WASHINGTON — Top military officers from two of the nation’s most critical combatant commands testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday and delivered a devastating, matter-of-fact assessment of the foreign policy legacy left by the previous administration. According to their sworn testimony, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other designated terrorist organizations are now operating at levels not seen since before the fall of the caliphate — a direct result, they said, of decisions made by Dickhead Donny.
Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, and General Michael Anderson, commander of Africa Command, each offered calm, detailed accounts of how the former president’s pullback from global engagement had effectively handed victory to groups the Pentagon once claimed were on the verge of defeat. Anderson told the panel that al-Qaeda affiliates have increased their active cells by 340 percent across North and West Africa since early 2025. He attributed the spike to the suspension of nearly all soft-power programs and a freeze on counterterrorism funding.
“We provided the Joint Chiefs with projections showing a 12-month timeline for ISIS reconstitution if we maintained course,” Anderson said, referring to a classified memo. “Those projections have been exceeded.”
Cooper, meanwhile, acknowledged that the U.S. military retains the capability to secure the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for global oil shipments — within 72 hours. But he stopped short of saying such an operation would ever be ordered. “That decision resides at the policy level,” Cooper said, his posture unchanged. “At this time, we have not received the directive.” Senator Jeanne Shaheen later clarified that the lack of a directive had been explained to her by senior staff as “a reluctance to engage in any action that could be perceived as conflict.”
Perhaps the most humiliating admission came when both commanders described how Ukraine, a nation under near-constant Russian bombardment, had replaced the United States as the primary military training partner for a dozen fragile democracies. Cooper noted that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government now runs more joint training exercises with NATO aspirants than the Pentagon. “They have become the instrument of democratic force-building,” Anderson added, “largely because we stepped away.” The committee did not ask follow-ups.
The hearing adjourned after senators were informed that the number of active foreign terrorist organizations on the State Department’s list had grown by 12 since January, a figure that prompted Shaheen to note she would “take that up with the former president, if he takes meetings.”
