Sometime soon jihadists will likely carry out a terrorist attack against the U.S. How the Trump administration reacts will have a profound effect not just on national security but on the national psyche.

Much will depend on the nature of the attack. It may occur in the U.S. and involve one or two operators inspired by Islamic State but not directly controlled by it, as in the Orlando and San Bernardino attacks, or it may be carried out abroad by a cell from that group or by al Qaeda. A major attack along the lines of 9/11 is unlikely, thanks to 15 years of aggressive counterterrorism work by the U.S. and its allies, but it can’t be ruled out.

It would be wise, however, to prepare for some sort of dramatic attack. The incentives for Islamic State in particular are growing fast, as it continues to lose ground in Iraq and needs to reaffirm its status by showing that it can strike at President Donald Trump’s America.

The early actions of the new president and his team suggest that they will opt for a forceful response. This would be in keeping with Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric and inaugural address, in which he promised to “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.” With that marker on the table, no one should expect his national-security team to opt for restraint.

But terrorists thrive on their opponents’ overreaction, which helps them to advance their narrative and to win over recruits. Cabinet officials, national-security staff and members of Congress should start thinking now about how, when the time comes, they will counsel Mr. Trump.

They should take into account how invaluable America’s Muslim communities have been to law enforcement. Officials report that roughly 40% of the tips that they receive on extremist activity come from these communities. FBI Director James Comey has underscored the value of such ties, saying last summer that American Muslims “do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.”

In the wake of a new attack, it is essential to avoid a replay of the post-9/11 roundup of large numbers of Muslims—American citizens and aliens—as suspects or material witnesses. At the time, more than 1,000 people were held, some for months, and the intelligence produced by this exercise was close to nil.

Repairing the damage from that crackdown took years. Similarly, talk of a total cutoff of Muslims coming into the country or a national registry of Muslims should be shelved. Such rhetoric, especially after Mr. Trump’s ill-advised executive order restricting travel from the Middle East in the name of fighting terrorism, alienates those who genuinely are our first line of defense. It plays into our enemies’ hands.

Rhetoric matters. The aftermath of an attack provides an unparalleled opportunity for leadership, a moment when Americans want to set aside biases and antipathies that seem trivial next to the devastation and loss. Consider George W. Bush’s uplifting remarks to the rescuers at Ground Zero and his visit to a Washington mosque in the immediate wake of 9/11.

Military action will almost certainly be a part of Mr. Trump’s response after an attack, especially given Islamic State’s recent emphasis on radicalizing “lone wolves.” The question becomes when to act. There will inevitably be a desire to move swiftly against the enemy while the attack is fresh in the national memory.

Solid targets are seldom sitting on the shelf in large numbers.

But effective military action usually takes time. Solid targets are seldom sitting on the shelf in large numbers. The imperative is to ensure that there are sufficient “validated” targets—places where real terrorists are living, training and plotting—instead of simply unleashing massive firepower to make a point. Moving too quickly is a recipe for large numbers of civilian deaths, which could undermine public and foreign support at a sensitive juncture.

There’s a good reason that presidents are in the habit of saying that the U.S. will respond “at a time and place of our choosing.” It allows them to take advantage of the laborious intelligence work necessary to find the most valuable targets. A potent, focused response also sends our foes a clear message about our capabilities.

Friends of the administration might also underscore that a president should never let a national-security crisis go to waste. That would mean, in this case, harnessing the energy and focus of the moment to solve serious problems in our counterterrorism efforts, even if the connection to a new attack is tenuous.

High on the list of concerns today is the phenomenon of terrorists networks’ “going dark.” The fast-spreading use of sophisticated encryption has made it increasingly difficult to penetrate the communications of jihadist networks. The last big go-round on this issue involved gaining access to the information on the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple refused to assist in decrypting the contents for the FBI, arguing that it would undermine its promise of privacy to its customers and sabotage its business.

There is no easy answer to the problem, but there is a need, at the very least, to detoxify the atmosphere and improve the dialogue between the public and private sectors. In the end, the best solution may be more funding for the intelligence community to devise its own solutions. That outcome, too, is more likely to be in reach if the White House uses the period after an incident deftly.

President Trump also might use the moment after an attack to back an effort supported by many counterterrorism experts: local programs that give Muslim communities better resources to deal with individuals who appear to be radicalizing but haven’t committed a crime. Families, friends and teachers who are worried about troubled young people need options that don’t involve law enforcement (unless they think an attack is being planned).

If law enforcement is their only choice from the start, they won’t want to risk sending a nonthreatening individual to jail. Pilot programs of this sort are currently being developed in such places as Boston, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, and have been welcomed by Muslim communities eager to counsel and steer their youth away from dangerous thinking and bad company.

