EPILOGUE: TERRORISM UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP

This book has attempted to provide predictions about general trends about terrorism, but it has avoided specifics. General trends are observable and should remain constant for some time unless something major occurs, but individualized predictions are likely to be disproven quickly, requiring humility on the part of the writers. Yet the election of Donald Trump is a structural feature that will affect terrorism for the near term, and quite possibly for generations, if he is successful in passing key legislation, such as his several attempts to ban Muslim immigration to the United States, or if for some reason he plays a major role in fracturing the European Union. At the time of this writing, he has already done the former and he has made overtures to the latter. As dangerous as speculating can be, a few macro-scale trends are emerging.

Whereas most policies Trump might pursue will have a temporal lag in regard to their influence, the one direct policy that will affect the problem immediately is his relationship with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Trump’s election coincided with the fall of Aleppo in December 2016 and changed American policy toward the conflict. In the final months of his administration, President Obama sought a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Syria, hoping to push Assad out and depriving Islamic terrorists of the necessary political oxygen to win local support. By that point, this seemed moot. Russia’s decisive intervention in November 2015 had undeniably rescued Assad from defeat, and with that, the regime had less incentive for negotiating or contemplating an exit plan. Although the United States and its allies were reluctant to confront Russia and Assad militarily, they could still question the moral legitimacy of any military outcome while still providing covert support to the moderate Syrian rebels. This has changed. President Trump campaigned on improving ties with Russia and even talked about cooperating with Putin on counterterrorism in Syria. Without this political pressure, Assad will remain a beacon for Islamic terrorists, all the while being unable to control the majority of Syria. This likely means the insurgency will continue, but also that groups like Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and IS will have ample territory to build training camps and to plot international attacks.

What about Trump’s strategy for combating terrorism? He campaigned on a largely nationalistic and overtly Islamophobic platform, and at one point, he claimed to have a secret strategy for defeating IS. He has been quite adamant that fighting modern terrorism involves calling it radical Islamic terrorism, in essence downplaying the threat posed by other strands of nonstate violence. His administration tried outlining its vision in its 2017 National Security Strategy. It involved traditional counterterrorism principles pursued by Trump’s predecessors, such as combating online radicalization and financiers. The document also discussed pressuring Pakistan to cease its support of terrorist groups, and countering Iranian meddling in the Middle East. Interestingly, the document does not mention radical Islamic terrorism, nor does it truly explain Trump’s approach to counterterrorism. Nevertheless, there are a few developments indicative of what his administration intends in the coming years.

First, he is loosening Obama-era regulations concerning violence toward civilians and giving the Pentagon greater leeway to authorize attacks in undeclared war zones. Obama’s policies, although criticized as overly limiting and cautious, were intended to reduce blowback from years of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan and to soften America’s image after the Iraq War. The hope was that fewer civilian casualties would undercut the propaganda value of potential military actions against terrorist groups. Trump’s second big step was promoting a more muscular military presence in places like Syria and Yemen. In March 2017, various news outlets leaked a plan to increase the number of ground forces deployed to Syria to help with the fight against Islamic State in Raqqa, but this is far from an invasion or occupation of territory. Other planks of this plan involve continued bombing and cutting Islamic State funding. Regarding Afghanistan, President Trump has not articulated a strategy, although his generals have requested an increase in the number of troops deployed to that theater. In early April 2017, he garnered international attention after authorizing the use of a GBU-43, nicknamed the “Mother of All Bombs,” or MOAB, against IS targets in Afghanistan. The use of the MOAB, the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in America’s arsenal, had tactical coherence. It destroyed a vast network of tunnels where IS was hiding and hoarding weapons and supplies. Whether this marks a change in policy is uncertain, but it did have an impressive psychological effect on the global public.

The one thing that is certain, as it has been a trend since 2001, is that American special operations forces (SOF) will see an increase in the number of troops, although the feasibility of this is questionable, given the cost and time required to properly train more special operators. More covert operations will occur to fight terrorism in a larger quantity. For all their skills in fighting and combating terrorists, their deployment should give one pause. An overreliance on SOF means that the government sees them as a panacea, without thinking through the fatigue they might suffer, how costly it is to train them, or how the present lack of oversight over most of these units affects their performance. The country became aware of these risks in the fall of 2017. In October, reports emerged that four SOF members and four soldiers from Niger were killed in an ambush by an IS affiliate. In November, a report emerged of an incident where two Navy SEALs killed a Green Beret in June 2017 after he threatened to inform their superiors they were stealing money. These incidents, though disparate in nature, shed light on the vulnerability of these units to both overuse and misuse.

