Dorothy

The document was released months after his administration published an updated national security strategy that called for the hemisphere to be the top U.S. focus.

Trump's administration has moved aggressively to reshape the region with the ouster of Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela's president, dozens of U.S. military strikes on alleged drug boats operated by cartels and new pressure on the communist government of Cuba.

Trump’s administration has moved aggressively to reshape the western hemisphere region with the ouster of Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president, dozens of US military strikes on alleged drug boats operated by cartels and new pressure on the communist government of Cuba.

Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism czar who spearheaded the new strategy, said the shift in priorities acknowledges some simple math: Far more Americans have been killed by cartels pushing illicit drugs into U.S. communities than American service members lost in conflicts around the globe since World War II, he said.

"More Americans were murdered by illicit drugs smuggled across the border by cartels in one year than in 70 years of combat fatalities of U.S. servicemen and women," he said. "They declared war on us. We are responding."

“Whether it is strangling their illicit funds, whether it is tracking their drug boats, we will not permit them to kill Americans on a massive scale,” Gorka said in a telephone call with reporters to announce the strategy.

It is the latest example of the administration's efforts to demonstrate it remains committed to sharpening U.S. foreign policy focus on the Western Hemisphere even while dealing with worldwide crises.

The White House argued that making its determination to achieve hemispheric security clear, and demonstrating America’s ability to act decisively toward that goal, was crucial to bringing America’s neighbors in the Western Hemisphere on board.

“It is clear to all that well-organized hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals. The more these alien cultures grow, and the longer current European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed,” the CT Strategy said, ringing an alarm bell that no prior administration of either party would have been willing to touch since September 11, 2001.

In line with the “Donroe Doctrine,” the strategy’s first priority is the “neutralization of hemispheric terror threats” — placing cartels squarely in the crosshairs.

One part of the strategy targets ideological groups including Al Qaeda, the group behind the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria; ISIS-Khorasan, an Asia branch of the group; and the Muslim Brotherhood, which Gorka said was the ancestor of modern jihadi groups.

Those groups include al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their most “aggressive subgroups,” such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K). The White House argued the importance of including the international Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a terrorist organization, a step the Trump administration took in January 2026.

The fourth priority of the CT Strategy, singled out as a “special strategic category” all its own, was to combat “non-state acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction, especially the terrorist use of nuclear or radiological devices.”