All of this may be far too therapeutic for a president determined to eliminate all Islamic terrorism. But perhaps in a crisis, Donald Trump, who prides himself on his unpredictability, will surprise us.

       

With his executive action suspending the admission of refugees to the United States and temporarily halting the entry of citizens from a variety of Muslim countries, President Donald Trump made a quick down payment on a key campaign promise. He also set the United States on a disastrous course—one that threatens to weaken our national security and diminish American global leadership.

The order signed on Friday calls for a temporary ban on visas for individuals from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia; a 120-day suspension of the resettlement of all refugees; and an indefinite ban on the resettlement of Syrian refugees.

It is hard to find any real basis for this action. During the campaign, Trump made frequent, unfounded claims that we have a “dysfunctional immigration system” and that unknown people are pouring through our borders. But over the past decade and a half, U.S. immigration enforcement has improved vastly to the point where it bears scant resemblance to the system whose vulnerabilities were exposed on 9/11. Travelers from all over the world are screened three or more times, with their names run through databases that draw on staggering amounts of intelligence and law enforcement information. The process flags all manner of misdeeds or suspicious information.

No system is perfect, so we will inevitably find a new shortcoming someday—possibly the hard way. We had one near-miss more than seven years ago on Christmas Day of 2009 with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” which led to another round of improvements in the visa process. Since then it has been doing an excellent job in keeping out those who would cause Americans harm.

There has not been a single terrorism-related death caused by foreign operatives coming into the country since 9/11. From Fort Hood to Orlando, jihadist killings have been the work of American citizens and green card holders. The strong consensus in the counterterrorism community remains that the principal danger today continues to come from homegrown extremists.

Insofar as there is rationale behind Trump’s move, it appears to come from a point he made about Omar Mateen, the day after he killed 49 at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando:

“The killer, whose name I will not use, or ever say, was born in Afghan [sic], of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States…The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.”

Trump apparently believes that we should prevent Muslims from settling in the United States because they are destined to be the killers of tomorrow.

But this genetic argument is absurd. Though we do not have statistics exclusively for Muslims, immigrants as a group commit crimes at a lower rate than the native born, and in the U.S. that is true of second generation immigrants as well. What’s more, more than a third of terrorist crimes are committed by converts, and, in many years, more terrorist deaths are caused by native-born right wingers than jihadists. As a Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security Study report released today notes, in 2016—the bloodiest year since 2001—only one-third of one percent of all murders in the U.S. were attributable to terrorist violence by Muslim Americans. Since September 12, 2001, the total is about one two-hundredth of one percent. What kind of serious policy of exclusion can be based on such infinitesimal numbers, especially compared with the valued added to the U.S. by these immigrant communities? Trump is doing nothing but pandering to the Islamophobes in his base.

Trump, knowingly or not, is signaling to American Muslims that they are in for a protracted experience of discrimination and isolation.

While a real-world basis for this action is non-existent, the consequences of the order could be all too palpable. By cutting off immigration, albeit temporarily, from seven majority-Muslim countries and refusing to take more refugees from Syria, Trump, knowingly or not, is signaling to American Muslims that they are in for a protracted experience of discrimination and isolation. Already distressed by a presidential campaign that stoked anti-Muslim sentiments and ignited a wave of hate crimes, they will understandably be disturbed by measures that cut many in their communities off from foreign-based family and friends and that portend additional measures that may similarly affect others. (America’s Somali community, the newest, poorest and least integrated of the nation’s Muslim communities will be hit especially hard.)

The executive order is also likely to erode trust in the government, which will set back law enforcement’s efforts to build stronger bridges to Muslim communities. Those ties, as FBI Director James Comey has pointed out, are essential to U.S. domestic counterterrorism.

In fact, Trump’s action has the potential to trigger violence by individuals who are already leaning toward extremism, including some with mental illness. There are more than a few people who experienced personal setbacks, including ones in which officialdom was involved, who interpreted their experience through the prism of the jihadist narrative and took violent action.

Mohammed Bouyeri, who killed Dutch artist Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands in 2004, went over the edge in part because his funding request for a community program was turned down and then-Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggested screening Muslim job applicants for signs of extremism. Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev appears to have begun moving toward violence when he, a two-time New England boxing champion and a green card holder, was refused entry to the Golden Gloves tournament after new rules decreed only U.S. citizens were eligible. It would hardly be surprising if someone reacted to Trump’s executive order in a similar way.