Whether these moves make the world safer from terrorism is debatable. Certainly there will be more dead terrorists, but in very honest terms, this seems like a continuation of President Obama’s kinetic counterterrorism efforts, but with more aggression. To his credit, President Trump has had some important successes. Under his watch, coalition forces retook Mosul, Raqqa, and other cities critical to IS’s caliphate project. Yet what these policies do not do is find a way to cut off the political oxygen that keeps terrorism alive, which was the other component of Obama’s strategy for fighting IS. With Trump’s proposed budget cuts toward international diplomatic efforts and in aid across the world, countries will find themselves strapped for resources and more vulnerable to being overwhelmed by terrorists. This is to say that Trump’s counterterrorism policy is in essence an overreliance on tactical tools to avoid investing in the necessary resources to formulate a strategy with a clear endgame for terrorism.

The other ways that Trump can affect the nature of terrorism are more abstract, making their consequences difficult to pin down if they ever come together, and that is largely through his rhetoric. Much of Trump’s electoral success occurred by normalizing behavior that before would have been considered unethical or anathema to any politician running for office in a major Western country. From his vocal distrust of Latin American immigrants and Muslims, he has created a climate where certain strains of American society feel empowered to act against these groups. This was covered at length before when discussing the prominence of right-wing terrorist organizations domestically and the rise of hate groups since he won the election. It is worrisome, though, that the United States appears so reactive to any act of violence committed by individuals with Middle Eastern names, with large sections of the country immediately up in arms the moment news breaks out. Contrast this with how inured its society appears when stories about mass shooters appear and the relative death toll of each. From an outsider’s perspective, there seems to be a problem of unbalanced expectations and major threat inflation.

If he manages to turn any of his rhetoric into policy, things will become more problematic. His attempts in January and March 2017 to restrict immigration to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Yemen and Iraq, were quickly shot down by courts because they were unapologetically Muslim bans. Even though he couched his executive orders in the language of national security, the courts found his justification wanting vis-à-vis the Constitution’s protection of freedom of religion. Trump’s case was not helped by campaign promises he had made and comments by his surrogates, which spoke of this effort as a Muslim ban designed to appear as legal as possible. The attempted ban was self-sabotaging from the beginning. As analysts explained, the ban applied to countries whose citizens had not committed acts of terrorism against the United States and instead affected countries that were important partners for the United States in its counterterrorism efforts abroad, notably Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. He was partially successful in his third attempt in September. This version of the ban included a few non-Muslim countries, including Venezuela and North Korea, but the ban still faces legal challenge.

Abroad, Trump’s inflammatory language and attempted policies like the Muslim ban are perfectly suited for sound bites used in propaganda videos by groups like Islamic State or al-Qaeda. His vilifying of the entire Muslim world and his castigation of Islam as a terroristic religion justify the worldview of Salafist jihadists, who regard the West with suspicion and hostility, believing it to be opposed to Islam in general. Trump did the world no favors by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. There was not the expected surge in violence immediately after his announcement, but American diplomatic stations across the world immediately issued alerts to American citizens about the heightened risk. Trump’s move, aside from accomplishing little diplomatically, reinforces the jihadist depiction of the United States as a crusader state. In this sense, Trump not only validates terrorist propaganda and facilitates recruitment but also encourages the much-maligned “Clash of Civilizations” thesis first put out by Samuel Huntington in 1996, in which he wrote that religious identities were the source of all coming conflicts. Indeed, even if recruitment and radicalization do not increase from Trump’s rhetoric, his distrust of Muslims may well affect relations with Middle Eastern allies who are crucial in the fight against terrorism. If, previously, Osama bin Laden in part justified his hatred of the United States because it stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, Middle Eastern governments might find themselves less willing to assist the United States in its counterterrorism efforts to avoid inspiring anger in their citizens.

Regarding Europe, this effect is purely secondary or tertiary, depending on how one chooses to analyze a potential breakup of the European Union or NATO, but it is worth discussing briefly, although it is mainly a topic outside the scope of this book. All the bad things that Donald Trump can do to encourage terrorism will affect the continent more directly because of its proximity to the Middle East. Right-wing populists have gained in the polls and according to several prominent surveys, the continent is experiencing anxiety towards immigrants from Muslim States.1 The United States, as the so-called leader of the free world, can shape the discourse of what is permissible rhetorically and policy-wise. The United States pursuing a ban targeting exclusively Muslims only gives fodder to populists in Europe, which will only aggravate relations with Muslims domestically. Even if no similar ban is passed, attempts like this will appear in propaganda, undeniably making Europeans bigger targets for attacks.

