President Donald Trump’s latest executive order targeting branches of the Muslim Brotherhood represents a significant move by a Western leader to address the Islamist networks that have taken root in various parts of the free world. While countries like Britain, Europe, Canada, and Australia either ignore or even accommodate these networks, the United States has initiated a crucial step towards identifying and imposing sanctions on organizations that contribute to radicalization from the Middle East to major Western cities. This development is particularly important because it highlights the growing pattern across the West, and the executive order seeks to bring it to light.

For many years, the radical left in Western nations has championed ‘multiculturalism’ as the highest virtue, advocating that all cultures must be seen as morally equal, even those that oppose democracy, pluralism, and individual rights. Under this ideology, Western governments have allowed Islamists into their societies without critical examination. There has been a lack of vetting, scrutiny, and consideration of long-term impacts. The consequences are now starkly visible. In countries like the UK, across Europe, Canada, and Australia, Islamist groups have firmly established themselves in educational institutions, unions, charities, and political parties. They have become influential voting groups and have significantly altered the social and cultural dynamics of entire cities.

This development has led to an openly hostile environment towards Jews in cities such as London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Toronto, and Sydney. Jews are advised to conceal their identities, avoid specific areas, or even relocate entirely. Synagogues are under heavy security, Jewish students face harassment on campuses, and families who once felt secure in the West now live with an unexpected fear. Instead of addressing these issues, Western governments have often appeased the empowered Islamist networks, adopting more critical stances against Israel, tolerating antisemitic activities, and rationalizing it all as ‘legitimate political expression.’

But Jews, as history never tires of teaching, are merely the first in line. Christians and non-Islamist Muslims — particularly those who fled Islamist regimes — are now facing the same pressure. Women who refuse to veil, Muslims who reject extremism, Christians who speak openly about their faith: all increasingly find themselves targeted in cities transformed by the very intolerance Western elites insisted was compatible with liberal democracy. This isn’t integration. It’s capitulation. And now the United States stands on the brink of the same self-inflicted disaster.

Here at home, the threat comes from two extremes simultaneously: the Zohran Mamdani–Bernie Sanders Leninist left, which insists Islamists including Hamas are simply ‘oppressed’ actors who must never be criticized — and the Tucker Carlson ‘Reich’ right, which has drifted into isolationism, conspiracism, antisemitism, Holocaust and WWII revisionism as well as the demonization of Israel. Both sides sanitize the forces that threaten the West. These two camps, though they claim to despise each other, are creating precisely the conditions that have already poisoned Europe and threaten Canada and Australia.

This is why Trump’s executive order matters. It is a recognition of reality: that the Muslim Brotherhood is not merely a political movement but the ideological backbone of the Islamist project worldwide — one with tentacles reaching into the West. By designating specific branches, the US can finally begin identifying operatives, cutting off financing, and countering the influence networks that Europe, Canada and Australia allowed to metastasize. No other Western leader has had the courage to take this step.

If America fails to learn from the collapse into Islamist appeasement, the consequences will be the same: Jews pushed out, Christians intimidated, non-Islamist Muslims abandoned, and the very fabric of Western society slowly unraveling. The question now is whether the United States will seize this moment — or follow our Western allies into the abyss. God help America — because the warning signs are already flashing red. Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.