COUNTERTERRORISMCounterterrorism Implications of a Second Trump Presidency
As Trump’s longtime friend, the legendary boxer Mike Tyson, once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” The Trump administration will need to come into the White House on day one with a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy while preparing to absorb and respond to whatever punches terrorist groups will land during the next four years in office.
With the recent US presidential election ushering Donald J. Trump back into the White House as the 47th President of the United States, there has been much speculation on what foreign policy could look like over the course of his second stint in office. While it remains difficult to predict exactly how Trump’s tenure will compare to his first, the period of 2017-2021 does offer some clues, taken along with his most recent public pronouncements.
Rather than attempt to forecast the contours of a Trump Doctrine 2.0, this analysis takes a more modest objective as its goal: to assess how the Trump team will shape its approach to counter-terrorism, both at home and abroad.
Terror Threat Landscape Heading into 2025
The terrorist threat landscape looks much different heading into 2025 than it did back in 2017, when Trump first assumed office. When Trump took over from President Barack Obama, the Islamic State (ISIS) was arguably at its apex, controlling large swaths of territory and launching external operations in the West with impunity. To Trump’s credit, his strategy of taking the fight directly to ISIS was successful. Under his presidency, the US military and its coalition partners helped destroy ISIS’s physical caliphate, with the Syrian town of Baghouz falling in the spring of 2019. In October of that year, US special forces located and killed Islamic State emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
When Trump takes office in early January 2025, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, though attenuated, is still active. US Central Command confirmed in late October that it launched airstrikes against a number of ISIS targets in Syria, killing dozens of ISIS operatives and demonstrating that the group remains potent. ISIS propaganda continues to radicalise violent extremists throughout the globe, including in the West. There are a range of emerging technologies that could exacerbate the problem, especially if ISIS or other terrorist groups leverage artificial intelligence to augment their existing capabilities.
There is also the issue of remaining foreign fighters and their families that continue to languish in camps in northeastern Syria. In an effort to close the chapter on Syria altogether, Trump could seek to accelerate or force the repatriation of thousands of foreigners currently in places like al-Hol and al-Roj, a troubling prospect for many of the countries where these foreign nationals would be returned to.
