America's Empty CT Chair

The world's counterterrorism chiefs are meeting in New York this week. We brought a list of demands and not much else.

A plot hatched in a chat room in one country, funded from a second, carried out by a man walking into a crowd in a third – that's the shape of terrorism now. It doesn't stop at borders. It never agreed to.

That's the problem sitting in front of the world's counterterrorism chiefs this week. They're at the U.N. for the first time since 2023, and on Wednesday the General Assembly reopens the global strategy that's held this fight together for twenty years. The question on the table is simple and ugly: who's actually going to do the work?

Washington's answer lately is everyone but us. The new U.S. strategy tells allies to carry more of the load and barely bothers to dress it up – the era of America as the world's cop is over, pick up the slack. There's a fair point buried in there. Allies should pay more and do more in their own backyards.

But you can't order everyone else to step up while you're sliding toward the door. The federal center built to connect the dots between agencies has had no permanent boss since March. Homeland Security hasn't issued a national threat warning since last September. State shut down its CVE and GEC teams – the shops that countered extremist recruiting and foreign propaganda – over the past year. The FBI and Justice Department teams that chase these cases are thinner than they've been in two decades. We're lecturing the world about leadership while quietly dismantling our own.

And the chair we're vacating doesn't stay empty. The U.N.'s counterterrorism work runs almost entirely on donated money, most of it from a few Gulf states. Cut our funding and our attention, and we don't shut the operation down – we hand the pen to whoever's still paying. Their threats become the priorities. Their enemies become the targets. That swap is already underway, one budget cycle at a time.

The timing couldn't be worse, because the threat is spreading, not shrinking – splitting into more groups, in more places, every year. ISIS-K runs plots out of South Asia. Al-Qaeda's Sahel franchise has turned that region into the deadliest killing ground on the planet. Newer names – the Resistance Front in Kashmir, the Majeed Brigade in Balochistan – show how fast a local grudge now becomes an outfit with cash, recruits, and a slick media shop. You don't beat a threat like that by going it alone – and you definitely don't beat it while eyeing the exit.

So where should the allies in that room actually put their weight this week?

Start with the people nobody wants to claim: the captured fighters and their families still languishing in camps years after the caliphate fell. Bring them home, try them, rehabilitate them. It's slow, ugly, and a political grenade – and every year we dodge it, we let the next generation steep in the same poison that made the last one.

Less visible and more useful is the plumbing: shared watchlists, fingerprints, traveler data, the systems that flag a wanted man before he boards a plane. Most countries still can't run it well, and helping them will stop more attacks than any speech from a podium.

None of that touches the cheapest counterterrorism there is – the kid who never gets recruited in the first place. You can't arrest your way out of this, and the prevention programs that reach that kid early are always the first thing cut and the last thing anyone takes credit for.

And the new front: machines. Cheap drones in the hands of groups that used to throw rocks. AI that spits out propaganda in forty languages and finds a lonely teenager faster than any human ever could. The side that masters these tools first wins. Nothing says it'll be us.

Twenty years ago the world decided this fight couldn't be run one country at a time – not out of idealism, but because the math demanded it. Threats cross borders faster than any single government can chase them. The strategy up for review this week has outlived four presidents for one reason: the work got shared instead of dumped.

Walking away now, with the threat splintering and the tools getting sharper, isn't strength – it's a bet that the next attack will be polite enough to stay in someone else's country. It won't. It never has.

The allies are in the room this week. The only question left is whether we lead the table or leave it.

Dexter Ingram is a former senior national security executive who led the State Department's office for Countering Violent Extremism and served as acting director of the 89-nation Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He writes the newsletter Dexter Ingram: Declassified.

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