Twenty-five years ago, the United States suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. The September 11, 2001, attacks killed nearly three thousand people and inflicted a collective trauma on an entire nation, fundamentally altering the US national security apparatus, ushering in the “war on terror,” and leading to overhauls of US intelligence and homeland security. But the core problem of terrorism itself—which has existed for centuries—didn’t go away.
As the world reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, we asked Atlantic Council experts to answer twenty-five pressing questions about how terrorism continues to shape the present era.
1. Was the war on terror successful?
The answer resists a simple yes or no, and for good reason. Counterterrorism ought to be conducted with grand-strategic discipline, which requires one thing the United States has so far not produced: a stated theory of victory. Twenty-five years after 9/11, no administration has told the American public what the end of this effort looks like or what conditions would permit it to close. “Disrupt, dismantle, and defeat,” which US President Barack Obama presented early in his first term, is a task list. The 2001 authorization for the use of military force was stretched across two decades and multiple continents without much congressional pushback. Over those same years, nonstate actors and their state sponsors pushed aggressively into high-tech domains, where cyber operations, artificial intelligence (AI), and cryptocurrency financing now grant asymmetric threats a global reach that the al-Qaeda of 2001 could scarcely have imagined.
Any honest verdict must begin with the human ledger. More than 900,000 people died in direct violence across the post-9/11 wars, including over seven thousand American service members. Their families deserve a candid answer on whether those sacrifices were in vain. National security practitioners delivered two decades of superb tactical execution, proving the ethos I was taught as a young infantry officer: “Lieutenants and sergeants win battles.” The shortfall was not with those at the pointy end of the spear. Instead, it lay in statecraft, where four successive administrations resourced the campaign lavishly, institutionalized it across the bureaucracy, and never once defined the end state those tactical triumphs were meant to secure.
Alongside that strategic vacancy ran a failure of basic decency. The United States repeatedly betrayed partner trust, the one element of counterterrorism that no amount of technological or economic power can replace. From the Kurds to the Afghans, the United States abandoned allies who bled beside US soldiers once national interests shifted. I watched the cost of that habit firsthand on the ground in Kabul during the August 2021 evacuation, as Afghanistan returned to the same tyrannical regime whose sanctuary for al-Qaeda had triggered the war.
This legacy of broken trust arrives as the wider strategic environment grows more combustible. As of 2025, conflict data show that state-based conflicts are at their highest level since 1946. That instability directly feeds terrorist networks, providing recruits, sanctuary, and revenue with every political order that collapses. A record of abandoning trusted allies will make the next necessary coalition harder to assemble.
Was the “war on terror” successful? It produced tactical excellence that strategic drift and broken faith squandered. The threat has splintered into forms harder to detect and, in several key domains, more lethal. Naming what victory requires, and keeping faith with those who fight for it, remains unfinished business.
—Omer Rafiq is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East programs.
2. What was the long-term impact of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on US national security?
Twenty-five years after 9/11 and five years after the fall of Kabul, the United States has not become isolationist—but it has become more realist.
The disappointing ends to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq soured the American public on “intervention.” What exactly that means is still evolving. It has never been a terribly useful unit of analysis. After all, what counts as an intervention? But much of the public debate about foreign policy takes place in those terms anyway.
It seems to mean that the United States will continue to be active in the world, but not for the sake of democracy, human rights, or alliance solidarity. That is exactly what President Donald Trump campaigned on, after all, and his foreign policy has followed his campaign rhetoric. Yet even some of President Joe Biden’s policies followed the same logic.
Neither president has led the United States to embrace isolationism. Nothing in Trump’s foreign policy, from saber-rattling against North Korea in 2017, assassinating an Iranian general in 2020, capturing the president of Venezuela in January, or going to war against Iran this year, suggests isolationism.
Biden, similarly, assembled and led an impressive coalition to support Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s aggression. He maintained strong support for Israel’s war against Hamas against considerable opposition within his own party and among the United States’ traditional allies.
But both presidents have deemphasized the idealistic side of America’s role in the world. Trump openly campaigned against it as early as 2016, mocking the idea of democratization and routinely deriding “nation building.” While Biden spoke more positively about democracy, he, too, rejected “nation building” and sought to limit America’s liability by completing the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The change is evident in how US officials talk about their purpose. Trump has successfully popularized his “America First” slogan, falsely implying that the old foreign policy consensus did not prioritize American interests. That has percolated into a new vocabulary in which US officials routinely criticize “globalism” and play up supposed conflicts between American interests and global order.
The net result is that the United States has a much more short-sighted approach to the world. It is still active and engaged, but it is now more transactional, less relational; more material, less idealistic; more nationalist, less cooperative.
Yet in some ways, Trump has been arguing against a straw man. The traditional view was not that the United States should invest in the liberal international order in spite of American interests, but because of them. US foreign policy used to be premised on the idea that the liberal international order was the outer perimeter of American security, the engine of American prosperity, and a tool of American influence. Losing that belief is the biggest change and worst defeat in US foreign policy.
—Paul D. Miller, PhD, is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
3. How does the global terrorism landscape today compare with that of 2001?
It’s easy to attempt neat analytic delineations on matters that are neither neat nor linear. Still, there is value in comparing September 11, 2001 to today, not so much for any coherence it might illuminate, but to reflect on how much the structure, concept, and category of terrorism has changed.
Terrorism, perhaps counterintuitively, is historically contingent. The pre-9/11 terrorism landscape was heterogeneous. Existing groups encompassed a range of forms, including separatist, nationalist, revolutionary, and religious organizations. Although state-sponsored terrorism never circumscribed that era in whole, state sponsorship as a prism supplied a distinctive framework through which governments understood the terrorist threats they faced.
Al-Qaeda represented a mutation: a transnational, nonstate actor operating from ungoverned spaces, with hierarchical leadership, directing complex attacks against a “far enemy.” After 9/11, this new model became the dominant paradigm for understanding “modern” terrorism. Global counterterrorism efforts then rapidly organized themselves around finding, fixing, and finishing this new center of gravity.
Today, terrorism has mutated further, giving way to a more dispersed ecosystem. A rough parallel might be made with the move from broadcast television, which was dominated by the major, identifiable networks, to a digital environment with a seemingly infinite plane of platforms, niche communities, influencers, and other content publishers. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State remain influential brands. But they no longer project exclusive command and control. They do not communicate with or even inspire every potential adherent of their ideas and methods of generating violence. Today’s terrorists embed themselves within local conflicts that have local effects, combining terrorism with insurgency, territorial control, and contested governance. Legacy terrorist brands lay claim to still being global, but their grievances, recruitment, and objectives are frequently local. Digitalization has further allowed this atomized polity to radicalize more easily and act with little formal direction and more dispersion.
