'This is how we win': US counterterrorism chief on Iran, Hamas and Trump’s 'will to act'

“And the president is a very, very visual individual, like me. He likes pictures. And we created what we call in the community a ‘place mat,’ which is a large one-sheet diagram showing who this individual was, his role in killing Americans, where he was, and our capacity to strike and remove him.”

Gorka describes how he and other officials went into the Oval Office, placed the “place mat” in front of the president, and told him: “Sir, this ISIS leader has been tracked by our intelligence community for 18 months.

“He immediately looked up from the Resolute Desk and said to us, ‘What do you mean we’ve been tracking him? Kill him. Kill him now.’”

Since then, Gorka says, the United States has targeted 1,082 terrorists.

For Gorka, the common denominator in the fight against ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and other terrorist hot spots around the world is simple: ideology, intelligence, and, above all, political will.

He argued that understanding Trump’s intentions does not require access to classified intelligence.

“If you want to understand the president’s intent, you don’t need a top-secret clearance,” Gorka said. “All you have to do is get a Truth Social account and listen to what he puts on Truth Social. Listen to his press events.”

According to Gorka, the administration’s objectives toward Iran remain consistent with the demands Trump articulated in his correspondence with Iran’s leadership.

“What we wish to achieve in Iran is shaped by the president’s first letter a year ago to the then-ayatollah,” he said. “It was very explicit, and it was about nuclear weapons. It was about funding proxies. It was about everything they do in the region to destabilize that part of the world.

“Nothing has changed with regard to the president,” he added. “Now the decision lies with the mullah in Iran.”

For Israelis watching the possibility of another US-Iran confrontation – or another nuclear agreement – Gorka has a message: Do not underestimate Trump.

Asked about concerns that the president could eventually agree to a deal that falls short of his original demands, Gorka appeared almost incredulous.

“When I have Jewish conservative friends worrying that this president will somehow bring a watered-down deal that doesn’t comport with his demands from the beginning, it’s like, do you know who this man is?” Gorka said.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh my gosh, outrageous or impossible,’” Gorka said. “Well, neither was it outrageous, nor was it impossible.

“So look, just watch the man and see what he has done,” Gorka said. “People need to calm down and look at the man who is behind the Resolute Desk and look at what he’s achieved.”

Gorka's responsibilities have also brought him into the effort to counter Iranian attempts to conduct operations on American soil.

He described spending the first months of the administration visiting different agencies involved in counterterrorism, including the Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA, and the NSA.

According to Gorka, one message repeatedly emerged from those conversations: Officials wanted political leadership to demonstrate that it was prepared to act.

“All we want is to have will to act demonstrated by our leadership,” he recalled being told. “Will to act.”

If Iran represents one of the major strategic challenges Gorka sees facing the United States and its allies, the Muslim Brotherhood represents a deeper ideological battle.

Gorka has made the organization a central focus of his work, arguing that the Brotherhood is not simply another Islamist organization but the intellectual and ideological source from which numerous modern jihadist movements emerged.

“I think the reason I was propelled into the first Trump administration was in large part because of my first book, Defeating Jihad,” he said.

“I made it very clear in that book that every modern terrorist jihadi group, even the Shia, has a genetic code that goes back to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood said that the only way to be a good Muslim is to be engaged in martial jihad, and that a new caliphate must engulf the Earth,” he said.

Gorka’s worldview is also deeply personal.

He described how his father, Paul, was arrested and tortured by Hungary’s communist regime after being betrayed while studying at university. He was eventually given a life sentence before being liberated during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and escaping to the West.

“My father was an anti-communist student,” Gorka said. “As a result, at the age of 20, my father, Paul, was arrested, tortured, and given a life sentence in a communist prison in Budapest.

“I understood the cost of fascism,” he said. “I understood the reality of the totalitarian communist ideology.”

Gorka said that experience eventually shaped his understanding of terrorism.

“It very quickly dawned on me that there is a connective tissue that binds Nazis to communists and to jihadists,” he said.

“In President Trump’s second term, we [began] designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, starting with the Egyptian chapter, the Jordanian chapter, the Lebanese chapter, and since then we’ve designated numerous other chapters.”

“This is how we win,” he said.

