Story highlights Last week, the White House announced that President Trump would visit Saudi Arabia on his first foreign trip

Lisa Monaco: Hopefully this visit signals that the administration is willing to form global partnerships to fight terrorism

Lisa Monaco served as White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser from 2013-2017. She is now a Distinguished Senior Fellow at New York University Law School's Center on Law & Security and a CNN Senior National Security Analyst. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) The White House has billed the President's first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia as a "historic gathering" to "combat extremism, terrorism and violence" and "build a coalition of friends and partners who share the goal of fighting terrorism and bringing safety, opportunity and stability to the Middle East."

Of course, a global coalition to combat ISIS already exists; it was built by the Obama administration. And far from a historic gathering, this trip follows President Obama's four trips to the Kingdom (more than any other President) and two prior summits of Gulf leaders -- one convened by Obama at Camp David and one by King Salman in Saudi Arabia -- to combat ISIS and enhance support for our Gulf partners.

Lisa Monaco

But history lessons aside, if this trip signals that partnerships and not isolationism will drive this administration's counterterrorism strategy, as it did in the last, then that should be welcome news. The terrorism fight is one area where we need a "globalist" approach.

To start with, ISIS is not the only terrorist group the United States should be focused on. Al Qaeda's franchises in Yemen and Syria remain intent on attacking the US homeland and must be the subject of relentless pressure. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen has been the most persistent in plotting to blow up American airliners and al Qaeda in Syria is currently the largest affiliate of the group that attacked America on 9/11. It seeks to exploit the civil war in Syria to create a new haven for its members.

And ISIS, despite its losses in Iraq and Syria, still remains a threat. Yes, ISIS has been rolled back from the majority of the territory it once held, and its caliphate is shrinking. But, as the saying goes, like a balloon squeezed in one place, it will bulge in another. ISIS wants to demonstrate its relevance, and we need to recognize that it poses a hybrid threat that won't be vanquished with bombs alone.

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