What then is 9/11’s lesson for today? That it is never a clean transition from one kind of terrorism to another. It’s a change in form that organizes an understanding of the threat. For the United States following 9/11, the central challenge was to dismantle an organization capable of strategic, spectacular surprise. Today, it is to understand a fragmented and adaptive system in which transnational networks, local grievances, self-mobilization, criminal economies, and state interests overlap.
—Edward Bogan is an adviser to the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project and a retired Central Intelligence Agency operations officer with twenty-four years of experience in national security and intelligence operations and policy.
4. What threat do al-Qaeda and ISIS pose today?
Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) no longer resemble the major, bureaucratic, lethal terror organizations they once were. However, both organizations have remodeled themselves and now support networks of splinter groups across the developing world. In Africa, for example, an al-Qaeda–affiliated group controls significant territory in Mali, while ISIS almost certainly manages its global operations from its hub in Somalia. ISIS and al-Qaeda retain significant influence as terror groups. They have developed broad networks of affiliates and subgroups. And they continue to inspire terror attacks and plots worldwide.
ISIS and al-Qaeda are not resurgent organizations, but they have remodeled in response to the shifting terror landscape. Both groups have spawned extensive networks of affiliates, which aim to spread their ideology, terrorize civilians, and seize territory. Furthermore, ISIS affiliates have long attracted foreign fighters, a trend that has only continued in recent months. As these affiliated terror networks attract fighters and consolidate territorial control, they demonstrate the enduring—if localized—threat these groups pose to weak states.
More importantly, both ISIS and al-Qaeda have adapted their propaganda and influence techniques to the digital age. They can rapidly reach global audiences, radicalizing individuals anywhere with an internet connection and inspiring terror attacks in the West. Their responsive, flexible propaganda machines are the most challenging—and enduring—threat posed by ISIS and al-Qaeda today. Both groups consistently adapt their practices to avoid content restrictions, ensuring that their extreme messages can reach their audiences. This content has inspired individuals to travel to terrorist-held territory and to plot and conduct attacks in Europe and the United States.
ISIS and al-Qaeda still pose a threat, even though the face of the organizations has changed over the past two decades. Their ability to spread propaganda and recruit and radicalize vulnerable individuals underpins their enduring presence as major terror organizations, a presence that is only bolstered by their networks of affiliates. Both groups have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt, and they will likely continue to do so in the coming years.
—Morgan Tadych is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs.
5. What is the state of foreign terror threats to the US homeland?
The United States’s global war on terror was largely won in the twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was not a war on terror, in truth, but largely a campaign against a single type of violent Sunni extremism, to which groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State adhered. As a political movement, that type of Salafist politics is dead.
This is not to say that the United States won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The outcomes of those conflicts were different: mixed in Iraq and a resounding defeat in Afghanistan. But as an attractive ideology—as a political idea that can pull adherents and recruits from an ocean away—there is no longer much gas left in the tank. The violence perpetrated against Salafist political projects over the past twenty years has devastated their attraction, particularly in Iraq and Syria. The nascent civil war between Shia paramilitaries and the government in Iraq in the 2000s, followed by the international campaign against ISIS in the 2010s joined by those same Shia paramilitaries, has left the Sunni cities of the northern Levant in ruins. In the heart of the Sunni Levant, few want to try for a third time, and even fewer want to join them.
The threat from violent Salafists still exists, of course. Radical Sunni groups in North Africa, Central Asia, and the Sahel are still a threat, and lone-wolf actors still conduct attacks in the United States and Europe, sometimes professing allegiance to ISIS or al-Qaeda. But their attraction, and their threat to the US homeland, has diminished.
Instead, the looming terror threat to Americans comes from state-directed actors, above all Iran. On the one hand, these are easier to counter: Washington knows where they come from and can interdict various points of the terror supply chain. In contrast, the diffusion and unpredictability of Sunni Salafist terrorism was a constant challenge. It has often been more opportunistic, willing to strike a disco or shopping mall than a more politically meaningful target. On the other hand, Shia militants with state support may be more capable. It is more likely that a Shia militant would have access to a surface-to-air missile in Turkey that might threaten Air Force One than would a member of ISIS, for example. As a result, modern terrorism, and the modern threat to the homeland, will come from less spastically violent actions and more careful, strategic planning.
—Andrew L. Peek is the director of the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for Iran and Iraq at the US Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
6. What is the future of terrorism in Central Asia?
Extremist groups, including Islamic State–Khorasan Province (IS-K), are likely to continue to exploit weak governance and social issues in Afghanistan and Central Asia to conduct external operations in the near future. At present, the largest counterterrorism challenge in the region is the Taliban’s inability to deter or prevent terror groups from operating inside Afghanistan.
The Taliban struggles to maintain security and prevent threats within Afghanistan, and it faces significant challenges from both IS-K and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The ETIM, an al-Qaeda-aligned militant group that aims to establish a caliphate in what it calls Turkestan (an area including Central Asia, Afghanistan, and parts of Western China), claims to defend oppressed Uyghur Muslims. In Afghanistan, the group is distinct from ISIS, though both have targeted Chinese interests in the region
Similarly, IS-K conducts operations within Afghanistan, while simultaneously recruiting young men to travel to and train in ungoverned portions of the country. Many of these individuals come from other Central Asian nations, as IS-K steps up its propaganda and recruitment efforts across the region. Tajikistani IS-K recruits have been implicated in attacks and plots across the globe, including in Europe, the Philippines, and the United States, highlighting the central role they play in IS-K’s external operations.
Looking forward, Afghanistan will likely continue to be a permissive environment for terror groups. The Taliban has proven itself incapable of managing emerging terrorism threats in Afghanistan, and other Central Asian states now face a crisis on their borders. Furthermore, IS-K remains poised to exploit the poor economic and social conditions in the region to continue its recruitment campaign. These new recruits are likely to continue to conduct, plot, and inspire attacks across the globe over the near to medium term.
—Morgan Tadych is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs.
7. What is the future of terrorism in Southeast Asia?
A quarter-century after 9/11, Southeast Asia’s counterterrorism landscape faces a structural evolution. While traditional violent extremist organizations have been strategically degraded by sustained security pressure, underlying socio-political grievances, archipelagic safe havens, and radical networks remain intact.
Over the next decade, the primary threat to regional stability will not stem from large-scale territorial insurgencies, but from low-resourced, highly ideological nonstate actors leveraging agentic AI to project state-level asymmetric power.
Autonomous AI frameworks—capable of multi-step reasoning, tool use, and task coordination—can lower the organizational barriers facing violent nonstate actors. Unlike static language models, agentic workflows can help small or fragmented cells carry out more sophisticated operations across multiple domains:
- Amplifying and legitimizing grievances: Artificial persona swarms can autonomously generate hyper-localized, multilingual propaganda in regional dialects, reframing local grievances as existential causes and accelerating radicalization across digital platforms.
- Precision maritime targeting: Multi-agent loops can combine live Automatic Identification System (AIS) ship tracking, satellite feeds, and port schedules to produce real-time targeting packages against commercial vessels.
