Washington — U.S. counterterrorism officials will meet with international partners on Friday to ask how allies can boost efforts to combat terrorist threats, especially from Iran and in the Strait of Hormuz, a White House official said.
A new counterterrorism strategy, signed by President Trump on Tuesday, seeks to crack down on Islamist terror groups, drug cartels and violent domestic political groups.
Seb Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism at the White House National Security Council, told reporters that the U.S. will be seeking more from allied countries that want to be viewed as “serious” nations.
“We have a very simple metric: if you want to be measured as a serious nation, whether it is protecting tankers in the Strait of Hormuz or whether it is working against jihadi threats in the Sahel of Africa, we expect more from you. The idea that there is one hyper-power in the world, America, and it will protect all from every threat, is untenable. We reject the concept of global police officer,” Gorka said.
“We will be discussing the new counterterrorism strategy and working together to say, ‘OK, how can you step up to the plate in ways which complement what we wish to achieve?'”
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Gorka outlined the United States’ new 16-page strategy, saying it prioritizes drug cartels and Islamist terror groups, as well as violent political groups whose ideologies are “anti-American, radically pro-gender or anarchist, such as antifa.”
He declined to describe classified steps that will be taken, but said the administration will work to identify threats — and leaders and followers of violent or terrorist groups — and neutralize them by law enforcement efforts, kinetic means or by strangling their financial resources.
The strategy aims to incapacitate cartels until they can no longer bring drugs or trafficking victims into the U.S., Gorka said.
The administration will put pressure on the top five Islamist jihadi groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization, until they can no longer recruit terrorists, Gorka said. He said “stragglers” from ISIS in Syria and Iran have relocated to African nations, seeking “ungoverned space.”
The U.S. strategy also aims to cripple left-wing extremist efforts before innocent Christians and conservatives are killed, he said. It isn’t targeted at specific labeled groups, Gorka added, but targets anyone who thinks violence for political purposes is justified.
Gorka said: “We see a threat, we will respond to it, and we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend Charlie Kirk.”
“We will not permit politically motivated violence in the United States from either side of the aisle, but the sad truth is the left has far more politically motivated assassinations or attempted assassinations, to its credit in recent years, not the right.”
