Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: U.S. President Donald Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy, Iran considers a new U.S. proposal to end the war, and Israel strikes Beirut for the first time in weeks.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: U.S. President Donald Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy, Iran considers a new U.S. proposal to end the war, and Israel strikes Beirut for the first time in weeks.

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a new national counterterrorism strategy that outlines his administration’s approach to terror threats both at home and abroad. The strategy is indicative of the ways that Trump has sought to reshape U.S. national security priorities and reframe what should be considered a terror threat.

The document points to countering drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere as the administration’s first priority, breaking from the counterterrorism strategies of Trump’s predecessors that placed more emphasis on threats emanating from jihadis or white supremacist groups in the United States.

The strategy’s release comes more than eight months after the Trump administration began a controversial campaign of deadly strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Trump has characterized these strikes as part of a fight against “narcoterrorists” who produce and sell drugs that kill Americans.

Legal experts have said the strikes violate both domestic and international law. They have also pushed back against the notion that drug cartels or smugglers can be considered terrorists.

“Criminal organizations aren’t terrorist groups,” Colin Clarke, a top counterterrorism expert and executive director of the Soufan Center, told SitRep. That doesn’t mean such groups aren’t a threat, Clarke said, but the United States shouldn’t necessarily use its military to deal with them. “That should be a law enforcement action,” he said.

Sebastian Gorka, the controversial White House counterterrorism director behind the strategy, was expected to release the document months ago and has faced scrutiny over the delay.

Common sense? The strategy also focuses heavily on vaguely defined left-wing extremist groups. “Our national [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the document says.

Though the strategy states that Trump has returned the United States to a “common sense and reality-based counterterrorism,” that is open to debate. For example, the document makes no mention of right-wing or far-right extremism nor white supremacist groups—despite the well-documented threat they pose.

Clarke described the document as “Orwellian” and “an exercise of gaslighting.” It begins by promising to execute an apolitical and “reality-based” counterterrorism strategy but goes on to repeatedly criticize former U.S. President Joe Biden and “proceeds to entirely omit the threat from right-wing terrorist groups or people inspired by far-right ideas,” he said.

Though experts have raised concerns about rising support for political violence across the spectrum in the United States, Clarke emphasized that the empirical evidence shows most lethal terror attacks in recent years have been tied to far-right extremism—pointing to the 2022 mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and the 2018 mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among others.

‘Fingernail deep.’ Beyond the emphasis on drug cartels and left-wing extremism, the strategy also lists “legacy Islamist terrorists” as among the three “major types of terror groups” that the United States is currently grappling with. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” Clarke said. “Yes, we are still facing a jihadist threat.”

But the strategy is “fingernail deep” in this regard, and offers few specific details on the capabilities of the jihadi groups that Washington is concerned with, Clarke added: It’s “less of a strategy and more of a worldview.”

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What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

The Iran waiting game. Trump’s efforts to find an off-ramp from the Iran war continued amid another chaotic week, with Iran saying on Wednesday that it would consider a U.S. peace proposal and convey its response to Pakistan, which has been mediating between the countries.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump threatened Iran with more bombing “at a much higher level and intensity than it was before” if it did not agree to the U.S. terms and expressed optimism later in the day that the Iranians “want to make a deal,” saying that the war was going “unbelievably well” and would be “over quickly.”

Those statements came a day after Trump suspended “Project Freedom”—a naval operation to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz—over widely reported opposition from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to use military bases in their territory for the operation. However, the Wall Street Journal reported that both countries walked back that opposition, paving the way for the operation to resume.

Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment reported by the Washington Post indicated that Iran’s regime can survive Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports for several months.

Israel bombs Lebanon ahead of talks. Elsewhere in the region, Israel threatened a fragile cease-fire with Lebanon with an airstrike on Beirut that killed more than a dozen people, including a senior Hezbollah leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said. “This is how it’s done and this is how it will be done,” Netanyahu said in a post on X.

Efforts to make that cease-fire stick continue, however, with the U.S. State Department saying that talks between Israel and Lebanon will resume in Washington next week.

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Saturday, May 9: The Hungarian parliament holds a session to vote on Peter Magyar as prime minister.

Russian President Vladimir Putin presides over a military parade in Moscow to mark Russia’s annual World War II Victory Day.

Tuesday, May 12: The Bahamas holds general elections.

Thursday, May 14: Trump begins a bilateral visit to Beijing.

The commanders of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Africa Command testify in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Friday, May 15: Jerome Powell’s term as chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve expires.

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• The Real Meaning of the UAE’s OPEC Exitby Amir Handjani
• The End of America’s Soft Powerby Stephen M. Walt
• The Deeper Pattern Behind China’s Military Purgesby Christopher Nye and Charles Sun

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228—The number of U.S. military assets in the Middle East that Iran has damaged or destroyed in the war, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery.

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“That is a low-T [testosterone] approach to threats to the United States.”

—Gorka on the opposition to the Iran war, after slamming critics of the war as “testicularly challenged.”