The Post-CVE Era
As ISIS threats resurface, countering violent extremism has lost political backing, funding, and strategic priority.
In recent months, ISIS has shown mounting signs of reconstituting. Intelligence assessments and open-source reporting point to increased operational tempo in Iraq and Syria, expanded activity by affiliates in Africa, and renewed propaganda output aimed at global recruitment. More troublingly, recent attacks suggest that the organization’s external operations ambitions may be returning.
In December, a father and son allegedly inspired and possibly trained by ISIS carried out a deadly stabbing attack on Bondi Beach in Australia — a reminder that the group’s ideology still travels far beyond its territorial footprint. Weeks later, authorities disrupted an ISIS-linked plot targeting the president of Syria, underscoring that the group continues to pursue high-level political violence even after years of counterterrorism pressure.
With terrorist threats resurfacing, one might expect a renewed policy focus on prevention—particularly on countering violent extremism (CVE), a once-central plank of counterterrorism strategy, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the infrastructure that supported CVE in the region has shrunk, and U.S. support for these activities is severely diminished. Despite the alarm bells, there’s little indication that it’s coming back.
In 2025, the U.S. government sharply reduced federal funding for CVE programs and zeroed out the bulk of U.S. foreign assistance to the Middle East, including stabilization, humanitarian, and governance aid. The United States also withdrew from several key multilateral institutions it once helped create to combat violent extremism, including the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF).
For the first time in over a decade, the U.S. government has no meaningful CVE policy or engagement in MENA.
CVE once commanded significant attention from policymakers. From roughly 2015 to 2021, it had the full backing of the U.S. government, from the White House to USAID to the Department of State. Millions were poured into programs centered on education, online messaging, community resilience, youth sports, and media campaigns. Regional partners joined in. Saudi Arabia launched the Ideological Warfare Center; the UAE hosted Hedayah; Morocco and Jordan developed national CVE strategies; and even fragile governments including Iraq and Tunisia established CVE plans with donor support. European and Asian governments also contributed to the global momentum.
It was never clear whether these investments created meaningful results. The evidence is, at best, inconclusive. Numerous evaluations found that CVE programs struggled to define success, relied heavily on anecdotal outcomes, and lacked consistent metrics. Efforts targeting “at-risk” general populations showed little measurable impact on reducing violent radicalization. Deradicalization programs aimed at rehabilitating former fighters fared somewhat better in specific contexts, particularly with returnees from Syria, but even these were difficult to scale and highly dependent on political and institutional conditions.
I recently spoke with a former State Department official who helped lead CVE programming until it was defunded in 2025. While acknowledging its limits, they pointed to the sense of momentum that once animated the space. They cited, for example, a children’s media series in Syria that reportedly shifted youth attitudes away from extremist ideologies, according to early survey data. Other programs focused on sports, community mentorship, and creative media. These weren’t silver bullets, but they offered a vision of prevention that went beyond kinetic counterterrorism.
That energy has now dissipated. The CVE field no longer commands policy relevance or funding, either from the U.S. or from most regional governments. Gulf countries may maintain their existing centers, but there is little appetite to reinvest or expand across the region. The heyday of CVE has ended with a whimper—another casualty of the broader retreat from the “global war on terror.”
Some NGOs and multilateral organizations still operate in this space, often under the banner of “social cohesion” or “resilience.” These efforts are, on the whole, modest, fragmented, and rarely treated as strategic pillars of security policy. The shuttering of U.S. public diplomacy institutions, like Alhurra or Voice of America’s Arabic programming, further erodes the soft power infrastructure that once complemented CVE initiatives.
Importantly, the decline of CVE is intertwined with the dismantling of the broader U.S. foreign assistance apparatus in the region. Rebuilding this architecture will take years, if not decades. Even as new terrorist threats emerge, the U.S. government faces difficult trade-offs among many pressing priorities, from climate change to great power competition. It’s difficult to imagine CVE rising to the top of that list.
And yet the threats remain. As groups like ISIS adapt and reemerge, and as regional grievances — from Gaza to economic stagnation — fuel discontent, some form of renewed policy attention is likely. In all likelihood, that response will take the shape of traditional counterterrorism and focus on intelligence sharing, military partnerships, and targeted strikes. It is unlikely to bring CVE back to life.
CVE was a genuine attempt to grapple with the drivers of terrorism. But even at its height, policymakers struggled to demonstrate consistent results or address the root causes of extremism, and its ambitions often exceeded what the evidence could support. The contraction of CVE programming reflects both shifting strategic priorities and persistent uncertainty about what prevention efforts can realistically achieve at scale.
Prevention remains part of the vocabulary of counterterrorism as threats reemerge, but it is no longer a defining pillar of U.S. strategy in the Middle East.The Post-CVE Era
As ISIS threats resurface, countering violent extremism has lost political backing, funding, and strategic priority.
