Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime: Executive Summary

The Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime applies all elements of national power to protect citizens and U.S. national security interests from the convergence of 21st century transnational criminal threats. This Strategy is organized around a single unifying principle: to build, balance, and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime and related threats to national security—and to urge our foreign partners to do the same. The end-state we seek is to reduce transnational organized crime (TOC) from a national security threat to a manageable public safety problem in the United States and in strategic regions around the world. The Strategy will achieve this end-state by pursuing five key policy objectives:

1. Protect Americans and our partners from the harm, violence, and exploitation of transnational criminal networks.
2. Help partner countries strengthen governance and transparency, break the corruptive power of transnational criminal networks, and sever state-crime alliances.
3. Break the economic power of transnational criminal networks and protect strategic markets and the U.S. financial system from TOC penetration and abuse.
4. Defeat transnational criminal networks that pose the greatest threat to national security by targeting their infrastructures, depriving them of their enabling means, and preventing the criminal facilitation of terrorist activities.
5. Build international consensus, multilateral cooperation, and public-private partnerships to defeat transnational organized crime.

The Strategy also introduces new and innovative capabilities and tools, which will be accomplished by prioritizing within the resources available to affected departments and agencies.

A new Executive Order will establish a sanctions program to block the property of and prohibit transactions with significant transnational criminal networks that threaten national security, foreign policy, or economic interests.

A proposed legislative package will enhance the authorities available to investigate, interdict, and prosecute the activities of top transnational criminal networks.

A new Presidential Proclamation under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) will deny entry to transnational criminal aliens and others who have been targeted for financial sanctions.

A new rewards program will replicate the success of narcotics rewards programs in obtaining information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the leaders of transnational criminal organizations that pose the greatest threats to national security.

An interagency Threat Mitigation Working Group will identify those TOC networks that present a sufficiently high national security risk and will ensure the coordination of all elements of national power to combat them.