The New York Times reports on Trump’s interest in designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO):

The Trump administration has resurrected the proposal to brand the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, prompting a fierce debate between the government’s political appointees and its career experts.

The designation would impose wide-ranging American economic and travel sanctions on companies and individuals who interact with the loose-knit Islamist movement that was founded in Egypt and is recognized as a legitimate political entity in many Muslim-majority governments.

It is the president’s latest major foreign policy decision that appears to have been heavily influenced by autocratic leaders without first being fully vetted by career American government officials.

It is telling that the division inside the government is between Trump’s appointees and the professional experts. The appointees that favor designating the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists support this terrible idea because they are ideologues and they are judging the group solely on the basis of ideology. The professionals are actually judging things on the merits and according to the law, and if this were being decided on the merits and in keeping with the law there is no way that the designation could go forward. Since Trump respects neither expertise nor the rule of law, we shouldn’t expect any of this to stop him from doing what despotic client governments want him to do.

As I’ve said before, designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization is wrong because it is not actually engaged in or supportive of terrorism. They can’t possibly meet the criteria for the designation, but then the push to label them as terrorists is a purely ideological one. Deliberately conflating non-violent Islamists with violent jihadists is wrong as a matter of fact and foolish as a matter of policy. Unless one wants to drive more people into the ranks of jihadists, criminalizing and persecuting non-violent Islamists makes no sense. Treating the former as terrorists because they espouse ideas that we don’t like not only empties the word of all meaning, but it also threatens to trample on the rights of speech and association in our own country as well as others.

Another practical consequence of sanctioning the entire Muslim Brotherhood as an FTO is the enormous diversion of resources and attention away from real security threats:

Opposing the terrorist designation are United States counterterrorism, intelligence and defense officials, who worry it would divert resources from demonstrated terrorist threats, including the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and roil American relations in the Middle East.

In an effort to cater to bad clients, the Trump administration would waste U.S. resources combating a non-existent threat from the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of real counterterrorism work. Like so many other unjustified hawkish decisions, this one would be detrimental to U.S. security and would achieve nothing except to bring our government into closer alignment with a handful of despotic governments.