We should also expect the order to anger Muslim partners around the world. Shutting the door on Iraqis, on whom we are relying in the ground fight against ISIL, isn’t going to help in that ongoing conflict. As one Iraqi asked on CBS news last night, “How is this our fault?..We are the victims. In fact, American ISIS fighters have come here.” At a moment when U.S. influence in the region is at a low ebb, and Russia, Iran and Turkey are collaborating in Syria and excluding the U.S., the American president should be concerned with building goodwill, not eroding it.

Beyond sending a negative message to Muslims around the world, the decision to stop resettlement of Syrian refugees bespeaks a meanness of spirit that is completely at odds with American values. Indeed, it’s almost unimaginable that today anyone would need to cite Emma Lazarus’s sonnet on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty as a testament to what the nation has stood for, but perhaps things are just that upside down. Although Europe has a problem with uncontrollable surges of migrants, including many from Syria, the U.S. does not, nor has there been a case of Syrian extremists plotting violence here.

[T]he decision to stop resettlement of Syrian refugees bespeaks a meanness of spirit that is completely at odds with American values.

In fact, there is so much scrutiny of Syrian refugees that the federal bureaucracy, unprompted by any unwelcome incident, is reinvestigating several dozen Syrians who were admitted to the country even though their vetting was incomplete. (The errors were first discovered in 2015 and corrected last year.) And yet, despite that record, the Trump administration is determined to punish further the victims of the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.

Pretty much anyone but Trump might see the post-election period, when the pressure of the political horse race is gone, as a moment for American leadership. Migration threatens the viability of the European Union as well as the political stability of American allies such as Jordan, Turkey, and others. Even beyond Syria, political turmoil and failing economies are driving migrants to leave their homes for safer, more prosperous countries.

The only way to deal with this genuinely global phenomenon is with a mixture of economic assistance to improve prospects in countries from which people are migrating and an international effort to apportion and resettle those who genuinely can’t go back—which would require the United States to resettle substantially more refugees than it was before Trump halved the number for the coming year. Of course, it’s not surprising that America’s least philanthropic billionaire—whose name is on scores of buildings used to make profits but on no university edifices, museums or concert halls—wants to pull up the ladder that so many have used over centuries to escape to a better life. And given that his “America First” slogan evidently means giving little or nothing to anyone else, it’s impossible to imagine Trump showing the farsightedness to supply urgent development assistance or to drive a solution for this catastrophe—actions that would bolster U.S. national security in the long run.

Does it need to be said again? Great countries don’t behave this way.

       

Donald Trump’s wild, swinging attacks against the intelligence community have been so far off the charts of traditional behavior for a president-elect that it is hard to wrap one’s mind around—and impossible not to wonder what lies behind it. That Trump is trying to throw everyone off the track of his ties to Russia and whatever compromising information it has, as CNN is reporting, seems increasingly plausible.

Whatever the case, Trump’s assaults on a core element of the government he is soon to lead have most observers focusing on the damage he is doing to the 17 institutions that house our spies and analysts. In his campaign to smother the notion that Russia hacked the U.S. election, he has thus far smeared the CIA and its sister agencies with accusations of politicizing intelligence, gross incompetence and even fabrication—to the horror of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the foreign policy establishment and of course the intelligence community itself.

Less remarked upon, but perhaps more consequential, is the eye-opening job Trump is doing at sabotaging his own presidency before it even starts. I say that mindful that the president-elect prevailed in the election even as everyone thought he was digging himself into a hopeless position. In the end, there is simply no evading the scorecard that governing creates. No American president can succeed in foreign policy—and by extension his term as commander-in-chief—without a good relationship with the intelligence community. Indeed, historically speaking, the CIA is usually one of the very first agencies to establish a relationship with new chief executives, because of the briefings it delivers before elections have even occurred and the beguiling prospect it offers of handling missions quietly and efficiently.

[Trump’s] pre-inauguration tantrums will haunt him.

Perhaps Trump thinks that he, CIA director designate Michael Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence designate Dan Coats can charm the intel community back into line. Given Trump’s adoration for Putin, strained relationship with facts and disinclination to hear bad news, I’m guessing this won’t happen. Instead, his pre-inauguration tantrums will haunt him. Here’s five reasons why.

Disrespected spies can’t do their jobs. The charges Trump has leveled at the intelligence community (IC) are demoralizing. There may be no more effective way to undermine the CIA and other intel agencies than charging them with politicization. The intelligence community lives and dies by its reputation for providing the unvarnished truth, and, though many may be surprised to hear it, the culture of these institutions is remarkably free of politics. I have been amazed, time and again, to hear from career intelligence people that they don’t know the partisan leanings of people they work closely with; it is just not talked about. Trump’s claim, after some of the first briefings he received last summer, that he could tell by his CIA briefers’ “body language” that they were dissatisfied because “our leaders did not follow what they were recommending” set off alarms on this count early on.

