy.

Prevention as a Priority 

Over the past two decades, another meaningful development has been the emergence of Prevention as a central component of CT policy. Growing recognition of the limits of traditional law enforcement CT responses in addressing online radicalisation and ideologically inspired actors operating independently birthed countering violent extremism (CVE) policy. Building upon domestic police-led engagement programmes in the UK and Denmark, in 2011 the White House, under the first Obama administration, released a first comprehensive domestic strategy on preventing violent extremism, focused on community-level partnerships. On the international front, US Agency for International Development (USAID) introduced its own complementary prevention framework, offering guidance on tackling root causes of violent extremism and insurgency, later codified in the 2019 Global Fragility Act.

Prevention was also a feature of US-led multilateral engagement. In 2011, the US co-launched and funded the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), an informal multilateral body made up of 30 global states, to promote good practices in civilian-led responses to terrorism with a particular emphasis on rule-of-law-based CT and preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE). This led to the creation of three institutions designed to build capacity in P/CVE and support human rights-led counter-terrorism practices globally: the Global Community Engagement Fund (GCERF), the Hedayah Center, and the International Center for Justice and the Rule of Law (IIJ).  In the subsequent years, US State Department funding also began to prioritise large-scale multi-country P/CVE capacity building programmes, such as the Leaders against Intolerance and Violent Extremism, developed and implemented by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Much of the capacity building carried out by these programmes concentrated on regions facing the challenges of violent extremism in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia.  

Over the past two decades, a focus on Prevention and human rights-led CT became foundational to the work of the EU, the OSCE, and the African Union, and informed the growth of UN CT mandates and programmes. These principles have normalised in soft law over the past 15 years, reflecting a dense web of decisions, memoranda, policies, and strategies on the international, regional, and national levels. This is the CT landscape as we know it today. The evolution of this field was messy and at times incongruent, involving actors from both development and security sectors who did not always share the same instincts or incentives, and bringing together states facing diverse security challenges. But, ultimately, a field of institutions, policies, and programmes was established that was firmly grounded in the hard-won understanding that modern terrorism required a global coalition of partners committed to addressing its root causes, prioritising prevention and operating within a human rights-centred framework. This was bolstered by substantial research funding that advanced an understanding of radicalisation pathways, developed nuanced distinctions among different groups and contexts, and built the analytic frameworks needed for effective, contextualised responses. 

Strategic Omission

All of this: the research, the evidence base, the policy development, the multilateral coordination and partnerships – much of it led and funded by the United States – is now completely absent from this new strategy. 

The language of this strategy reflects a rigid and overtly unilateral security mindset. The overarching goal is to “crush the threat”, multilateralism is absent, and the US’s closest security allies are accused of being “incubators of terrorist threats”. There is no mention of human rights. There is not a single reference to the United Nations or international obligations. Furthermore, the strategy conflates terrorist groups and criminal gangs with limited substantiation. While the intersection of criminal activity and terrorism is not new, and the damage of drug cartels real, designating them as terrorist organisations represents the sort of overreach that undermines CT policy. Ironically, the United States has now entered the very definitional void it once cautioned others against.

This strategy is not merely a tonal shift or strategic reprioritisation. The document demonstrates a form of selective institutional amnesia in which much of the accumulated knowledge from the post-9/11 era has simply been disregarded. 

It is worth noting, in this context, that the Global War on Terror, for all its profound failings, at least operated within the framework of international law. However superficially, it sought legitimacy: the US invoked the right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, engaged the Security Council, built multilateral coalitions, and framed US actions in terms of collective security. It acknowledged, at a minimum, the system of global governance it helped to establish. This strategy is overtly indifferent to international law, multilateral partnerships, and established obligations, and makes no attempt to situate current counter-terrorism policy within any global order. This is not GWOT 2.0 but rather a new and more complete form of isolated disengagement.

The 7 January 2026 White House Presidential Memoranda foreshadowed these developments, announcing the US withdrawal from the GCTF, GCERF, IIJ, and 63 other international organisations and entities, many of which are central to the multilateral security landscape the US helped construct. The new counter-terrorism strategy logically continues this approach: not just withdrawing from institutions but repudiating the very ideas that informed their creation.

Counter-terrorism discourse has always had a domestic symbolic function. The GWOT was never simply about operational threat mitigation; it also organised political identity and legitimacy narratives of national cohesion. Much of the analysis of that period highlights how heavy-handed CT security policy often serves as a bellwether – a measure of a country’s internal disfunction and polarisation. Using that lens, this strategy can be read as a politicised deflection, myopic in its view of the threat landscape, and blind to the international infrastructure designed to address it.

The EU’s Mantle

The consequences of this disengagement are not abstract. The regions most acutely affected by terrorism today – the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia – are precisely those where US-funded P/CVE programming and institutional capacity building have been most active. The withdrawal of that support does not in itself cause instability, but it removes internationally coordinated efforts to address underlying drivers at the moment they are most needed, and mid-stream. The question of what replaces this investment remains open, but ungoverned spaces in CT policy, like ungoverned spaces in territory, rarely stay empty.

This pivot raises important questions about the regression of policy, the erasure of technocratic expertise, and the erosion of institutional memory. US leadership in the multilateral CT framework provided political legitimacy and normative weight that other actors cannot easily replace. When the country that helped construct the rules of global governance chooses to “forget” them, it does not just weaken the system; it licenses others to do the same. A CT landscape without accountability to human rights and rule of law does not become more stable; it becomes more enabling of the very conditions that drive radicalisation and recruitment. The historical record on this is unambiguous.

The multilateral system has not collapsed yet. The 9th review of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy is underway, and the EU continues to play an active leadership role within the GCTF, among others. However, the burden of leadership now falls, more than ever, on Europe. The EU and its member states have the institutional infrastructure and the policy commitment to hold the bar high. Yet doing so will require resisting the same domestic pressures that have made this US strategy possible. European leaders face their own significant electoral anxieties and politicised dynamics wrapped around perceptions of foreign threats. The EU should read this strategy as a call to re-affirm its own commitment to maintaining the standards of evidence-based, human rights-led, and multilaterally-aligned CT. 

This article represents the views of the author(s) solely. ICCT is an independent foundation, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy unless clearly stated otherwise.

Photo credit: Tom Wilson/ Unsplash