The Trump administration on Wednesday released a new counter-terrorism strategy — a 16-page document drafted under the supervision of Sebastian Gorka — that names migration as having made Europe an “incubator” for terrorism, places drug cartels in the Americas at the centre of US counter-terrorism efforts, and explicitly identifies “violent left-wing extremists,” including what it calls “radically pro-transgender” groups, as domestic priorities. The document is the first formal articulation of the administration’s terrorism doctrine since taking office, and it lands in the middle of an already strained transatlantic relationship: tariff ultimatums on European cars, the unilateral troop drawdown from Germany, and an ongoing argument about who is funding what in Ukraine. European governments responded with a combination of formal protest and visible exhaustion.
The received wisdom
The mainstream European reaction has been close to unanimous: the document is reckless, factually thin, and politically self-serving. To declare an entire continent an “incubator” for terrorism is to ignore the actual data — the years in which the largest single source of jihadist plotting against US targets was domestic, the steady decline in successful European attacks since 2017, the role of European intelligence services in disrupting transatlantic plots that American agencies had missed. The framing about transgender activism is read as a culture-war flourish dressed up in security language. The cartel emphasis is read as a pretext for the administration’s ongoing pressure on Mexico and the kinetic posture in the Caribbean. And the document arrives, embarrassingly, the same week US forces are exchanging fire with Iranian assets in the Strait of Hormuz — a reminder that whatever the administration’s domestic preoccupations, the threat picture has not been replaced. Most of these objections have force.
A different read
But the document is also doing something the European response cannot quite bring itself to engage with on the merits, and conservatives who instinctively recoil from Gorka’s prose should resist the temptation to dismiss the underlying argument because the messenger is unattractive. The “incubator” charge, stripped of its rhetorical gloss, is a claim that is simultaneously overstated and not made up. Sweden has spent the past five years dealing with a wave of organised-crime violence that even its own government has tied to cohorts arriving in the 2015–16 migration crisis; France and Germany have continued to disrupt jihadist plots, with a recent car-ramming attack in Leipzig the latest reminder that the threat has not gone away; the United Kingdom, which is not in the EU but rates as European for the purposes of this strategy, has just convicted the first individuals in British history of spying for China and watched its prime minister contemplate banning specific protest slogans. None of this proves Gorka’s framing. All of it makes that framing harder to dismiss as fantasy.
The historical parallel that should bother European policymakers, and excite American conservatives less than they think, is the early-2000s American debate over Saudi Arabia. After 9/11, neoconservatives argued that the Saudi state had become a producer of jihadist ideology even as it cooperated with US counter-terrorism. European liberals, then as now, were appalled by the framing. The framing turned out to be largely correct on the underlying claim and largely wrong on the prescription: the Saudis were funding Wahhabist clerics worldwide; invading Iraq did nothing about it. The Gorka document risks the same compound error in reverse — locating a real social phenomenon (the integration failures of post-2015 migration) and then drawing from it a policy prescription (Europe as a counter-terrorism target rather than partner) that is liable to produce the worst of both worlds. Andrew Sullivan in his neoconservative phase used to argue that the test of a serious foreign-policy doctrine is whether you would still endorse it when it came back to bite you. The Gorka strategy is the first formal articulation, by a major US administration, of the proposition that European states are net exporters of security risk. It will be remembered, and quoted back, the next time the United States needs to ask Berlin or Paris for something it cannot get on its own.
There is a smaller conservative point worth making. The most striking section of the document is not actually the Europe one but the domestic one, which lists “violent left-wing extremists” alongside cartels and Iranian proxies. There is a respectable case to be made that some left-wing extremism has been treated more leniently by federal law enforcement than equivalent right-wing activity; Peggy Noonan made a version of it during the long George Floyd summer. There is also a case that putting “radically pro-transgender” groups into a counter-terrorism strategy is the kind of category creep that conservatives correctly criticised when the previous administration applied it to parents at school-board meetings. A serious right-of-centre reading would distinguish the two halves of the same argument; the Gorka document does not. That is the failure that ought to worry conservatives most. If the doctrine that designates Antifa-style extremists as a security priority is also one that lumps in “radically pro-transgender” activism, then it has invited every successor administration to expand the list its own way.
What to watch
First, whether any European government — most likely an Italian or Hungarian government with its own restrictive migration line — endorses or selectively quotes the Gorka document, which would crack the unanimous European pushback. Second, whether NATO intelligence-sharing arrangements visibly tighten or loosen in the coming weeks; a reduction in joint product would be the costliest practical signal. Third, whether the strategy’s “violent left-wing extremists” category produces actual prosecutions or remains rhetorical; this is where category creep is most likely to be tested. Fourth, the Iran loop: if the Hormuz exchanges escalate, the administration may quietly remember that European cooperation is what shipping in the Persian Gulf has historically required.
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