Designating the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization Harms America

Vish Sakthivel

Security, Middle East

This disastrous proposal, if carried out, would backfire for several reasons.

The Trump administration is evaluating designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), reviving a 2017 proposal squashed after rightly receiving significant institutional pushback. The designation is back on the table, but little has changed since 2017. It remains a disastrous proposal that if carried out, will backfire for several reasons.

The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t one thing. When we talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, many imagine Egypt’s flagship branch, but the proposed blanket designation will affect branches from Morocco to Indonesia. This is the biggest challenge to a designation. Far from a cohesive, coordinated transnational bloc, today’s Brotherhood is a fragmented, decentralized movement whose country branches have long revised and relaxed their ideological and organizational influence under Egypt’s founding Brotherhood. In some cases, designation would criminalize allies with whom we share interests: affiliates in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, some of which are expressly pro-American, and most of which have remained engaged in joint counterterrorism efforts. Any designation should thus be undertaken on a case by case basis, as was done with Hamas in 1997.

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