- Synchronizing strikes across domains: AI orchestration can automate cyber-reconnaissance against port authority infrastructure and locate optimal launch points for commercial first-person-view aerial drones, explosive surface craft, and low-cost submersibles.
Singapore and its littoral partners maintain world-class maritime security through the Malacca Straits Patrols and autonomous defense assets. However, nonstate actors do not need to defeat state militaries to achieve strategic disruption. By exploiting micro blind spots, short reaction windows, and jurisdictional seams in narrow passages such as the Phillips Channel, nonstate actors can use even low-cost harassment strikes to trigger global market volatility, gain global attention, and spike shipping insurance costs.
To preserve a free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific, Washington and its regional allies must shift toward proactive cross-domain deterrence, integrating counter-unmanned systems, point-defense electronic warfare, and AI-driven maritime anomaly detection.
—Colonel Gittipong “Eddie” Paruchabutr, USA (ret.), is a nonresident senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
8. What is the future of terrorism in the Sahel?
The future of terrorism in the Sahel may be determined as much by what we cannot see as by what we can.
Across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, terrorist organizations are operating across an enormous geographic space where state authority is frequently weak or absent. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), affiliated with al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara are exploiting porous borders, local grievances, illicit economies, and ungoverned territory to move, recruit, generate revenue, and establish influence. Increasingly, they are not simply conducting terrorist attacks. They are functioning as insurgencies, controlling access to territory and economic activity while competing with governments for authority.
The scale is difficult to overstate. The militant Islamist threat now stretches more than 1,200 kilometers across the Sahel, while violence continues to expand southward and westward toward the more densely populated states of coastal West Africa. The Sahel remains the deadliest theater of militant Islamist violence in Africa, accounting for around nearly ten thousand deaths in 2025, or 41 percent of fatalities on the continent linked to militant groups that year.
At the same time that the threat has expanded, US visibility has contracted.
Following the 2023 coup in Niger, the United States suspended counterterrorism operations and ultimately withdrew its forces, completing its departure from Air Base 201 at Agadez in August 2024. The base had supported regional counterterrorism efforts, while the broader US presence in Niger provided an important platform for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance across the region. Its loss did not make the United States blind to the Sahel, but it removed a persistent collection and operational platform positioned inside an enormous and increasingly difficult operating environment.
That combination, expanding terrorist freedom of action and diminishing US visibility, is what makes the future particularly concerning.
There is an uncomfortable parallel to Afghanistan before September 11, 2001. The Sahel is not Afghanistan, and history rarely repeats itself cleanly. But Afghanistan demonstrated what can happen when terrorist organizations are afforded sanctuary, time, resources, and sufficient freedom from sustained external pressure. The danger was not simply what al-Qaeda was when it arrived. It was what the organization was able to become.
That should frame how US policymakers think about the Sahel today. JNIM and Islamic State elements remain overwhelmingly focused on regional objectives. A local insurgency does not inevitably become a transnational terrorist threat to the United States.
But the problem is precisely that the United States may have a decreasing ability to observe that transition if it occurs.
The future threat from the Sahel, therefore, is not simply terrorism expanding across Africa. It is the possibility that across an increasingly lawless expanse, terrorist organizations have the time and space to evolve faster than our ability to understand what they are becoming.
—Alex Plitsas is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and leads the Initiative’s Counterterrorism Project. He previously served as the chief of sensitive activities for special operations and combating terrorism in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
9. What is the future of terrorism in the Horn of Africa?
Terrorist threats in the Horn of Africa are becoming more interconnected, technologically capable, and global in impact, requiring creative responses that combine political, military, and economic tools. The Islamic State’s presence in Somalia illustrates this evolution. Although smaller than al-Shabaab, the Islamic State in Somalia plays a financial facilitation role for the broader Islamic State network, raising and transferring funds that support operations beyond Somalia. Meanwhile, cooperation between al-Shabaab and the Houthis in Yemen is increasing despite their ideological differences. The relationship represents a dangerous marriage of convenience: al-Shabaab can offer financial resources, smuggling networks, and access on the African side of the Gulf of Aden, while the Houthis possess increasingly sophisticated drone, missile, and maritime-warfare capabilities.
The Horn of Africa will not be exempt from intensifying pressure on global maritime chokepoints. Its centrality in the Bab el-Mandeb, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden means that terrorist and insurgent activity can threaten shipping, ports, energy supplies, and global supply chains. Addressing this danger should not be treated solely as an Iran or Houthi problem. Governments and other actors on both sides of the Red Sea have equal roles in disrupting illicit finance, weapons transfers, smuggling routes, and operational cooperation among militant groups.
Yet military operations alone will not resolve the threat. In many areas, communities have seen few benefits from their governments. Where the state cannot provide security, justice, services, or economic opportunity, residents may tolerate or passively support terrorist organizations, because the consequences of resisting them are greater than anything the government can offer. Without stronger governance and legitimate economic alternatives, this dynamic is likely to continue.
The long-term answer therefore lies in political solutions, supported by economic programs and by sustained counterterrorism pressure. Negotiations with elements of al-Shabaab should not be ruled out, and diplomatic engagement with the Houthis might form part of a wider regional approach. These tracks should proceed in parallel alongside credible military pressure.
The future of counterterrorism in the Horn must consequently be multipronged: political and diplomatic negotiation, economic growth that offers communities viable alternatives, more legitimate and capable governance, coordinated action across both shores of the Red Sea, and targeted military pressure against irreconcilable actors. As we have argued before, Washington must move beyond viewing the Horn principally through a counterterrorism lens. The threat is becoming transregional and the response must become equally integrated.
—Maureen Farrell is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and previously served as US deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs.
—Rose Keravuori is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and previously served as the director of intelligence at US Africa Command.
10. What is the future of terrorism in South Asia?
At first blush, terrorism’s current trajectory in South Asia appears much less troubling than it was in the years leading to 9/11. Legacy groups like al-Qaeda have grown old and weak. Most of the dozen-plus terrorist organizations operating in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region are relatively inactive. Attacks by IS-K, the South Asia affiliate of the Islamic State and one of the few truly potent groups in the region, have come down in recent years.
But it would be a mistake to downplay the continued threat of terrorism in the region. The Taliban—which has alliances with most of the terror groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, from Central Asian jihadists to Pakistani outfits focused on India—has been back in power for five years, with no foreseeable threat to its political survival. This ensures the presence of sanctuaries for terrorist actors, and it creates space for weakened groups—including al-Qaeda—to focus on rebooting. One of the Taliban’s most dangerous allies, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), is using bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan to carry out attacks in Pakistan. Most TTP attacks have targeted security forces in Pakistan, but more than a decade ago—before Pakistani counterterrorism operations temporarily weakened the group—it carried out waves of attacks on Pakistani civilians and trained a fighter to attempt an attack on New York’s Times Square.
