Brigadier General (Ret.) Dr. Saud Al-Sharafat
Founder and Director, Shurufat Center for Globalization and Terrorism Studies (SCGTS)
Amman, Jordan
The significance of the new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy for 2026 does not lie solely in its emphasis on the use of force or the expansion of deterrence tools. Rather, it stems from the profound intellectual shift it reflects in the way the United States understands the roots and sources of contemporary terrorism. While previous U.S. counterterrorism strategies focused primarily on confronting armed terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the new strategy goes a step further by reassessing the ideological and organizational environment that it views as having contributed to the emergence, sustenance, and continued survival of these organizations over the decades.
What is particularly noteworthy is that the document does not treat terrorism merely as a series of violent acts carried out by isolated armed groups. Instead, it approaches terrorism as an integrated system encompassing ideology, organization, financing, and transnational networks. Within this framework, the strategy explicitly identifies the Muslim Brotherhood as the historical and organizational origin from which modern terrorist movements emerged. This represents an unprecedented shift in official U.S. discourse regarding terrorism and Islamist movements.
For decades, political, academic, and security circles in the United States and the broader West maintained a clear distinction between what was commonly referred to as political Islam and armed terrorist organizations. Numerous policies and analytical frameworks were built upon the assumption that Islamist movements operating in the political or religious sphere were fundamentally different from organizations that employ violence and terrorism to achieve their objectives. The new strategy, however, reflects a significant reassessment of this assumption and suggests that some U.S. policymakers no longer regard the separation between the two spheres as either clear-cut or as definitive as previously believed.
The importance of this shift extends beyond the designation of certain Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Sudan as terrorist organizations. More importantly, it reflects the adoption of a broader strategic vision that links the Brotherhood’s ideological and organizational structure to the evolution of numerous terrorist organizations that have emerged over the past several decades. This approach is likely to influence future sanctions policies, security cooperation, intelligence-sharing mechanisms, and the broader framework governing U.S. relations with a number of political actors across the Middle East.
Undoubtedly, this shift will remain the subject of considerable academic and political debate. Many researchers, analysts, and scholars will continue to challenge the direct linkage between the Muslim Brotherhood and armed terrorist organizations. Others, however, will argue that the strategy reflects a conclusion reached by U.S. security institutions after decades of monitoring the evolution of radical Islamist movements and their transnational networks, as well as documenting patterns of ideological and organizational overlap between such movements and terrorist organizations.
Nevertheless, what is difficult to ignore is that the new U.S. strategy represents a major turning point in official counterterrorism doctrine. It not only redefines the nature of the terrorist threat but also reexamines the relationship between political Islam and violent extremism from the perspective of U.S. national security. For this reason, future historians and researchers may well regard the 2026 strategy as a watershed moment in the evolution of American thinking on how to address Islamist terrorism, much as the September 11 attacks marked a historic turning point in an earlier era.
In my view, regardless of whether one supports or opposes this approach, the central message of the strategy is unmistakable: the United States is no longer focused solely on combating existing terrorist organizations. It is also seeking to target what it considers the ideological and organizational roots that produced and facilitated the growth and spread of those organizations. The strategy has also broken a long-standing barrier within many academic, research, and political circles, where drawing a direct connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist organizations—from Al-Qaeda to ISIS and their affiliated branches and formations—was often regarded as a highly sensitive subject, surrounded by hesitation, caution, and, at times, fear.
Today, that linkage is no longer merely a hypothesis advanced by a limited number of researchers or experts. It has become part of the official framework through which the U.S. administration approaches contemporary counterterrorism policy.
Should this approach continue under future administrations, the world may be witnessing the beginning of a comprehensive redefinition of counterterrorism concepts and policies at both the regional and international levels. The strategic, political, and security implications of such a shift would extend far beyond the Middle East, potentially influencing the broader architecture of the international system itself.
