WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed off on a new U.S. counterterrorism strategy that sets eliminating drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere as the administration's highest priority. The strategy document was released months after the administration published an updated national security strategy that called for the Western Hemisphere to be the top U.S. focus.

"We will not let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity. Terrorists of any kind will not be allowed to find safe harbor here at home or attack us from abroad," Trump said. He said drug traffickers and transnational gangs pose an "unacceptable threat" to the hemisphere's national security.

The administration has moved to reshape the region with the removal of Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela's president and applied new pressure on the communist government of Cuba. It has also conducted dozens of U.S. military strikes on alleged drug boats operated by cartels. The campaign of blowing up alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Latin American waters has persisted since early September and killed at least 191 people.

Trump has sought to press regional leaders to work more closely with the U.S. to target cartels and to take military action themselves against drug traffickers and transnational gangs.

White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka outlined the rationale behind the focus on cartels. "Far more Americans have been killed by cartels pushing illicit drugs into U.S. communities than American service members lost in conflicts around the globe since World War II," he said. "Whether it is strangling their illicit funds, whether it is tracking their drug boats, we will not permit them to kill Americans on a massive scale."

Gorka said the administration's counterterrorism priorities also include targeting and destroying Islamic military groups capable of executing operations against the United States, identifying and neutralizing violent secular political groups with anti-American, "radically pro-gender," or anarchist ideologies, and boosting efforts to prevent nonstate actors from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. Administration officials will meet with allies to discuss how to bolster their counterterrorism strategies, he said. "As the president made very clear, we will measure your seriousness as a partner and ally by how much you bring to the table. So we expect more — from our partners in the Middle East, as well as elsewhere," Gorka said.