The one group with which the Taliban is not allied is IS-K. The Taliban has carried out ground offensives against IS-K that likely account for the reduction in IS-K attacks (and even prompted grudging praise from Biden administration officials). But IS-K is famously resilient, having withstood years of NATO airstrikes and even the “Mother of All Bombs” deployed against its cave sanctuaries in Afghanistan in 2017. Indeed, over the past few years, even while getting hit hard in Afghanistan by the Taliban, IS-K has developed a growing capacity to project a threat beyond South Asia.
The future of terrorism in South Asia is concerning. The region may not be the global hub for international terrorist plots that it was in the past, and the number of attacks may not be as great. But terrorism will continue to be a reality, thanks to potent and resilient groups such as IS-K and TTP, and thanks to the rule of the Taliban, which provides an enabling environment for militant organizations of many stripes.
—Michael Kugelman is a resident senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council.
11. What is the future of Iran’s terrorist proxies in the Middle East?
Should the current Iranian regime remain the country’s governing force at the end of the current conflict, expect its proxies—Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iraqi Shia militias—to remain core to the regime’s strategic goals of survival, forward defense, and asymmetric warfare. This is a likely outcome given that current negotiations do not appear to include any demands for a cessation of Iranian support to its proxy network. The extent to which Iran will continue to fund and provide material support to its proxies will largely depend on economic concessions, cash infusions, and the easing or elimination of sanctions that Iran garners in a final peace settlement.
Moreover, even a diminished Iranian regime will not lead to its proxy network’s demise. It will instead force the network into transitional phases of survival and regeneration. Facing no existential threat to its belief structure, the network will continue even with less financial and military support from a weakened Iranian state.
The proxies will also endure sustained pressure on their operations from both internal and external forces that will shape but not eliminate their influence and impact. Hamas and PIJ’s ability to pose a significant terrorist threat to Israel has been significantly reduced for now, but Hamas will likely remain a significant ideological and political movement committed to Israel’s destruction. Likewise, Hezbollah’s recent setbacks are substantial, but it is unlikely to be disarmed. It will continue to influence Lebanese politics and society and destabilize Lebanon’s pursuit of a lasting peace treaty with Israel. In addition, the Houthis can be counted on to pursue their political objectives in Yemen. With a reduction in material support from Iran, the group may more frequently try to hold shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb hostage to counter Saudi and Emirati pressure.
Regardless of Iranian support, the Shia militias in Iraq, including the Popular Mobilization Forces and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—much like Hezbollah in Lebanon—remain fixtures of Iraq’s society and polity. At a minimum, these groups’ anti-US, anti-Saudi, and anti-Israel positions hinder Iraq’s economic growth and the Gulf’s stability.
Iran’s proxies have a hydra-like ability to regenerate, especially when fed with new funding and materiel. For the foreseeable future, expect them to contribute to instability in the Middle East.
—Joe Zacks is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. He previously served as deputy assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency for counterterrorism.
12. What is the future of terrorism in Latin America?
The global security environment is at its most unsettled in decades, and arguably since the end of World War II. With conventional conflicts underway in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, positive global and regional security trends are in short supply.
Yet in Latin America, one long-standing challenge is showing signs of improvement: terrorism. Since the end of the Cold War, the Castro regime in Cuba and the Chavista regime in Venezuela have been particularly pernicious in incubating and even using terrorist proxies against the United States and its partners. With the Cuban regime under sustained pressure from Washington and Hugo Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro ousted in Caracas, the primary state sponsors of terrorism in Latin America are either deposed or on the run.
Cuba has long supported leftist militants and terrorists across the Western Hemisphere. Havana has also sheltered fugitives from the US legal system. For Havana’s actions, the US State Department has designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. The Trump administration’s mounting pressure on the Castro regime is likely to restrict its operating environment for the foreseeable future.
In Venezuela, the removal of the Chavez-Maduro regime deprives Hezbollah of its principal base of Latin American operations. Having executed successful attacks in Argentina during the 1990s and operated in the tri-border area of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, Hezbollah’s support from the Venezuelan regime has provided it with staying power. Washington’s successful operation against Maduro in January is likely to substantially degrade Hezbollah’s capacity for Latin American operations.
Despite the positive momentum of recent months, terrorism in the region will undoubtedly persist, albeit without immediate state hosts and sponsors. Transnational criminal organizations and narcotics traffickers pose a threat more analogous to traditional terrorist organizations in many instances, including in Mexico and Ecuador. These organizations remain exceptionally dangerous in a region often defined by limited state capacity and unstable political institutions. Additionally, as the Trump administration outlined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, such organizations are capable of directly threatening the US homeland while trafficking deadly narcotics across borders.
Overall, however, Latin America has made progress in reducing the threat of terrorism, particularly as Washington has applied pressure on regimes with longstanding records of sponsoring terrorism. To build on this momentum and fortify the region against terrorism-like violence from cartels and other criminal organizations, Washington must deepen security cooperation and training programs with like-minded governments in Latin America. Recent elections that have brought more compatible governments to power across the region open the possibility of a shared security agenda in the hemisphere.
—Alexander B. Gray is a nonresident senior fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He previously served as deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff of the White House National Security Council.
13. What is the future of state-sponsored terrorism?
The future of state-sponsored terrorism is likely to feature more covert, deniable support to diverse violent actors, increasingly enabled by technology and shaped by great-power competition rather than by ideologically driven proxy wars alone. Classic patterns, such as states training, arming, and sheltering militant groups, will persist, but sponsorship is already shifting toward more ambiguous arrangements. Analysts note that governments increasingly rely on criminal networks, loosely affiliated operatives, and low-profile proxies instead of clearly branded militias, making attribution harder and complicating legal and diplomatic responses. This trend blurs the line between terrorism, organized crime, and covert action, and it allows states to exploit violence while avoiding formal designation as “state sponsors of terrorism” under US law.
State sponsorship is likely to grow alongside intensifying geopolitical rivalries. Research on terrorism suggests that in regions such as the Middle East, Africa, and Eurasia, states are likely to keep using nonstate violence to pressure adversaries, shape battlefields, and circumvent conventional deterrence. Debates over designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism highlight how sponsorship can involve both direct attacks and enabling third parties, from separatist movements to private military companies. At the same time, some governments, such as in the discussions around Syria, may seek removal from terrorism lists without necessarily abandoning clandestine support, underscoring the political nature of designation processes.
AI and cheap commercial drones will amplify the impact of state-backed actors. AI tools can enhance targeting, surveillance, propaganda, and recruitment, while also strengthening states’ counterterrorism capabilities by creating a dynamic of mutual escalation. Assessments for 2026 foresee terrorist and proxy actors adopting drones for attacks on critical infrastructure, a pattern that state sponsors can quietly subsidize or enable through training and technology transfer.