“You cannot defeat the jihadi organizations like Hamas unless we destroy the progenitor, the grandfather of them all, which is the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Trump administration subsequently issued an executive order initiating the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

But the policy raises a difficult question for Israel: If Washington considers Brotherhood-linked organizations a security threat, what does that mean for countries such as Turkey and Qatar, which maintain close relationships with the United States while also maintaining relationships with the Brotherhood?

Gorka said the answer is not to designate countries.

“You can’t designate a country as a terrorist organization,” he said. “We have to do what is legal in US law.”

Gorka said he traveled to Ankara and described Qatar as an important partner in hostage negotiations and other sensitive cases.

“Qatar has multiple relationships with us on various issues,” he said. “They have been very helpful to me because counterterrorism, the directorate, includes hostages.”

He also stressed that Washington can simultaneously cooperate with a country on one issue while pressing it on another.

“It’s a constant discussion,” Gorka said. “There are issues that have to be resolved.

“But we are very clear-sighted, and we will continue to provide evidence where evidence is needed for whatever nation needs to help us to take the right decision.”

According to Gorka, Israel itself has provided valuable intelligence to the campaign.

“There are parts of the Israeli government, especially with regard to some materials that were discovered in the last three years, that have been incredibly helpful to us in providing primary evidence of organizations across the world that are part of the Brotherhood enterprise,” he said.

Next week, Israel will mark three years since the October 7 massacre. Asked what he, as an expert on terrorism, had learned from October 7, Gorka’s answer was not about Hamas’s operational capabilities. The shock, he said, was that Israeli decision-makers had adopted what he considers a flawed counterterrorism framework.

“The thing that shocked me is the decision-makers in Israel, or several of them, had, as we say, drunk the Kool-Aid of the Obama years’ counterterrorism analysis,” he said.

Gorka specifically attacked the theory that terrorism is fundamentally caused by poverty, lack of education, or political disenfranchisement.

“If poverty and political disenfranchisement were the root cause of terrorism, there’d be billions of terrorists around the world because of the poverty we have in various regions,” he said.

For Gorka, ideology comes first.

“You cannot have terrorism unless you have an ideologue that comes with an argument and says, ‘You are being oppressed for these reasons,’” he said.

He argued that Israel made a strategic mistake by treating Gaza and Hamas as essentially political problems.

“There was this decision somewhere inside Jerusalem that Hamas, Gaza, the West Bank isn’t a national security terrorist issue,” Gorka said.

They called it a political problem, to be solved by political issues, by money.

“No, you can’t,” he said. “If the person has an ideology, you have to address the ideology.”

Gorka argued that military action can remove individuals who pose an immediate threat, but that defeating terrorism requires a broader ideological campaign.

“You have to delegitimize the ideology,” he added, comparing that process to the ideological battles against Nazism and communism.

Throughout the conversation, Gorka repeatedly returned to his admiration for Trump’s personal style of leadership.

He recalled the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and said the president’s reaction illustrated what he calls “will to act.”

“Once there’s a threat to the president, by protocol the president, whoever he is, loses control of his body,” Gorka said.

But Trump, he recalled, pushed his security detail away.

“He knows somebody just tried to kill him. He doesn’t know who, but he knows the world is watching live. He needs to send a message right now to the world that everything’s okay.”

The conversation ended on another subject Gorka considers central to the current political moment: the revival of conservative intellectual movements.

Next week, Gorka will participate in the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon), held in Israel in cooperation with the Herzl Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation in the United States. The conference is titled “National Conservatism as the Main Alternative to Liberalism.”

“What does the word conservative come from?” he asked. “It comes from the word ‘to conserve.’”

But, in Gorka’s interpretation, conservatives today face a paradox: They are attempting to preserve institutions and values they believe have already been weakened.

“That which they wish to conserve has been systematically dismantled,” he said. “So our job is not to conserve. Ours is to rediscover and rebirth those ancient values.”

This, he said, is why conferences such as NatCon have become important.

Gorka compared the current moment with the Reagan era, when conservative institutions developed an intellectual framework that eventually influenced American policy.

“That needs to be done now in a new context,” he said.

His argument is that the Trump movement is not simply a political phenomenon but part of a broader ideological realignment that requires its own intellectual infrastructure.

And that same philosophy runs through Gorka’s approach to counterterrorism.

Whether discussing Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, October 7, or the future of conservatism, he returns to the same principle: Identify the ideology, understand the threat, and then demonstrate the political will to confront it.