Faced with these insults, as well as Trump’s continual lack of interest in intelligence, top career officials are going to find it hard to lean into their jobs. These are hardworking, tough, patriotic people and they undoubtedly will want to do their best. But working for a chief executive who believes he is “like, a smart person,” doesn’t need to hear the “the same things in the same words” at regular briefings and disparages his experts in public is bound to be dispiriting. Ultimately, they will find it tougher to push their considered views against his surly blasts. How many times will the briefers come back to warn Trump that his friend Vladimir Putin is indeed hacking U.S. government computers or massing troops on the borders of Estonia or Latvia when he refuses to heed it?

The implications of this kind of alienation could be profound, both for U.S. national security and Trump’s legacy. Trump’s experience as a New York real estate developer and Page Six celebrity has undoubtedly introduced him to plenty of unusual characters. If he thinks he can understand North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un without the help of the experts, well, God help us.

Trump has devalued an important asset. Trump has cast a big shadow over the quality of the IC’s work by invoking its 2002 misjudgment on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to suggest that it is also wrong about Putin’s recent meddling in U.S. politics. That’s an appalling smear, not least because cherry-picking is terrible analysis. Trump overlooks the 15 years since the invasion of Iraq, a period in which the IC raised its game time, found Osama bin Laden and did the lion’s share of the work to destroy al-Qaida. Those are just the high points and say nothing about the terabytes of tactical information and analysis the IC churns out every day to keep American foreign and security policy running.

This kind of trash talking diminishes public respect for the intelligence community, which relies on government officials to defend its reputation because so much of its work never is never heard of outside the Executive Branch. This might work for Trump in the short run, as he scrambles to defend the legitimacy of the 2016 election. Eventually, it will backfire. At some point during his presidency, Trump is going to want to act on intelligence he receives. And what will happen when he tries to justify to the nation that he is deploying troops or firing missiles on the basis of information brought to him by agencies he has so thoroughly denigrated? Trump seems not to understand that governing is a team sport, and that his credibility will ultimately depend on those who serve the administration.

Top talent will flee. Who wants to work for an organization that has become the White House’s punching bag? As former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell has argued, Trump’s public repudiation of the community will prompt its stars to wonder why they work crazy hours for civil service salaries. Senior intelligence managers are in high demand—just visit the headquarters of a few large financial institutions and you can see. Washington is awash with the consulting firms of former senior CIA officials who will do everything from open the doors of the powerful in faraway places to provide sophisticated risk analysis. One doesn’t often hear about them going belly-up. Younger analysts and intelligence collectors, who watched their college classmates march off to fabulous incomes at Bridgewater, Goldman Sachs and innumerable tech startups, will have ample reason to reconsider their choices. At a time when the government needs more intelligence on more subjects every year, a downturn in recruitment and quality could be felt quickly.

Leakers and whistleblowers won’t hesitate. What Morell and other intelligence veterans are too decorous to mention is that Trump’s treatment of his spies will also come back to bite him in the form of leaking and whistleblowing. The intelligence community doesn’t leak as much as the Pentagon or Congress, but when its reputation is at stake, it can do so to devastating effect.

When something goes wrong—say a military deployment to combat jihadi insurgents in the Middle East blows up in the Trump administration’s face—the press will overflow with stories telling of intelligence reports that were ignored by the White House and briefings the president missed. The current administration suffered this treatment on a number of memorable occasions, including, perhaps most dramatically, the deluge of stories about other options it could have chosen in Syria—and that is despite the fact that Barack Obama has probably had a better relationship with the IC than any American leader since George H.W. Bush, who served as CIA director a dozen years before being elected president.

Imagine what an aggrieved intel community might do to a genuinely hostile president.

No one will stick his neck out for the president. One form of punishment that the intelligence community can mete out will likely come to gall Trump and his team most: passivity. Inevitably, there will be missions that Trump wants carried out secretly and effectively, so he can avoid deploying the military and suffering public criticism.

But it is an iron law of bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if something goes wrong.

Considering the crowd around him, it may not be long before Trump asks, for example, for covert options to destabilize the Iranian regime. The answer from the intel community will never be no. Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80 percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining in otherwise dismal story.

President-elect Trump has shown distinctive tastes in world leaders, quoting Benito Mussolini approvingly, openly admiring Putin and lauding Saddam Hussein’s counterterrorism efforts. Another figure who fits well into this lineup is the totalitarian Josef Stalin, who also ignored and disparaged the foreign intelligence that was brought to him, especially the assessments in 1940-1941 about a Nazi buildup on Soviet Russia’s borders. That didn’t work out too well for Stalin and his people. Trump might ponder that.