Several analyses warn that global intelligence-sharing and counterterrorism cooperation are degrading, even as the threat landscape becomes more fragmented and ideologically diffuse. Without renewed multilateral agreements on what constitutes “state sponsorship,” including both active support and permissive environments for financing and recruitment, sanctions and legal tools will remain partial and uneven. The future of state-sponsored terrorism will therefore hinge less on whether states use terror-linked proxies, which seems inevitable, and more on whether international institutions can adapt fast enough to identify, attribute, and impose real costs on these evolving forms of sponsorship.
—Doug Livermore is the national vice president for the Special Operations Association of America, senior vice president for solution engineering at the CenCore Group, and the deputy commander for Special Operations Detachment–Joint Special Operations Command in the North Carolina Army National Guard.
14. What makes narcoterrorism different?
While cartels certainly employ tactics of terror, such as public executions and mass killings, they lack the ideological ambition to unseat political governance structures that often defines terrorism. Whereas ISIS and other terrorist groups sought to eradicate existing governance structures and impose their own, cartels are often driven by profits, which hinge on commercial and logistical networks operated by their national governments.
Despite this general pattern, however, the Trump administration’s designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations in 2025 was not unfounded. Recent years have seen cartels increasingly tread on the state’s legitimacy, both by fomenting lawlessness and by attempting to cultivate the population’s support through infrastructure and aid projects. This, coupled with the growing pervasiveness of narcocultura, or the veneration of narcoviolence in popular culture, has imbued cartels with a politico-ideological dimension that increasingly warrants treating them as terrorist organizations.
Despite some skepticism of the Trump administration’s embrace of narcoterrorism as a conceptual reality, it remains unlikely that subsequent US presidents, regardless of political leanings, will undo the cartel foreign terrorist organization designations. At its height, the cartel-fueled opioid epidemic killed more Americans in a single year than during the entire Vietnam War. Reversing the designations seems like a politically untenable sword to die on.
Ultimately, as I have argued, the United States needs a counter narcoterrorism strategy tailored to the market realities in which cartels operate. While the US has pursued decapitation strategies, history has shown that removing cartel leaders often fragments criminal organizations, increasing violence and allowing smaller successor groups to proliferate because the underlying drug market remains intact. Recent findings further indicate that the Trump administration’s strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have failed to reduce seaborne drug smuggling into the United States.
Instead, Washington should take several steps. It should puncture cartel transport networks by hardening the Southern border. It should weaken cartels by working to cut their access to US firearms. And it should work alongside regional governments to deepen intelligence and law enforcement partnerships. The ultimate blow to narcoterrorism, however, would be to reduce US demand for narcotics—an ambitious but necessary public health objective all Americans should support.
—Charlotte Bertrand is a program assistant for the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
15. What is the future of bioterrorism?
The anthrax events of 2001 began shortly after 9/11, with the first letter containing weaponized, powdered anthrax received on September 18. Over the past two and a half decades, the United States and other countries took steps to address the threat of bioterrorism, but those efforts have waned in recent years. The underlying threat did not go away, and it will not in the future.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS have issued statements encouraging their followers to use biological weapons in acts of terrorism. These and other terrorist organizations will continue to do so. However, as more time goes by, it will become easier to obtain biological material and learn to weaponize it due to the evolution of biological sciences. The technology needed to synthesize and modify organisms or toxins will likely continue to spread throughout the world and enable terrorist organizations to produce what they cannot otherwise obtain. For example, recent field research indicates that Boko Haram and its offshoots are already using AI for attack planning and weapons troubleshooting, raising concern that such tools could lower the expertise barriers to developing biological weapons.
Russia and North Korea possess active biological weapons programs today. Nation-state sponsorship of bioterrorism will remain an option for these and other countries suspected of possessing biological weapons. Working through proxies could provide states with plausible deniability while giving terrorist organizations access to biological agents or weapons already in their inventories. Uncertainty about the disposition of biological agents and materials associated with Iran’s suspected biological weapons program is likely a long-term risk for US and allied warfighters and civilians.
Domestically, ricin events continue throughout the United States. Letters containing ricin have appeared and been sent to government officials, including Obama and Trump. Attempts at and successful execution of bioterrorist events in the United States should be expected for decades to come.
Greater investment in public health security is needed. The United States must remain vigilant both to prevent biological terrorism and to detect and attribute an attack rapidly if prevention fails. In order to do that, the United States and its allies must gather information and data from throughout the world and analyze them to produce both classified and unclassified assessments of bioterrorist threats, as well as vulnerabilities to and consequences from acts of bioterrorism. The central challenges for the next quarter century will be to transform data and information into early warning systems and scientific advances into biodefense, before adversaries can turn those same advances into weapons.
—Asha M. George, DrPH, is the director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
—John (J.T.) O’Brien is the associate director of research for the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
16. What is the future of cyberterrorism?
For twenty-five years, policymakers have warned that terrorists might launch a “cyber 9/11”—remotely crashing an airliner, poisoning a water system, or blacking out a major city. October 7, 2023, was not that attack. It was among the most consequential terrorist attacks of the post-9/11 era, but its effects came from physical reconnaissance, deception, drones, explosives, communications, and armed teams; not an integrated cyber strike. Google’s Threat Analysis Group found no evidence that Hamas used cyber operations to tactically support the assault, even though Hamas-linked actors had previously engaged in cyberespionage and information operations.
That distinction clarifies the gap between the cyberterrorism long feared and the cyber-enabled terrorism more likely to emerge. Terrorist organizations have used the internet extensively for propaganda, recruitment, surveillance, fundraising, and coordination, but they have not yet consistently fused offensive cyber operations with complex physical attacks. Many ideologically and politically motivated cyberattacks have been linked to nation-states rather than terrorist organizations. Still, October 7 demonstrates both how much damage a capable organization can cause without cyber integration and how much more disruptive a future attack could become if that remaining seam is closed.
Terrorists may not need to develop elite hacking units to close it. The 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack offers a useful preview. DarkSide was a criminal enterprise, not a terrorist organization, yet its intrusion caused the operator to take portions of a major fuel pipeline out of service. The capability already existed within a commercialized criminal ecosystem. United Nations research has similarly warned that cybercrime-as-a-service could allow extremist actors to acquire tools and expertise they cannot produce internally.
The next phase of cyberterrorism will therefore be less cinematic and more operational. Attackers could buy stolen credentials to map a facility, disable cameras before an assault, disrupt dispatch systems as bombs detonate, publish responders’ personal information, or circulate convincing false evacuation instructions. Cyber tools would not replace firearms, explosives, drones, or insiders. They would make each one more effective.
A cyber 9/11 scenario has not yet come to pass. The more plausible danger is that the next major physical attack begins with a password and that attackers learn to treat surveillance, communications, emergency response, public information, and weapons as parts of one integrated system.
—Stephen Honan is a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project, a senior consultant for BVG and Company, and a former explosive ordnance disposal officer for the US Navy.
