The Department of State and USAID have just issued a report entitled the “Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism.”
There are some ideas in this “strategy” for what is now called CVE, but at bottom it is hopeless. If this is really the United States’s strategy, we are in even bigger trouble than we thought.
Here’s just one fact that will show you why: The word ‘Islam’ does not once appear in the US government’s CVE document. Neither does ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamist’, ‘radical-Islam’, ‘radical-Islamist’ or any other such formulation.
That phrase comes from the assessment of the Henry Jackson Society in London, an NGO named after the late Senator Henry M. Jackson (for whom I had the honor to work in the 1970s). Here is their full text:
The US government has released a new CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) strategy consisting of a 12-page document, with a foreword by Secretary of State John Kerry. Although the release has been little commented upon either in the US or the UK, both countries should take an urgent interest in the document.
Firstly because the whole framing of the strategy is an import from the UK. It was the UK government that first came up with the presentation of its counter-extremism strategy as ‘countering violent extremism’. Many UK government experts extolled the virtues of the British strategy to the US. In fact through this process Britain has exported some of our worst habits to America.
For the glaring problem with the strategy is that it lacks any apparent desire to deal with the problem, or even to identify it. The new strategy is a follow-on document from last year’s White House convened conference on the same subject. The resulting document, like the conference, is notable for its attempt to avoid pin-pointing the problem. For although there are multiple domestic and foreign security threats to the US as there are to the UK, there is no point in setting up strategies to counter them unless you are willing to say which ones you are talking about.