President-elect Donald Trump's campaign pledge to wage war on "radical Islamic terrorism" is about to become U.S. policy.
In its emphasis on ideology, it is a war that puts him at
odds with his two immediate predecessors. While both former President George W.
Bush and President Barack Obama have avoided casting the war on terror in
ideological terms for fear of alienating Muslim allies, Trump has stressed that
very dimension and the need to counter it ideologically.
"Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a
major foreign policy goal of the United States," Trump said in April in
the first of two major foreign policy speeches he delivered during the
campaign. "Events may require the use of military force. But it's also a
philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War."
More than campaign rhetoric, it seems to be a deeply held
view. In the weeks since his Nov. 8 election, Trump has steadfastly stuck to
his hardline position on terror even as he's softened his views on other
hot-button issues.
After a Tunisian man drove a truck through a crowded
Christmas market in Berlin last month, killing 12 people, Trump tweeted:
"This is a purely religious threat, which turned into reality. Such
hatred! When will the U.S., and all countries, fight back?"
And when he was asked about his controversial campaign
call to bar Muslims from entering the country, he replied: "You know my
plans all along — I've been proven to be right."
Blaise Misztal, director of the national security program
at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, said Trump sees radical Islam as
an ideological threat to his nationalistic vision of "making America great
again."
"I think by seeing the threat as an ideological one,
President Trump will see the problem as not just stopping attacks but stopping
the spread of that ideology and stopping the potential for further
radicalization," Misztal said.
Evolving view
Trump wasn't always so hawkish on fighting terror. Nor
was he the first to warn about radical Islam.
The credit for popularizing the phrase goes to his
Republican rivals — and some of his subsequent advisers, such as incoming chief
strategist Stephen Bannon — who repeatedly chastised Obama for refusing to
utter the words. Indeed, in his June 2015 presidential announcement, Trump made
no mention of radical Islam and called China a "bigger problem" than
Islamic State.
But Trump's rhetoric grew increasingly bellicose as the
campaign wore on and a rash of terrorist attacks in Europe and the United
States unnerved voters, leading him to make some of his campaign's most
incendiary comments and proposals.
After a terror attack in Paris in November 2015 and a
deadly shooting by a Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California, the following
month, Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
In March 2015, he told CNN that "Islam hates
us" and later defended his comment, saying "large portions of
Muslims" have "tremendous hatred" for the West. And two months
later when a Muslim-American gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in
Orlando, Trump blamed the violence on radical Islam and said he favored a
suspension of immigration from countries with "a proven history of
terrorism."
'Ideological warfare'
In August, with Americans still jittery over terrorism,
Trump delivered what some experts saw as his most coherent policy statement on
national security. Comparing radical Islam to fascism and communism, he
championed a "new approach" and a "long-term plan" to fight
what he branded an "ideology of death."
"All actions should be oriented around this goal,
and any country which shares this goal will be our ally," he told
supporters at Youngstown University in Ohio, echoing Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric.
He advocated "ideological warfare" against
Islamic State and vowed to work with NATO and "our friends in the Middle
East" and to find "common ground" with Russia to defeat the
group.
"My administration will aggressively pursue joint
and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international
cooperation to cut off their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and
cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting," he
said. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.
Trump said the common thread among terrorist attacks
since 9/11 was the involvement of immigrants or the children of immigrants, and
he called for an ideological test for immigrants to screen out those who do not
"share our values and respect our people.”
The policy implications of Trump's call to arms remain to
be seen. Colin Clarke, a political scientist at RAND, said it is too early to
tell how the rhetoric of Trump and his advisers translates into policy.
"That still doesn't tell you what he'll do
differently in terms of combating the threat," Clarke said. "It
doesn't tell you how he's going to allocate resources any differently than the
Obama administration."
Homeland secure
Critics of Obama's refusal to acknowledge a link between
terrorism and Islam hailed Trump's drive to highlight the issue, but they
cautioned against painting the world's 1.5 billion Muslims with a broad
ideological brush.
"Actually it does have something to do with
Islam," said former CIA Director Michael Hayden. "A lot of it is
about Islam. But I quickly add, it's not all about Islam, and for God's sake,
it's not about all Muslims."
Apart from his controversial Muslim ban and proposal to
work with Russia, nearly everything Trump has proposed to fight terror —
bombing IS, working with Middle Eastern allies, and using drones and special
forces — are policies that have been carried out by the Obama administration.
"I haven't seen anything [new]," Clarke said.
"I've been looking. Trust me. I think a lot of people have."
In securing the American homeland against terrorist
attacks since 9/11, the U.S. may have exhausted nearly all the law enforcement,
investigative and intelligence tools at its disposal, Hayden said. While
mass-casualty attacks like 9/11 have grown highly improbable, he warned that
so-called lone wolf attacks by homegrown extremists will be hard to prevent.
New strategy?
According to Pentagon data, in the two years since the
U.S. launched a bombing campaign to roll back IS, coalition aircraft have
carried out nearly 17,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, damaging or destroying
nearly 32,000 targets.
"Getting tough" has its limits, Hayden
cautioned. "I'm fond of saying, if being tough is all you needed, if you
could kill your way out of this, we'd have been done a decade ago," Hayden
said.
But Trump advisers say the threat of international
terrorism has grown over the last eight years and requires a new strategy.
"I do think there are, there are clear and broad
distinctions between the past administration and the future
administration," said James Carafano, director of foreign policy studies
at the conservative Heritage Foundation who advises the Trump transition team
on foreign policy. "And it's logical that there ought to be big changes
because by almost every observable measure, the problem of transnational
terrorism is worse than it was eight years ago."