17. How might terrorist groups adopt emerging unmanned technologies?
This September 11 anniversary reminds us of the grave consequences when leaders fail to anticipate a highly unconventional threat. This generation’s “failure of imagination” could be the threat posed by drones. Unmanned systems are the great democratizer of weaponry—incredibly accessible, inexpensive, easy to use, and capable of gaining an advantage over larger conventional forces. Their capabilities are largely limited only by a user’s intent and imagination, offering terrorist groups immense opportunities to induce fear and advance their ideological goals. Some terrorists have already begun using unmanned aircraft systems, including in a January 2024 attack by Kataib Hezbollah with a drone in Jordan, which represented the first time US soldiers were killed in a drone strike.
The next target may be the US homeland, offering terrorists opportunities to trigger large-scale violence in crowded venues and symbolic places, deny access and use of critical infrastructure, and terrorize Americans. The future of unmanned systems is being revealed in Russia’s war on Ukraine, such as Russia’s horrific “human safari” fear campaign. It should serve as a warning that terrorists have access to not just a new toolkit but an entirely new way of pursuing their goals.
The United States has begun to take the right steps on defending against drones, but it has more work to do. Leaders must accelerate actions to achieve broad airspace awareness, improve interagency coordination, train and equip law enforcement, and invest in technology that counters unmanned systems to protect people and critical infrastructure. Crucially, experts must imagine the unimaginable, preparing to counter the new ways that terrorist groups could use drones to devastating effect in the homeland.
—Vice Admiral Peter Gautier (ret.) is a nonresident senior fellow at the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
—Sydney Sherry is an assistant director with the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
18. How might terrorist groups target and attack critical infrastructure?
Sixteen sectors of critical infrastructure fuel daily life and economies for billions around the world. They provide water, energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, communications, public health, and emergency and government services. Because these systems are often interconnected and poorly protected, they are vulnerable and strategic targets that terrorists will likely try to attack to create widespread chaos.
Between 1970 and 2015, a study of two thousand terrorist incidents targeting US critical infrastructure noted a decline in annual attack frequency. Yet after 9/11, the public profile and scale of global terrorism grew. Today, attacks on infrastructure are spiking, disrupting livelihoods, societal resilience and cohesion, and trust in government.
Historically, terrorist groups have deployed conventional methods, such as bombs, missiles, or other explosives to damage physical structures and networks. Yet “gray zone” tactics, like drones and increased cyber capabilities are extending the reach and magnitude of potential disruption.
In July, Iranian-linked cyberhackers attacked thirty water infrastructure plants across twelve US states, halting signal operations, remote-access capabilities, and automated monitoring for water services. Those same attacks shut down a power plant in the UK. In 2023, similar groups linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps manipulated data for water and wastewater services. In 2013, they accessed flood control systems of a New York dam and three US financial companies. In the future, terrorists could expand their cyber targeting to exploit systems managing pollution and alter levels of contaminants and chemical treatments.
Weak digital security, like firewalls and default passwords, as well as dated technology used by infrastructure providers, makes remote attacks cheaper and lower risk for malicious actors. The risk of terrorists weaponizing ransomware, GPS spoofing, or AI could make protection even more difficult to develop and implement at scale. But it isn’t all cyber. Another avenue may mean carrying out less-sophisticated attacks that do not require advanced equipment. In 2013, for example, Egyptian authorities arrested three divers who used underwater explosives to cut shallow telecommunications cables in the Mediterranean. Recently, too, the Houthis revealed a map of subsea cables in Middle Eastern waters on a Telegram channel, in what was widely seen as a threat.
Attacks on the input or output networks of critical infrastructure pose even more opportunities for terrorist groups to exploit. Terrorists might, for example, adapt pollution tactics such as pumping oil into bodies of water. When Iraqi forces did this during the Gulf War in 1991, they contaminated seawater and shut down desalination plants critical for supplying drinking water in Kuwait.
The ability to easily, indirectly, and remotely sabotage critical infrastructure, frequently without official condemnation or retaliation, allows terrorist groups and other state and nonstate actors to seed instability and wield geopolitical influence. A terrorist attack on one system will certainly have consequential spillover for resiliency and recovery efforts. As the US government retracts support for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, critical infrastructure must become a more serious national security priority backed by more protection measures and investment.
—Ginger Matchett is an assistant director with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
19. How might terrorists use artificial intelligence?
Twenty-five years ago, aspiring terrorists seeking specialized training often needed direct access to knowledge networks, camps, and equipment. Today, they can turn to a large language model to achieve unimaginable results.
Terror groups today still seek to inflict damage and create shock at scale, but the AI age makes access much easier. Former Boko Haram members have described militants using AI to troubleshoot equipment, assess battlefield problems, and brainstorm attack options. Former members also described dedicated AI teams and internal training, suggesting that AI use is becoming embedded in organizational routines rather than remaining isolated experimentation. But what happens as those capabilities and sustained investments become more powerful? This question should concern counterterrorism officials and publics alike.
AI is already reshaping the terrorist threat landscape by making a familiar playbook easier, cheaper, and faster to execute. Propaganda and recruitment are obvious starting points. ISIS-linked networks have used AI to translate propaganda into multiple languages and to create AI-generated media that amplifies the group’s messaging. Generative and agentic AI could allow terrorist groups to tailor content to vulnerable audiences and produce radicalizing material at unprecedented scale.
More concerning possibilities may still lie ahead. Terrorist groups have long sought chemical, biological, and other malicious capabilities. Advanced AI models may help terrorists synthesize scientific information and identify gaps in their technical knowledge thus lowering barriers to an attack. In the biological domain, AI developers are already testing whether models could assist non-experts with weaponizing biological agents. AI will not remove every practical barrier to an attack, but it can help users work through technical problems.
AI systems are already directing experiments through remotely operated, automated laboratories. These developments could lower some hands-on skill requirements, making access controls and safeguards at the laboratory level increasingly important but also difficult to control across academic, industrial, and government contexts. Safeguards do exist. AI developers use a variety of tools to prevent models from aiding terrorism or other dangerous activities. But defenses are not impermeable. Researchers continue to identify “jailbreaks” that circumvent safeguards. The challenge becomes greater with open-weight models, which can be downloaded and used outside the monitoring and controls of their original developers. Governments and industry face a moving target where safety measures must evolve alongside both increasingly capable models and malicious users.
AI does not need to reinvent terrorism to make it more dangerous, but policymakers should not assume its effects will remain incremental as capabilities advance. The next lone actor could be radicalized by AI-generated propaganda, interact with automated extremist personas, and turn to AI when technical problems arise. If that individual is using a downloadable model outside a provider’s monitoring systems, those interactions may be far harder to detect. AI will not erase every barrier to an attack, but it could lower enough of them to matter. Governments will struggle to keep up with the rapid adaptability of terror groups, and more specialized expertise and legal structures are needed now for intelligence, counterterrorism, and law enforcement agencies to create credible preventative capabilities.