More worrisome is the notion of Donald Trump’s encouraging the breakup of the European Union or NATO. The last American ambassador to the EU under President Obama suggested that Trump did indeed want the former, a concern that many European leaders share. In fact, the European Council president, Donald Tusk, actually listed the United States as a threat to the continent in February 2017. At other times, Trump has questioned the utility of NATO, arguing that most member states are not paying their dues and the United States ought to stop subsidizing their security. This matters for a few reasons. In practical terms, Europe is the first line of defense against Islamic terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Its proximity means it can control air, land, and sea routes that would-be terrorists targeting the United States can take. And given that Europe has been a staging ground for plots against North America before, greater European unity means that more resources can be dedicated toward monitoring and dismantling plots. The EU is also the route many foreign fighters take to arrive in Syria; it is well positioned to stem the flow.

More than that, the continent as a whole is a bulwark that supports American diplomatic efforts to end conflicts across the world. European leaders have played important diplomatic roles in attempting to force Assad out of power and to empower moderate Syrian rebels. They have also been critical in supporting American counterterrorism training missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Africa, Nigeria, and other places. These efforts are aggregated tremendously through the prism of NATO, which enables the United States to draw upon additional resources in times of need. As such, European allies have been critical linchpins in those moments when the United States has carried out large-scale counterterrorism missions, providing supporting or leading roles. In Libya, the effort to oust Qaddafi was spearheaded by the British and the French, and both countries continue seeking to stabilize the situation through the use of SOF. The French also were critical in pushing out al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb from Mali after it managed to take over the northern half of the country, although this was not a NATO-led effort. And the United States cannot forget how NATO allies responded diligently to the attacks on 9/11, they themselves activating Article 5 to express solidarity with the country. In fact, they helped shoulder the burden in stabilizing Afghanistan after the United States began focusing on Iraq and have continued supporting stabilization efforts there for the past fifteen years. In other words, Trump’s muscular foreign policy, which prioritizes American interests first, will enervate one of the key tools that has benefited the United States for many years and will undermine the country’s ability to deter, contain, or fight terrorism in the world.

What is curious about the deleterious effect of the Trump phenomenon is that he might increase terrorism simply through politics and not through military action alone. This is the opposite problem that plagued President Bush during the Iraq War, where people argued that the invasion made it more likely the United States would be attacked while he simultaneously tried making a distinction between Islam and terrorism. As it stands right now, at a minimum, Trump has four years to change things structurally, but there are other centrifugal forces at play that can limit him. Domestically, the American foreign policy bureaucracy tends to be slow moving and hard to alter, unless there is major agreement with Congress and if the American judiciary finds his actions constitutional. Whether the Republican-led Congress will rubber-stamp Trump’s proposed cuts to foreign aid or his policies stand up to judicial scrutiny is uncertain. Early indicators suggest this might not be the case, with early polls from his presidency showing high levels of disapproval, affecting the willingness of Republicans to bandwagon with him if it might cost them reelection. The judiciary seems to be resistant to Trump’s more extreme policies as well, and there is increasing distrust by the institution as a whole after his numerous attacks against judges during his election and after he assumed the presidency.

Western Europe also seems resistant to Trump’s policies. After Geert Wilders’s loss in the Dutch parliamentary elections of March 2017, it is evident that there is a limited appeal to right-wing anti-EU populism that favors Trump. Afterward, Europe endured its biggest test during the French elections of April/May 2017. Again, the anti-populist forces won out, and Marine Le Pen saw herself losing the elections. While this victory is powerful, it should give the public cause of concern that around one-third of the French electorate cast its vote to Le Pen, suggesting her ideas have purchase in large portions of French society. The next big test was Germany. Angela Merkel soundly won reelection, but the AfD, a Eurosceptic far-right party, for the first time in its history won seats in the German parliament after receiving more than 12 percent of the vote. If these countries stave off extremist challenges and maintain a moderate path forward, then the core countries of the EU (Germany, Italy, France, Spain, among others) can limit the contagion of Trump’s policies and rhetoric. Some countries in central and eastern Europe, such as Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, are a different matter entirely. They have been part of the recent populist wave surging across Europe, but they do not wield much influence in the EU.

In summary, trying to predict the future of terrorism under Trump is difficult beyond stating that it carries the potential to make things easier for extremists to thrive. Unless there is some moderation in his policies, all proposals just seem to increase the probability that people will radicalize and attack. None of this is deterministic, of course, but it does change the perceived possibilities for would-be terrorists everywhere. Furthermore, the terrorist threat will continue unless his government finds a solution for ending the conflict in Syria, which seems to be the main driver for terrorism outside of the Middle East currently. Until then, what is most likely to happen is a continuation, and perhaps an increase, in terrorism and not a decline or end for the phenomenon.