It’s only one year into Donald Trump’s second term as US president, and he has already massively transformed US counterterrorism policy.

The list of designated terrorist groups has grown at an unprecedented rate. Counterterror policies are being stretched to include drug cartels – with serious international consequences, as we saw in Venezuela at the beginning of January.

And, importantly, the US is taking these steps without its longtime allies.

Since early 2025, Trump has added a whopping 26 new groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. In most years since the list started in 1997, only two or so groups were added. The past 12 months have seen the largest single year increase in US-declared terrorist organizations.

The FTO list imposes serious consequences on listed groups. It is a felony for anyone to “materially support” an FTO, so a US citizen could be sent to prison for transferring funds to a group member.

Banks have to freeze funds of anyone associated with a designated group. Alleged associates of designated organisations can also be barred from entering the US or kicked out if already in the country.

Terrorist designation implies a great deal of work on the part of law enforcement, financial institutions, the military and others, first in identifying and then in pursuing and countering organisations on the list.

In the mid-2010s, at the height of the threat from the Islamic State, there were about 60 FTOs – now there are more than 90. With such an inflated list, it is unclear that officials can focus on the highest priorities.

Other FTOs continue to carry out or direct attacks, such as the Bondi massacre of Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney in December 2025, or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps plotting the assassination of Israel’s ambassador in Mexico in 2024.

Drug dealers or terrorists?

The main US terrorist list has sprawled beyond traditional terrorist organizations. These are defined as ideologically motivated groups using intentional violence against civilians to achieve political goals.

In February 2025, the Trump administration added 15 groups to the terrorist list that are probably best described as drug cartels or gangs – such as the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico and gangs in Haiti and Central America.

Most people in the US had probably never heard of these groups, such as Gran Grif in Haiti and Los Lobos in Ecuador.

Especially perplexing to many analysts is why criminal groups would be added to a terrorist list. There are already US sanctions for criminal organizations, such as the Kingpin Act, which bans financial transactions with drug cartels and freezes their assets.

Apart from anything else, it stretches the resources of US crime-fighting agencies away from actual terrorist groups. And it seems to green-light excessive and counterproductive policies toward criminal organizations.

A growing body of research shows that counterterrorism and counterinsurgency used against drug cartels or gangs often backfire, leading to increased violence.

This expansion of the “war on terror” to criminal groups has been used to justify more than 100 deaths (so far) in missile strikes, and the overthrow of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.

The Trump administration has justified the missile strikes with the language of counter-terrorism. Trump announced the first attack, on September 2 2025, with an explanation on social media indicating that the targeted group, Tren de Aragua, is an FTO.

There have now been 35 similar strikes, killing approximately 120 people.

America does not claim, however, that the targeted boats carry bombs or guns, the typical tools of terrorists. The boats are attacked because they are alleged to carry drugs – even though drug trafficking is almost never a death penalty offense in the US.

There have not been any missile strikes since Maduro’s capture on January 3. The US president justified the raid by saying that Maduro was the head of the Cartel de los Soles, which was designated as an FTO in 2025.

But, two days after Maduro’s capture, the US justice department dropped the claim that the cartel exists. It changed its indictment against the Venezuelan president to instead nominate him as sitting at the top of a system of corrupt patronage under which drug trafficking has flourished.

The US has certainly carried out regime change before, notably in Panama in 1989 when it captured and removed the country’s dictator, Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted before his capture. He was subsequently convicted and jailed in the US.

But the use of counterterrorism law, language and lethal tactics abroad for drug traffickers – to this degree, in an extended military campaign – represents an unprecedented escalation.

A new path

These changes are all the more remarkable because they are part of a decoupling from traditional US allies on counterterrorism.

For decades, the US set the standard on counterterrorism. Analyses of the dozens of terrorist lists around the world demonstrate that when the US designated a certain group as terrorists, its allies tended to follow suit – until 2025, that is.

Over the past year, the US has far outstripped all other countries when it comes to adding to the list of groups deemed to be “terrorists” proscribing terrorist groups. And most have not followed Washington down the road of listing criminal groups as terrorist organizations.

A few Trump-aligned Latin American countries, such as Argentina, labelled some of the cartels as terrorists. Canada also followed suit, listing seven cartels, but the move was widely reported to be part of an effort to gain a favorable trade deal.

States that historically copied US counterterrorism priorities, from Australia to the UK, have not stretched their terrorist proscription regimes to include organised crime.

Longtime US allies have gone in another direction on counterterrorism in recent years, proscribing far-right groups. The UK, for example, added two white supremacist networks to its terrorist list (alongside the pro-Palestine group Palestine Action) in 2025. The Trump administration did not include any far-right groups among its 26 new FTOs.

Overall, the decoupling of the US and its traditional allies is occurring more broadly than just on counterterrorism, as the recent debate about Greenland makes clear. But when they can’t see eye to eye on who the main threats are, it begins to present a problem for the people tasked with keeping the world safe.

Brian J. Phillips is reader (Associate Professor) in international relations, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.