—Tressa Guenov is the senior director for programs and operations and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
—Bailey Galicia is assistant director for strategy and operations with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
20. How is cryptocurrency changing terrorist financing?
Cryptocurrency is not the primary engine of terrorist financing, but it is a useful lens through which to understand how the threat has evolved since 9/11. While cash, state sponsorship, and informal networks remain dominant, cryptocurrency is part of a broader technological shift that allows funds, communications, and operations to bypass the institutions that counterterrorism efforts are designed to monitor.
The September 11 attacks reportedly cost their plotters around half a million dollars to reap trillions in economic consequences through direct losses, war expenditures, and the architecture built in their aftermath. That asymmetry frames the enduring logic of countering terrorist financing: sanctions, financial reporting, and targeted action against key intermediaries impose real costs on terrorist networks. Those networks have evolved in response, as has the challenge.
The 9/11 Commission outlined a hybrid financial architecture mixing formal and informal channels, including donor networks, charitable fronts, hawala, and bank accounts mundane enough to disappear into legitimate flows. The post–9/11 regime was built around the obligated intermediaries and human facilitators those channels required.
Two mutually reinforcing catalysts reshaped what followed. Sustained counterterrorism pressure helped push networks toward decentralization, from al-Qaeda’s hierarchy to ISIS’s territorial model and toward the increasingly autonomous structures of IS-K. Technology expanded what decentralized structures could achieve, building on pre-existing informal shadow economies that made distributed operations formidable.
Financing adapted across the full spectrum. Crowdfunding made small-value global giving easier to aggregate, exploited through humanitarian fronts by ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Palestinian groups well before cryptocurrency existed. Encrypted messaging became infrastructure for propaganda, recruitment, and coordination, extending the functional logic of hawala into digital channels that cross jurisdictions without accountable intermediaries. Mobile money with limited verification has also been used to launder money across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Generative AI now lowers the human cost of propaganda, recruitment, and fundraising at scale.
Cryptocurrency fits this pattern because some architectures shift financial activity away from the accountable intermediaries on which the post–9/11 regime depends, distributing across protocols and node operators rather than custodial institutions. While cash and state sponsorship remain dominant, digital assets supplement terrorism financing efforts. Hamas and PIJ shifted toward dollar-pegged stablecoins after enforcement disrupted earlier wallet infrastructure; IS-K began publicly soliciting Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency designed to obscure transaction flows.
Blockchain analytics and the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designation authority have disrupted real networks. But privacy coins, cross-chain bridges, and DeFi protocols can remove the intermediation points on which existing obligations depend—a problem that is compounded by persistent gaps in global implementation of virtual asset standards.
Twenty-five years on, the post-9/11 financial coercion regime faces a problem of rapid technological innovation at almost zero margin cost. Effective deterrence will depend on whether governance and enforcement adapt to reach infrastructure designed to disperse, obscure, and relocate the obligations on which that regime depends.
—Carole House is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center.
21. Where are the greatest risks of climate change fueling terror threats?
The linkages between climate change and terrorism are complex, multifaceted, and indirect. But they can be boiled down to a basic proposition, which is that a changing climate can deepen the ecological, social, and political stresses in which terrorism takes root and grows. Extremist groups, which use terror as a central tactic, can more easily establish themselves in places suffering from climate-driven degradation—sustained drought, say—than elsewhere. This is most true in countries with poor or absent governance, where reduced freshwater supplies, extreme heat, and dry soils undermine state capacity, helping to turn weak states into fragile ones, and fragile states into collapsed ones. The effects can spin outward from there, affecting entire regions and even beyond.
The sequence from climate change to terror-driven collapse is far from guaranteed. Rather, climate change makes instability, insecurity, and violence, including terrorism, more likely, because it deteriorates the background conditions in which stable societies function. For example, a 2024 study of farmers and pastoralists in the Sahel by the Institute for Security Studies, a South Africa–based think tank, found that climate change has driven “natural resource scarcity” in the region, contributing to localized conflict, including the emergence of armed militias, “against the backdrop of weakening conflict management by both traditional and state systems.” Climate change, in other words, makes the other hard problems facing such fragile regions even harder to solve.
“Climate security” refers to the field that examines this nexus. Although its origins date to at least the 1970s if not earlier, the 9/11 attacks underscored how terrorism can take hold in poorly governed settings and spread its violent tentacles outward. Over the next decade, climate security practitioners sharpened their arguments, formulating such ideas as the “threat multiplier” concept, which describes climate change as compounding existing sources of instability in already volatile regions.
This problem will not go away anytime soon. Why? Since 9/11, the Earth has continued to warm. It is hotter now than it was in 2001 and getting hotter nearly every year. More heat, and therefore more drought, flooding, and other resource problems, should worry everyone concerned about terrorism.
—Peter Engelke is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Global Energy Center.
22. Is the US prepared to counter future terrorist threats?
Is the US highly capable now on counterterrorism? Yes. Should Americans worry that the US is not doing enough? Yes, as well.
The US government remains the gold standard globally in the counterterrorism framework model to “detect, deny, and disrupt” the ability of terrorist groups to attack Americans. The US counterterrorism ecosystem includes the timely integration and synchronization of the intelligence community, law enforcement, and military—all highly specialized entities with skills honed across two decades of fighting the global war on terrorism. The intelligence community maintains a global reach, with human intelligence and signals intelligence gathering capabilities that are second to none. Counterterrorism operations are also a team sport: the United States maintains robust global intelligence liaison relationships that may be among the only areas untouched by political controversies. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) around the United States allow for interagency cooperation within US borders. The Special Operations Command maintains specialized units that are battle tested. Moreover, US border and aviation security apparatuses have also proved resilient in protecting the homeland.
That said, the counterterrorism community is akin to a soccer goalie—it can be very good at times, but goals do get by. In fact, lone-wolf attacks are extremely difficult to combat, as often there is no cell for a JTTF to penetrate, complex communications for the intelligence community to intercept, or actual terrorist groups for special operations forces to take down in a raid. Complex attacks like 9/11 may not be the norm any longer, but radicalized individuals can still cause great harm. Domestic extremism is a growing (and politically toxic) issue as well—one that law enforcement may be reluctant to tackle based on the political winds of the day. And terrorists’ use of technology has evolved, with encrypted communications now prevalent across the terrorist spectrum. One can only imagine how problematic the weaponization of small, inexpensive drones within US borders would be, if such a terrorist plot materialized and matured.
Finally, given the operational successes of the US counterterrorism community since 9/11 and the renewed rise of great power competition, there are fewer resources, including funding and personnel, for counterterrorism efforts than during the Global War on Terror. Counterterrorism is playing second fiddle to threats from China and Russia, for example, and the current administration’s focus on the border and narcotrafficking is also shifting resources to the Americas.
