By: Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
Senator Ted Cruz has spent much of the past year trying to do something no American administration has managed in decades: get the US government to formally treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a unified terrorist threat, rather than a loose collection of national movements to be judged case by case.
His Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, introduced with Senator Ashley Moody and a House companion from Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, would direct the president to designate the Brotherhood itself; not just its most violent offshoots like Hamas, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and would bar its members from US soil and its finances from US institutions.
That the bill has moved as far as it has is notable.
The Trump administration has spent the past several months designating individual Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt as terrorist entities, and the White House's 2026 National Counterterrorism Strategy went further than any prior official US document by describing the Brotherhood as the root of modern Islamist terrorism and explicitly linking it to Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
This points to what the campaign needs next. A bill, even one with a chairman's gavel behind it, is not a strategy. What actually moves a contested national-security designation through the American system; and keeps it durable once it passes, is the unglamorous scaffolding around the legislation: sustained research output, a policy pipeline that survives staff turnover, and a standing network of experts and allied lawmakers who can be mobilised on short notice when a committee tries to quietly water down the text.
This is precisely the infrastructure the United Arab Emirates has spent a decade building, and it is worth Cruz's team studying closely, not as a matter of imitation but as a working model of how a designation campaign becomes self-sustaining rather than dependent on any one senator's floor time.
The clearest example is TRENDS Research & Advisory, that has made countering the Brotherhood's ideology close to a core institutional mission. TRENDS does not simply publish studies asserting the Brotherhood is dangerous; it has built out a research architecture designed to be cited, translated, and reused by policymakers abroad.
It maintains a Muslim Brotherhood International Power Index that scores the group's influence across regions on organisational, political, economic, media and societal dimensions, and it has begun publishing that index in local editions.
TRENDS has commissioned a multi-volume documentary project on the group's history, unveiling a 35-volume Encyclopedia of the Muslim Brotherhood with plans to add material on the organisation's activity in specific countries such as Canada.
And it has taken the argument directly into foreign legislatures, organising a symposium in the UK's House of Lords on strengthening the Middle East–UK partnership against extremism, alongside outreach into the European Parliament and the Canadian Parliament.
The pattern across all of this is consistency of output paired with relationship-building. That is what gives the UAE's position durability; when a European MP or a US senator needs a citation or an expert witness, there is already a standing relationship and a body of work to draw on, rather than a cold call.
If Cruz's campaign is to survive the inevitable next attempt to gut it in committee, it needs the American equivalent of that scaffolding. Concretely, that means three things.
First, a research pipeline that isn't episodic; commissioned studies, translated case files and a running index of Brotherhood-linked organisational activity in the US that congressional staff and journalists can cite without having to build the case from scratch each time.
Second, a policy shop capable of producing the technical language that survives markup: definitions precise enough to withstand First Amendment and religious-liberty challenges, since a designation aimed at an organisation rather than a specific violent affiliate will draw exactly that scrutiny in American courts in a way it doesn't in the Gulf.
Third, and most importantly, a network; not just of sympathetic senators, but of former intelligence officials, terrorism-finance analysts and civil-society voices willing to testify, brief staff and rebut opposition arguments consistently across news cycles, the way TRENDS routinely provides expert witnesses across the UK, Europe and North America. Cruz's office and allied organisations like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies already do pieces of this; the UAE's model shows what it looks like when the pieces are unified under one sustained institutional effort rather than assembled fresh for each hearing.
None of that changes the basic fact that Senator Cruz has done something few lawmakers manage: he has kept a genuinely hard, multi-year fight alive through a change in administration, a hostile committee markup and years of bureaucratic inertia, without letting it die quietly the way so many designation efforts have before it. That persistence is the real asset here.
The policy architecture described above; the research pipeline, the standing network of experts, the durable relationships with allied lawmakers, is not a rebuke of his approach; it's the natural next chapter of it, the kind of institution-building that turns one senator's determination into something that outlasts any single Congress.
Senator Cruz has already supplied the hardest ingredient, sustained political will. Given the infrastructure to match it, this is a fight he is well positioned to win.
*Parliamentary Adviser and Research Partner with TRENDS Research & Advisory