The Trump administration’s new counterterrorism strategy released in early May marks the next stage in America’s move away from the old post-9/11 war-on-terror model. The long foreign wars, large deployments, and nation-building campaigns that followed 9/11 have steadily given way to a more homeland-centred doctrine.

The document says the United States (US) has returned to “common sense and peace through strength” and that “protecting the United States and our citizens is once again the goal of our national security and foreign policy”. It identifies “three major types of terror groups”, namely “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs”, “legacy Islamist terrorists”, and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists”.

The post-9/11 model was built to prevent another mass-casualty jihadist attack on American soil. It sent troops into Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other theatres, degraded terrorist safe havens, built foreign partner forces, and relied on intelligence, drones, special operations, surveillance, sanctions, and financial disruption.

The new document keeps the jihadist threat in view, but says the terrorist threat has changed. America now faces “new categories and combinations of violent actors that make the established ways of doing counterterrorism insufficient or obsolete”.

The first major target is drug cartels. The strategy treats narcoterrorism as a front-line national security threat, not merely a criminal or border-control problem. It says America will prioritise “the neutralisation of hemispheric terror threats by incapacitating cartel operations until these groups are incapable of bringing their drugs, their members, and their trafficked victims into the United States”.

This pulls the Western Hemisphere, the border, fentanyl, trafficking routes, gangs, and hostile regional regimes into the counterterrorism frame. The document says counterterrorism operations against state actors will include “sanctions, shadow fleet oil tanker interdiction, and covert operations” to make state sponsorship costly, as well as “offensive cyber operations against those planning to kill Americans or who support those plotting to do so”.

The second target is Islamist terrorism, but without the old nation-building model. The strategy says its second priority is “the targeting and destruction of the top five Islamist terror groups that have the intent and capabilities to execute external operations against the United States”. It names Al Qaeda, “especially its most aggressive subgroup, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” and Islamic State (ISIS).

Africa is central to that shift. The document says surviving ISIS remnants were “forced to relocate to Africa and Central Asia” and exploited “ungoverned spaces”, especially in “West Africa, the Sahel region, the Lake Chad Basin, Mozambique, Sudan, and of course Somalia”. It sets two goals for Africa: preventing jihadist groups from building bases from which to attack America or American interests, and protecting Christians.

The proposed method is lighter than the old intervention model. The US will keep a “light military footprint”, rebuild bilateral counterterrorism relations, provide “actionable intelligence”, develop partner forces, and combine security cooperation with “heightened trade and commercial relations”.

The third target is the radical left. This is where the Trump strategy most sharply contests the Biden-era diagnosis. The Biden administration’s 2021 domestic terrorism strategy said domestic terrorism had become “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today”. It identified the two most lethal elements of that threat as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race” and “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militia violent extremists”.

The 2026 document says counterterrorism activity will prioritise “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist”. It says the government will use constitutional tools to “map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organisations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent”.

The strategy is therefore best understood as the counterterrorism arm of America First. It does not return the US to the old age of open-ended foreign wars, nor does it accept the Biden-era claim that the main domestic threat comes from the far right. It keeps the inward turn, but changes the target. The document says the mission of American counterterrorism is to “identify those groups that have the intent and capability to plot attacks against Americans and then neutralise them”. The strategy’s central test is therefore not whether America can occupy distant territory, but whether it can break the networks that bring violence within reach of Americans.