Trump’s executive order is less about specific Muslim Brotherhood chapters and more about how foreign lobbying and culture wars shape US policy.
On 24 November, US President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order initiating a process that could lead Washington to designate three Middle Eastern chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organisations.
Citing accusations that the branches in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon “engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilisation campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests,” the order states that Washington will “cooperate with its regional partners to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters designated as foreign terrorist organisations”.
Efforts to push the US government toward blacklisting the Muslim Brotherhood are not new. During Trump’s first term, certain actors in the US and abroad sought to persuade the White House to take this step.
Yet a broad designation of the movement as a whole was fraught with practical, legal, and political complications.
By choosing instead to target its Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese chapters, the second Trump administration appears to be adopting a more incremental approach to addressing the “Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational network, which fuels terrorism and destabilisation campaigns against US interests and allies in the Middle East,” as the White House explained.
Trump’s directive instructs the Secretaries of State and Treasury, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, to prepare a report on the proposed designation within 30 days.
If approved, the formal designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a “foreign terrorist organisation” (FTO) would take effect within 45 days of the report’s completion.
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Egypt: Repression, scattered exiles, and an elusive justification
According to the executive order, “a senior leader” in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood “called for violent attacks against United States partners and interests” on 7 October 2023. Nonetheless, which leader and what statement the Trump administration referred to remains unclear.
Regardless, the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has been forced underground in Egypt with most of its members imprisoned or exiled since the military coup of mid-2013 that brought down Mohammed Morsi’s presidency.
Jordan: From managed opposition to criminalised movement
The Trump administration’s reason for targeting the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood stemmed from its leaders’ allegedly long record of providing material support to Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
It should be noted that in April, officials in Amman banned the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, which, having been established in 1945, is the oldest opposition force in the Hashemite Kingdom. Authorities swiftly raided the group’s offices, seized documents, and prohibited the promotion of its ideology.
The move followed the government’s announcement that it had uncovered and foiled an alleged terrorist plot dating back to 2021, culminating in the arrest of several militant cells and 16 Brotherhood members between 2023 and 2025.
The security apparatus in Jordan asserted that the group had crossed a fundamental red line by conspiring against the state.
Lebanon: Shifting alliances and the post-7 October landscape
Founded in 1964 as the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaa Islamiya has established a presence across Sunni-majority towns and cities in both northern and southern Lebanon. Its military wing, the al-Fajr Forces, emerged in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion during the civil war.
A close ally of Hamas, Jamaa Islamiya has long had a complicated relationship with Hezbollah, Lebanon’s dominant Shia organisation. The two groups stood on opposing sides during the Lebanese civil war and later diverged sharply over the Syrian conflict, with Jamaa Islamiya aligning against the former Syrian regime.
Relations, however, began to thaw as a rapprochement developed between Hamas and Hezbollah, and as the Israel-Hezbollah confrontation intensified beginning in October 2023.
These converging circumstances gradually eased tensions, fostering a more pragmatic relationship between the two Lebanese groups.
As one expert put it, Jamaa Islamiya was “operating as an extension of Hamas in Lebanon” despite playing a relatively limited role in Lebanese affairs with only about 500 armed men, at least as of March 2024.
Nonetheless, Jamaa Islamiya’s relationships with Hezbollah, Hamas, and other armed Palestinian groups following 7 October 2023 were the official reason in Trump’s executive order.
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US domestic drivers: Ideology, culture wars, and policy framing
The Trump administration’s motivations for this executive order must be at least partly understood within the context of the United States’ political arena.
Primarily, the driving force behind Trump’s executive order has far less to do with the specific circumstances in Lebanon, Egypt, or Jordan than one may assume.
At its core, the impetus arises from, and is continually shaped by, a deeper ideological and cultural conflict within the United States itself.
The debates, anxieties, and strategic postures that emerge in American domestic politics provide the primary lens through which these issues concerning political Islam are framed and interpreted. Only in a secondary and derivative sense do they pertain to the particular political developments within the Arab world.
“While international lobbying on the Muslim Brotherhood has undoubtedly continued during the Trump period, especially by the Israelis, I think a major new factor in the mix is the domestic, and how the Republican right is instrumentalising this in the ongoing culture war within the United States,” Dr H. A. Hellyer, Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) for Defence and International Security Studies in London, said in an interview with The New Arab.
Regarding the ideological factors and domestic politics, Dr Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, pointed out that “Trump campaigned on fighting ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ and his inner circle – Bannon, Pompeo, evangelical, and Islamophobic networks – tended to blur distinctions between Salafi-jihadism and mainstream political Islam and Muslim civil society”.
