Washington has argued for years about how to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. President Donald Trump just upended a decade of debate by choosing precision to surgically target the Brotherhood branches that meet the terrorism threshold under US law.

To most people, the Muslim Brotherhood is an abstract idea. It is a patchwork of national branches that share an ideological lineage but often diverge in practice. Some branches are political parties, some have become armed movements, and others have stuck to charity work.

The evolving nature of the different branches has made it difficult for the United States to designate the entirety of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The Brotherhood lacks a single headquarters, a unified command, or an organizational structure that demonstrates control over multiple branches.

When it was founded in 1928 by Egyptian teacher Hassan al-Banna, it had a centralized authority with a supreme guide and maintained close relations with branches across the Middle East. Over time, that structure fragmented. National branches and affiliates continued to share the original branch’s ideology but operated independently, adapting to their own political environments.

It appears that Washington recognized this landscape and is adopting a more effective approach, one that does not treat the “Muslim Brotherhood” as a single entity but instead, per President Trump’s executive order, focuses on its most violent branches under existing counterterrorism authorities. This branch-based strategy gives policymakers a more straightforward pathway to build designations case by case, and pursue a sustained campaign to “eliminate the designated chapters’ capabilities and operations.”

The EO explicitly identifies three branches as probable designation targets: the Lebanese Islamic Group, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. According to the order, the Lebanese branch’s military wing “helped terror groups launch multiple rocket attacks against........

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