PerspectiveThe Fight in the Right: It Is Time to Tackle White Supremacist Terrorism Globally

In the summer of 2002 as an Air Force major, Robert Levinson was sent to Washington to work as deputy director of U.S. Southern Command’s office in the capital. U.S. Southern Command. He writes that the Southern Command had been regarded as the step-child of the geographic combatant commands, never getting the attention or money that our bigger brothers at U.S. Pacific Command or European Command got. There was no threat of major war, no weapons of mass destruction, and the terrorists we were dealing with, principally in Colombia, were largely local concerns.

In the summer of 2002, all of the commands had taken a back seat to U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command, which led the 9/11 wars then known as the “Global War on Terror.” We were keeping an eye on the FARC in Colombia, but FARC was not considered a terrorist organization of “global reach.”

Levinson writes in War on the Rocks that the distinction between fighting the FARC and the various incarnations of violent Islamist extremists like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and various other groups made sense. You fight local terrorists by strengthening local governments and governance, while global terrorists involve much broader and more complicated efforts.

He adds:

But now, sparked by the March 15 attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and reinforced by the April 28 attack at the synagogue in Poway, California and the latest shootings in Gilroy and El Paso, it may be time to consider whether terrorism variously categorized as being inspired by white supremacy, white nationalism, Neo-Nazi, etc., and its various manifestations and adherents, has reached the threshold of “terrorists of global reach” who are now claiming victims in the United States homeland. The El Paso shooter posted a diatribe online specifically citing the manifesto of the shooter in New Zealand as inspiration. This doesn’t seem far removed from the Ft. Hood shooter’s communication with a radical Islamic cleric overseas. Does the United States now need to devote resources and develop strategies to counter this threat with a level of effort similar to that which we devote to counter the Islamic State and other Islamic extremist groups?

That there is a serious domestic terrorist threat is not disputable, Levinson writes. Rather, it is the growing international component that requires new strategies and tools. In testimony before the House of Representatives in April, FBI director Christopher Wray included the threat from “white supremacist” with other forms of violent extremism as a “persistent, pervasive threat.” On July 23, Wray said that the agency has made about 100 domestic terrorism-related arrests since October, the majority of which were tied to white supremacy. “I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence, but it does include other things as well,” Wray said.

Levinson concludes:

Dealing with white supremacist terror will pose many challenges to our nation, and we will need to strike a careful balance, but we can’t shy away from the threat, wherever it may come from. Just as the Ft. Hood killer, a native born American citizen, should have been in our sights as he was becoming radicalized and communicating with terrorists overseas, we need to find ways to stop the next killer before he walks into another church in Charleston or another Walmart in Texas.