Trump’s counterterrorism efforts include continued global coalition meetings, but no new conference

Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to convene an international conference focused on defeating the Islamic State group and curbing the spread of "radical Islam."

"As president, I will call for an international conference focused on this goal," Trump said during the Aug. 15, 2016, speech in Youngstown, Ohio. 

"We will work side-by-side with our friends in the Middle East, including our greatest ally, Israel," he said. "We will partner with King Abdullah of Jordan, and President Sisi of Egypt, and all others who recognize this ideology of death that must be extinguished."

Nearly four years later, we found no record that Trump called together any new conference of world leaders. The U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, an alliance now 82 members strong, was formed in 2014 under former President Barack Obama and has continued to meet.

A State Department spokesperson said the U.S. has participated in numerous meetings of the global coalition since its formation, and that the U.S. and other coalition members remain committed to the partnership and the fight against ISIS.

Trump spoke at a coalition meeting on Feb. 6, 2019. He celebrated the coalition's work in the "shared fight" and said its members would "work together for many years to come." 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also spoken at the coalition's events, including during the most recent meeting of the coalition's foreign ministers on June 4.

The coalition convened at least twice per year for several years, said Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

The coalition does include Jordan and Egypt — two of the nations Trump singled out during the campaign speech as potential partners in the fight against ISIS — as well as most of the other countries that make up the Middle East. Israel is not listed as a member.

The White House has celebrated as an accomplishment of the Trump presidency the fact that NATO officially joined the global coalition in 2017 — a move that was largely a formality and a show of political support, since the alliance's member countries were already involved.

Trump has also called for international cooperation to combat terrorism, including during a tour of the Middle East in 2017, as we noted when we last updated this promise.

Still, we found no record that Trump organized any new international conferences dedicated to defeating ISIS in our searches of Google, Nexis, the White House's website and Factba.se, the interactive transcript database that tracks Trump's public statements. 

For what it's worth, ISIS is now significantly weaker than it once was, experts told us. In October 2019, U.S. forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a nighttime raid, and ISIS' land holdings have been largely dismantled over the years. But the group has not been eliminated. 

We rate this promise a Compromise.