National Security and Terrorism: Why was the Travel Ban so Urgent?

• In Event: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump

Abstract

What motivated the Trump Administration to urgently institute the 2017 Travel Ban (TB)? On January 27, 2017, the Trump Administration released Executive Order 13769 banning majority-Muslim country nationals from entering the United States. The Department of State’s Terror Watch List or blacklist provided the Trump Administration with states suspected of engaging in state-sponsored terrorism (SST). Critics of the blacklist (Peed, 2005 & Collins, 2014) suggest the list is politically motivated because it reflects the Secretary of State’s negative or positive preferences. Terrorism literature focusing on SST says SST violence is in its lowest phase since the 1970s. If, global terrorism is in decline (the death of Iranian, General Soleimani may augment this thesis), why the urgency to enact the TB and is the blacklist politically motivated? To attempt at answers, this paper will proceed in the following ways: a). defining and distinguishing between terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, and the blacklist; b). tracing all three phases of state-sponsored terrorism; c). a look at all three iterations of the Travel Ban; and d). discuss the current threat-potential of nuclear proliferation from SSTs. This work, which is part of a larger dissertation project has implications for understanding how identity affects national security decisions. This work also sits at the intersections of security, terrorism, foreign policy, and national security legal studies.

Author

• Nola Haynes, University of Southern California