In recent months, ISIS has shown mounting signs of reconstituting. Intelligence assessments and open-source reporting point to increased operational tempo in Iraq and Syria, expanded activity by affiliates in Africa, and renewed propaganda output aimed at global recruitment. More troublingly, recent attacks suggest that the organization’s external operations ambitions may be returning.
In December, a father and son allegedly inspired and possibly trained by ISIS carried out a deadly stabbing attack on Bondi Beach in Australia — a reminder that the group’s ideology still travels far beyond its territorial footprint. Weeks later, authorities disrupted an ISIS-linked plot targeting the president of Syria, underscoring that the group continues to pursue high-level political violence even after years of counterterrorism pressure.
With terrorist threats resurfacing, one might expect a renewed policy focus on prevention—particularly on countering violent extremism (CVE), a once-central plank of counterterrorism strategy, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the infrastructure that supported CVE in the region has shrunk, and U.S. support for these activities is severely diminished. Despite the alarm bells, there’s little indication that it’s coming back.
In 2025, the U.S. government sharply reduced federal funding for CVE programs and zeroed out the bulk of U.S. foreign assistance to the Middle East, including stabilization, humanitarian, and governance aid. The United States also withdrew from several key multilateral institutions it once helped create to combat violent extremism, including the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF).
For the first time in over a decade, the U.S. government has no meaningful CVE policy or engagement in MENA.
CVE once commanded significant attention from policymakers. From roughly 2015 to 2021, it had the full backing of the U.S. government, from the White House to USAID to the Department of State. Millions were poured into programs centered on education, online messaging, community resilience, youth sports, and media campaigns. Regional partners joined in. Saudi Arabia launched the Ideological Warfare Center; the UAE hosted Hedayah; Morocco and Jordan developed national CVE strategies; and even fragile governments including Iraq and Tunisia established CVE plans with donor support. European and Asian governments also contributed to the global momentum.
It was never clear whether these investments created meaningful results. The evidence is, at best, inconclusive. Numerous evaluations found that CVE programs struggled to define success, relied heavily on anecdotal outcomes, and lacked consistent metrics. Efforts targeting “at-risk” general populations showed little measurable impact on reducing violent radicalization. Deradicalization programs aimed at rehabilitating former fighters fared somewhat better in specific contexts, particularly with returnees from Syria, but even these were difficult to scale and highly dependent on political and institutional conditions.
I recently spoke with a former State Department official who helped lead CVE programming until it was defunded in 2025. While acknowledging its limits, they pointed to the sense of momentum that once animated the space. They cited, for example, a children’s media series in Syria that reportedly shifted youth attitudes away from extremist ideologies, according to early survey data. Other programs focused on sports, community mentorship, and creative media. These weren’t silver bullets, but they offered a vision of prevention that went beyond kinetic counterterrorism.
That energy has now dissipated. The CVE field no longer commands policy relevance or funding, either from the U.S. or from most regional governments. Gulf countries may maintain their existing centers, but there is little appetite to reinvest or expand across the region. The heyday of CVE has ended with a whimper—another casualty of the broader retreat from the “global war on terror.”
Some NGOs and multilateral organizations still operate in this space, often under the banner of “social cohesion” or “resilience.” These efforts are, on the whole, modest, fragmented, and rarely treated as strategic pillars of security policy. The shuttering of U.S. public diplomacy institutions, like Alhurra or Voice of America’s Arabic programming, further erodes the soft power infrastructure that once complemented CVE initiatives.
Importantly, the decline of CVE is intertwined with the dismantling of the broader U.S. foreign assistance apparatus in the region. Rebuilding this architecture will take years, if not decades. Even as new terrorist threats emerge, the U.S. government faces difficult trade-offs among many pressing priorities, from climate change to great power competition. It’s difficult to imagine CVE rising to the top of that list.
And yet the threats remain. As groups like ISIS adapt and reemerge, and as regional grievances — from Gaza to economic stagnation — fuel discontent, some form of renewed policy attention is likely. In all likelihood, that response will take the shape of traditional counterterrorism and focus on intelligence sharing, military partnerships, and targeted strikes. It is unlikely to bring CVE back to life.
CVE was a genuine attempt to grapple with the drivers of terrorism. But even at its height, policymakers struggled to demonstrate consistent results or address the root causes of extremism, and its ambitions often exceeded what the evidence could support. The contraction of CVE programming reflects both shifting strategic priorities and persistent uncertainty about what prevention efforts can realistically achieve at scale.
Prevention remains part of the vocabulary of counterterrorism as threats reemerge, but it is no longer a defining pillar of U.S. strategy in the Middle East.