Grievance to Greed: The Global Convergence of the Crime-Terror Threat

The threat is real, deadly and serious-for everyone, not just the United States. The rapid collapse of distinctions between transnational criminal organizations and terrorist organizations has led to a threat convergence the likes of which we have not seen before and are only beginning to understand. Transnational organized criminals and foreign terrorist organizations have linked (both wittingly and not) in what we now call the crime-terror pipeline, or CTP. While the intellectual landscape of the problem is still under study, its scale and relevance have made it squarely a Tier-One national security threat, as codified in the White House Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime.