Washington Dismantles the Brotherhood Chapter by Chapter — Because It Cannot Ban the Whole
Executive orders have designated four national branches in six months, even as the flagship blanket-ban bill was gutted in a Republican-led committee. The gap is the story.
Executive Order 14362, signed November 2025, created the mechanism. Under it Washington designated the Lebanese Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in January, the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters as global terrorists for material support to Hamas, and the Sudanese Brotherhood in March; a May Treasury sweep hit the violent HASM offshoot and networks in Egypt, the West Bank and Europe. Yet at a December markup, a Republican-led House committee stripped the mandatory blanket-designation provisions from H.R. 4397 — precisely because the movement is a franchise, not a corporation.
Assessment: The executive branch has quietly solved a decade-old analytical problem — that the Brotherhood is too decentralized to designate as one body — by mapping and hitting discrete national entities tied to Hamas. The gutted bill exposes the counter-current: chapter-level enforcement works where movement-level designation cannot. Gulf capitals, which welcomed the designations, are watching the method as much as the target.