There also seems to be less of an inclination to “defend forward,” meaning a diminished US footprint in terrorist hotspots in South Asia and Africa, where ISIS activity is rising. A reduced official US footprint means fewer US intelligence and special operations boots on the ground. Flying blind is never a comforting thought for counterterrorism professionals.
Counterterrorism is often not seen as important until it really is. Think of the Bush administration in the run-up to 9/11. It too often takes a catastrophic event for the US political establishment to recognize that the country cannot take its foot off the gas.
—Marc Polymeropoulos is a member of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative’s Counterterrorism Project. He previously served for twenty-six years at the Central Intelligence Agency.
23. What does an allied strategy for counterterrorism look like?
An effective counterterrorism strategy is built on partnerships, shared intelligence, and coordinated action. Collaboration with allies and nontraditional partners has been one of the great strengths and pillars of America’s post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy. Nations find combating terrorism compatible with their domestic and foreign policies, and counterterrorism partnerships serve as a force multiplier. Effective counterterrorism partnerships require governments to commit to their partners’ security nearly as part of their own. In its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy, the Trump administration continues to prioritize counterterrorism partnership, albeit more transactionally than previous presidential strategies, which focused on collective leadership. Although today it may be “America First,” it is not “America Alone.”
The goal of any allied counterterrorism strategy is to prevent terrorist attacks, and its foundation is the identification and disruption of terrorist threats. Success depends on relationships built on trust and shared purpose. It must involve at least bilateral if not multilateral cooperation across intelligence, diplomacy, and finance. It cannot rely solely, however, on cooperation among intelligence services. All relevant instruments of national power must play an active role in defining and implementing counterterrorism strategies. Timely information sharing and collective action are essential to disrupting terrorist plots from every angle. For less capable countries, partners with advanced tools and abilities should provide training, materiel, and financial support.
The US-sponsored Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, established in 2014 and now comprising eighty-seven members, along with its Counter-ISIS Finance Group, is a prime example of the value of multilateral efforts to tackle global terrorism capabilities and threats. The Global Counterterrorism Forum and the Financial Action Task Force are other examples of multilateral approaches to counterterrorism doctrine and financial enforcement.
In the future, terrorism emanating from inspired individuals, lone-wolf actors, and violent domestic extremist groups is likely to rise. Many countries may shy away from multilateral solutions to homegrown problems. Nevertheless, collective efforts will remain essential, especially as they relate to governing social media and cryptocurrency platforms that enable terrorist, nihilist, and anarchist activity to propagate.
A counterterrorism strategy heavily dependent on alliances and partnerships has served the United States and the world well for the twenty-five years since 9/11. It will continue to do so, even as the nature of terrorism evolves.
—Joe Zacks is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs.
24. What should an effective domestic counterterror strategy to defend the homeland look like?
It would match intelligence, cyber, political, and law enforcement resources to the most serious threats. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the threats from al-Qaeda and ISIS and their respective franchises and affiliates have diminished but not ended. However, the threat from Iranian state-sponsored terrorism has increased. Cyberattacks against US water infrastructure and threats against Iranian dissidents and Trump administration officials represent the most serious terrorist threat against the US homeland. Even if the most recent Iranian plot to shoot down Trump’s plane was thinly sourced, Iranian officials’ thirst for revenge for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is not going away. Even a ceasefire is unlikely to end Iranian plots against Trump and the homeland.
Serious state-sponsored terrorist threats against the United States are an entirely different order of magnitude from what the United States has faced since 9/11. The annual budget for al-Qaeda at its peak, around $30 million a year, was a fraction of the $700 million to $1 billion or more that Iran spends every year to support Lebanese Hezbollah. The United States has not faced a determined state-sponsored terrorist threat like the one Iran poses today in decades, if ever.
The Trump administration’s 2026 counterterrorism strategy acknowledges that “the greatest threat to the United States emanating from the Middle East comes specifically from Iran.” The strategy also states that the United States will “continue to focus our kinetic, intelligence, and cyber operations against Iranian-backed terror proxies who plot against Americans, and we will take decisive action against regime actors who plot attacks against Americans in the homeland, as well as Iranian dissidents and Israelis in our country.” Other administrations had essentially the same policy.
However, the loss of a thousand employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since January 2025 raises questions about matching the policy with resources. The Trump administration is also in a bind of its own making, trying to justify increased security spending after starting a war of choice using tactics that significantly increased the terrorist threat against the homeland. Perhaps most troubling is the administration’s apparent unwillingness to compromise with congressional Democrats to reallocate or increase funding to protect against Iranian terrorism. The administration needs to work with appropriators of both parties, not just Republicans, to make sure the United States has the resources and personnel to address today’s greatest terrorist threat.
—Thomas S. Warrick is a nonresident senior fellow with the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative in the Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council.
25. How does China approach global terrorism?
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States praised China for its close cooperation on counterterrorism issues, with the topic even helping to stabilize the relationship. But by 2005, Washington was raising concerns about how sincere China’s efforts were. In the years since, Beijing has focused on terrorism as a domestic threat, but as it seeks to expand its global footprint, it will increasingly face the threat of transnational terrorism.
Beijing has long worried that members of the Uyghur ethnic group hold extremist ideas that present a threat to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It has labeled the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant separatist group founded by Uyghurs, as a terrorist group (though the United States removed the group from its list of terrorist organizations in 2020), and views it as part of a growing terrorism threat facing China. Part of this concern has also been driven by a worry that terrorist groups operating abroad would spread into Xinjiang province. Some Uyghurs have fought alongside militant organizations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, but experts doubt that Uyghur militancy in Xinjiang is imminent or even possible. In response, China has carried out a campaign of arbitrary detention against the Uyghur population, which the United States has labeled a “genocide.”
The CCP views terrorism as posing a significant threat to Beijing’s ability to achieve its interests and maintain internal security. Now, as China has expanded its global presence, it must also contend with terrorism abroad.
Beijing’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure and development strategy, extends across many countries that face active terrorism threats. In Afghanistan, the Islamic State – Khorasan Province has targeted China in its propaganda and has threatened Belt and Road projects in the country. Next door, in Pakistan, the Balochistan Liberation Army attacked China’s consulate in Karachi in 2018, and in 2021, the TTP organized an attack on the hotel housing China’s ambassador to Pakistan. Since 2021, terrorist attacks have killed at least nineteen Chinese nationals in Pakistan.
China’s hostility toward its Uyghur population has also caught the attention of terrorist groups, with the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula saying that China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims justified future attacks. Earlier this year in Kabul, an IS-K bombing killed seven people at a Chinese restaurant, with the group pointing to China’s treatment of Uyghurs as justification.
These kinds of attacks are likely to continue as China maintains a visible global footprint. Chinese nationals, infrastructure investments, and diplomatic missions will remain targets.
—Imran Bayoumi is a deputy director and resident fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.