Forging New International Cooperation on Terrorism

Washington DC is currently hosting the fourth and perhaps final Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama’s signature initiative to secure the supply of nuclear material. Terrorism has always been a sub-theme of the NSS given its objective of keeping fissile materials away from terrorist groups. But in the wake of the most recent attacks in Brussels, Obama has added an additional special session to the summit to discuss ISIS and terrorism in urban areas.

World leaders at international summits do not normally roll up their sleeves to try to solve crunchy problems such as terrorism. Summits such as the NSS make progress because of the detailed preparatory work of the dozens of advance teams and working groups that have ironed out the details of new agreements. The sudden inclusion of the new agenda item has prevented such prep work. And in any case the number of participants at the summit—representatives from 56 countries and international organizations—is too large for a productive team effort. As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has observed, if you want a productive meeting, you must be able to feed the entire group with no more than two pizzas.

So what progress could the President make on ISIS during such hastily arranged discussions? Probably not much. The one thing some of the attendees might want to see, particularly our European allies, is a stronger American military push against ISIS territory in Syria and Iraq. Although the U.S. military has clearly increased its involvement in recent months, our response is tempered by the recent history of military interventions, which have a better record to date of sparking jihadism than of containing it. Also, even if the ISIS base of operations disappeared tomorrow, the hundreds if not thousands of foreign fighters that have already returned to Europe along with the networks they have built probably could sustain attacks such as the ones in Brussels and Paris for some time to come. And carpet bombing Molenbeek is not an option.

That brings up another deficit handicapping the U.S. at the summit table: the current political climate in the U.S. is not winning us any points in the “soft war” against terrorism. The anti-Muslim rhetoric of several presidential candidates is confusing our European allies and confirming the extremists’ assertion of an existential war between Islam and the U.S. Even the arguments of some that the U.S. has done a better job than Europe of assimilating Arabs, while probably true, is misleading. According to the Arab American Institute, 55% of Arab Americans are Christians, although new immigrants to the U.S. are trending Muslim.

There is one topic on which the U.S. could lead, or at least facilitate an initial discussion of, at the NSS: the need for much more extensive sharing of intelligence, information, and insights on terrorism and extremism. Reports since the Brussels attacks have revealed numerous instances when different police jurisdictions and security services in Europe did not quickly exchange information or share leads with the Belgian Government. In at least one instance, it was the U.S. who relayed information from one European country to Belgium, which is of course, madness.

The U.S. is in a strong position to lead here because European governments probably assume that the U.S. is the best source of intelligence and insight on terrorism and that it does not share that intelligence equally with all European allies. Much improvement has been made in global intelligence sharing on terrorism in the last decade. But the reports in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks suggests to me that such sharing still occurs too slowly. Instead of a process that requires an active decision to share, information should be automatically entered in common databases in near real time, providing instant access to all who need it across borders and jurisdictions. I recognize that a near automatic process causes heartburn among those concerned with source protection, information verification, and privacy, but we are fooling ourselves if we think anything short of that can meet the information needs of the fight against ISIS and other extremists.

The U.S. could also suggest that the international community explore a more permanent international structure to deal constructively with terrorism and extremism. The Nuclear Security Summit is one possible model but I’m intrigued by others that we’ve used to tackle serious global security issues, such as nuclear energy and global pandemics. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established in 1957 in response to worldwide concerns about the downside potential of nuclear energy. It has evolved into an effective international platform for cooperation on nuclear security.

Another example is the World Health Organization, particularly its effort since 2007 to accelerate international sharing of information on infectious diseases with pandemic potential. For example, the International Health Regulations promulgated by WHO require 196 countries to report within 24 hours certain categories of information about suspect diseases. Extremism could be said to qualify as an infectious disease with pandemic potential.

An international organization devoted to preventing and combating extremism and terrorism could take on many other functions. For example, it could develop standards and best practices for police and security forces to follow, much in the same way that the WHO has developed protocols for dealing with dangerous diseases such as Ebola. And of course an international analytic function that was not connected to any one country could broaden the ways we think about terrorism and extremism. In fact, I doubt such an organization could work unless many predominantly Muslim states were among the founding members, along with important non-government organizations, such as religious associations.

It’s a tall order I know. But I’m thinking that we need to break out of our nation-state centered ways of thinking about terrorism if we are to make any progress. We can no longer pretend that terrorism and extremism are local phenomena or passing fads. They look to be permanent features of the human condition. It’s time to begin a new conversation about them, and the National Security Summit looks like the place to start.