The recent conflict between Iran and Israel, which included numerous powerful airstrikes by the United States against Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, has once again raised the specter of Iran-backed terrorism in the West.
FBI Director Kash Patel increased efforts to monitor possible activity from Hezbollah sleeper cells in the United States. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bulletin, issued through the National Terrorism Advisory System, warned of a “heightened threat environment.” Customs and Border Protection said that the threat from Iran-backed sleeper cells has “never been higher.” And the Iranian regime itself threatened President Donald Trump that it would activate sleeper cells to attack the United States.
With a tentative cease-fire in place, Iran is unlikely to want its fingerprints on any traceable attack planning. But the combined Israeli and American attack is likely to stoke further anger and elevate anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-American sentiment on the home front. The issue is directly connected to the existing groundswell of anger over the war in Gaza, which has been a source of inspiration for two terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado, over the past several weeks.
Meanwhile, DHS’s countering violent extremism efforts are currently being led by a 22-year-old recent college graduate with no experience in counterterrorism. Even as terrorism remains a live issue, there is a clear mismatch between the level of the threat and the resources allocated to combat it. The zeitgeist in Washington’s Beltway has shifted decisively to focus on great-power competition. However, while competing with adversaries and near-peer rivals is a regular part of statecraft, American policymakers and government officials have struggled to recognize that great-power competition and counterterrorism are not mutually exclusive.
Since terrorism is, at its core, a tactic, terrorists and terrorist organizations are a feature of contemporary global politics. Accordingly, it makes little sense for the United States to say that it is downsizing or withdrawing troops in regions like West Africa or Central Asia so that it can concentrate on great-power competition, when it is exactly in those regions where great-power competition is happening, alongside the threat from armed militants.
Yet within the counterterrorism community, personnel and funding have been drastically reduced, including by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Resources have been shifted away from the counterterrorism mission, and replacing a generation of analysts and operators with indispensable expertise simply will not be possible.
The firewall between violent nonstate actors and conventional, state-based warfare is also highly permeable. Twice in the last two years, it has been a terrorist attack that has brought two nation-states to the brink of all-out conflict with one another. First, the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, catalyzed an open-ended conflagration between Israel and members of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance, a proxy network that includes not just Hamas, but also Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Lebanese Hezbollah, various Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Houthis in Yemen.
And in late April of this year, a terrorist attack launched by a group affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba brought two nuclear-armed rivals—India and Pakistan—to the brink of conflict on the Indian subcontinent. Terrorism has the power to draw in some of the largest militaries in the world and pit them against one another.
There is deep historical precedent here. After all, it was the targeted assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that sparked the earliest stages of what would escalate into World War I. However, it is not 1914 all over again. Unlike 1914, the 21st-century NATO alliance is not sleepwalking into a NATO-Russia conflagration over Ukraine. Rather, it is awakened to these threats. Still, how NATO and the United States contend with Russia remains an urgent task and may determine what kind of global order will exist for the rest of the 21st century. Western powers recognize the threats across Europe—sabotage, arson, cyberattacks, and disinformation—as part of an escalating campaign of hybrid activities.
Accordingly, it is not just countries like Iran, but also Russia, that pose major state-sponsored terror threats to the West. If a state-sponsored terrorist attack emanating from the Kremlin led to the downing of a cargo plane from or over NATO territory, could that lead to a broader war? Almost certainly, and it remains an issue that many European countries are concerned about.
During his campaign for president, George W. Bush ran on a platform of domestic policy, particularly focused on education and poverty reduction. But the 9/11 attacks transformed his presidency overnight, and Bush was soon overwhelmed with the complexities of nation-building and counterinsurgency in failed states after sending the U.S. military to Afghanistan, and then Iraq.
Today the United States faces a range of terrorism threats, including from domestic actors motivated by a litany of grievances, including anti-government extremism. The old threats still remain, albeit in slightly hybridized form. The core organizations of al Qaeda and the Islamic State have been smashed, but the offshoots and branches of these groups remain potent. Any number of transnational terrorist groups likely have the will and capability to strike the U.S. homeland in some manner, including al-Shabaab, Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) in Afghanistan, and Hezbollah, to name just a few.
The threat from al Qaeda offshoots in particular continues to linger, as evidenced earlier this month when Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a Tajikistan-born Russian national in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with ties to the organization.
Just this year alone, there have been a number of arrests in the United States pertaining to the Islamic State and support for the group. In February, an individual living in Brooklyn, New York, was arrested for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State and IS-K. In April, an Afghan native living in Oklahoma pleaded guilty to an attack he had planned on Election Day last November, on behalf of the Islamic State. And in May, a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard was arrested for planning to attack a U.S. military base, also on behalf of the group.
These attacks were thwarted, but imagine the second- and third-order effects of a mass casualty terror attack in a major American city targeting civilians. In such a worst-case scenario, if links to a state sponsor were uncovered, it could trigger escalation and lead the United States into war, depending on the nature and severity of the attack. As uncomfortable as it is to envision such scenarios, it is the inability or unwillingness to grapple with such possibilities that led to the failure of imagination surrounding 9/11.
If all politics is local, as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was fond of saying, then the modern-day corollary to this adage is that all conflict is global. What happens in Kyiv or Khan Younis can impact the threat landscape from Melbourne to Montreal. One of the deleterious consequences of globalization, especially the advances in information technology and real-time communications, has been a shrinking of the battle space. Inevitably, conflict spills over borders and frequently manifests in the form of terrorism.
Lastly, there are a range of ominous and unconventional emerging-threat undercurrents percolating just beneath the surface. This is perhaps most evident in the recent arrest of two Chinese nationals charged with smuggling potential agroterrorism fungus into the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Any kind of spectacular attack, either against U.S. food and or water security, or involving the use of weapons of mass destruction, could commandeer the mandate of the broader U.S. national security establishment, which would then seek to reconstitute a robust counterterrorism capability after the fact. Thus, the accidental power of terrorism is that it is a universal spoiler of a well-intended policy agenda.
Emerging technologies have lowered the barriers to entry for would-be terrorists. These tools, including drones, 3-D printing, virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, and encryption, have become force multipliers for violent nonstate actors and may very well be an unintentional accelerant for a global war.
The past 20 months of state-to-state warfare between Iran and Israel kicked off in earnest after a terrorist attack. Countering terrorism—crafting the strategy and allocating resources properly—cannot be an afterthought. Rather, it must be integrated at a strategic level as an essential part of the U.S. approach to great-power competition.
The post Terrorism Means Something Different Now appeared first on Foreign Policy.