Regional alignment: UAE, Egypt, Israel, and political Islam
Trump’s executive order is a major win for certain Arab governments as well as Israel. This move is likely to yield immediate political dividends with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and especially the UAE.
These governments tend to interpret heightened pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood as consonant with their broader regime-stability agendas. As a result, they are predisposed to view such actions on Washington’s part as a welcome reinforcement of their domestic strategies of countering ideologies such as those of the Muslim Brotherhood.
However, this move “risks narrowing Washington’s diplomatic bandwidth in the Arab-Islamic world, [where] many societies, including in Jordan and Egypt, view the Brotherhood not only as a political actor but as a social movement with deep grassroots legitimacy,” explained Francesco Salesio Schiavi, a Middle East analyst and Non-Resident Fellow at the Middle East Institute of Switzerland (MEIS), in a TNA interview.
“The Egyptian Brotherhood embodied the Arab Spring’s most powerful electoral alternative to the old order. The UAE in particular has treated the Brotherhood as an existential enemy since the 2011 uprisings and backed Sisi’s coup through money, media, and organisation-building in an attempt to demobilise the revolutionary current at the time,” Dr Krieg told TNA.
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“Using a broad-brush approach to labelling a variety of Muslim civil society groups as ‘Brotherhood-affiliated’ and thereby a terrorist organisation would retroactively legitimise the 2013 coup in Egypt and the Emirati counterrevolution, which has been used by Abu Dhabi as a pretext to intervene aggressively in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia,” he added.
The Emirati-Israeli-aligned influence campaign in Washington proved strikingly effective. Abu Dhabi cultivated an extensive network of public relations firms to persuade US policymakers to conflate independent Islamic civil-society movements, especially those outside state control, with terrorism.
This effort drew on lessons from an earlier campaign in the United Kingdom, where Emirati pressure encouraged London to scrutinise the Muslim Brotherhood and quietly linked that review to prospective arms deals.
Together, as Dr Krieg observed, these initiatives offered a blueprint for leveraging economic influence to securitise the Brotherhood across Western capitals.
He went on to explain that Abu Dhabi “systematically fuses this anti-Brotherhood framing with its broader toolkit of investments, security partnerships, and covert operations from Yemen to Sudan” while asserting that Trump’s “push on the Brotherhood fits very neatly into that Emirati playbook”.
Abdelrahman Ayyash, a fellow at Century International and director of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood working group, told TNA that “narrowing the target to ‘chapters’ lets the White House look tough after Gaza without litigating a wholesale ban”.
“It also delivers a symbolic win to Cairo, where the Brotherhood is the regime’s preferred foil, and dovetails with Israeli officials who immediately welcomed the news,” he added. “The result is ideology-first optics, not behaviour-based counterterrorism.”
With Israel viewing action against the Muslim Brotherhood as a “stick” to use against Turkey, this factor is important to consider within the context of an intensifying rivalry between Tel Aviv and Ankara, particularly in post-Assad Syria, explained Michael Young, a senior editor at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, in a TNA interview.
“The Turkish relationship with Muslim Brotherhood groups such as Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is something that I think is a weak spot that the Israelis can press on to limit the margin of manoeuvre of the Turks,” he stated.
“Now the Gulf states have been on better terms with Turkey in recent years, but Israel, on the other hand, wants to limit the Turkish role in Syria and, by and large, this is one way probably of narrowing the Turkish margin manoeuvre,” added Young.
“For the UAE, it validates a decade-long campaign to delegitimise the Brotherhood across the region. But alignment does not automatically translate into policy coherence: while Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv pursue comprehensive political and ideological containment, Washington’s designation is narrower and more transactional,” Schiavi told TNA.
“The US risks being pulled into regional agendas that are not fully aligned with its own long-term interests, particularly where political participation and social stability are intertwined,” he added.
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Potential consequences: Diplomatic, ideological, and strategic costs
If these three FTO designations formalise, there could be important repercussions, including those which might not necessarily be so predictable at this juncture.
There could be secondary consequences when it comes to designating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.
“There are members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that exist in Qatar, Turkey, and in some other places around the world. So that may complicate issues with those countries slightly,” noted Dr Hellyer, who emphasised the word slightly.
“Already there are groups that the United States is not happy with in particular countries, but they still maintain connections with those countries and have very strong bilateral engagements with those countries – Qatar included,” he told TNA.
