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Profs and Pints DC presents: “Trump and Terrorism,” on the Trump administration’s counterterrorism policies and their likely impact at home and abroad, with Jacob Ware, research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, adjunct assistant professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.
From its pardons of the January 6th defendants to its designations of Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, the Trump administration has been making big changes in U.S. counterterrorism policies and has signaled its intent to carry out others down the road.
Gain a sophisticated understanding of these policy shifts and what they’ll mean at home and abroad with Jacob Ware, a scholar of domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism who last year gave an excellent Profs and Pints on the history of far-right terrorism in the United States.
Ware will take a wide-ranging approach to discussing counterterrorism over the next four years.
He’ll look at why counterterrorism will remain a significant challenge, discussing the ascendency of new ideologies that espouse it as well as the deterioration of norms of civility. He’ll give overviews of key regions of concern, including Africa, which has emerged as the epicenter of modern terrorism, and the Middle East, where ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Houthis remain a threat. And he’ll examine the headwinds faced by counterterrorism practitioners, including the redirection of resources away from their efforts and toward strategic competition with China and Russia.
Ware also will look at the Trump administration’s dramatic shifts in counterterrorism policies, including its designation of Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and will analyze the pros and cons of such moves and how counterterrorism might fit into a broader national security strategy. He’ll talk about the implications of the Trump administration’s deployment of the “terrorism” label in respect to student protestors and acts of property destruction, raising the question of whether this heralds a new era where the terrorism label is used chiefly against political opponents rather than those engaged in lethal political violence.
Finally, Ware will talk about directions in which counterterrorism policy needs to go and talk about how why U.S. success in countering extremist violence would offer it a comparative advantage supporting efforts to counter Chinese and Russian influence around the world. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: A Mexican police officer investigates the scene of violence involving that nation’s drug cartels, which President Trump has labeled as foreign terrorist organizations (Knight Foundation photo / Creative Commons).
