Terrorist threats redefined 20 years after 9/11

Success and failure

Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR, warned that bitter partisan divisions in the US could undermine the nation's counterterrorism strategy.

In an article posted on the CFR website titled "How Has the Terrorism Threat Changed Twenty Years After 9/11?", Hoffman noted that the US counterterrorism response to the attacks in 2001 yielded some "remarkable" successes and "disastrous" failures in hunting down al-Qaida.

"Sadly, the terrorist threat to the United States has shifted from a mostly external one－which it was for nearly two decades after 9/11－to an internal one, as the Capitol Hill riot of Jan 6 highlighted. But the ongoing threats posed by Islamic State and al-Qaida have not disappeared," he wrote.

However, the current climate of political polarization could effectively paralyze the US government in preparing for the next generation of threats, Hoffman warned.

Stanley Renshon, a political scientist at City University of New York, said the biggest internal threat to the US is "the breakdown of trust" in the nation's leadership and its key institutions.

Jason Blazakis, director of the State Department's Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office in the Bureau of Counterterrorism from 2008 to 2018, said that as the US prepares to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks, it "must confront the real possibility that our next 9/11 could arrive from within".

In an opinion article published in The Washington Post on Monday, he wrote,"As someone who has worked on national security issues in the US government for more than a decade, I've concluded that the US 'war on terror' launched in the wake of 9/11 has left us unprepared for the domestic threat that grows by the day."

He added: "Complicating matters further is that in today's politically charged environment, the Biden administration will find it difficult to pivot toward the domestic threat. But we must move beyond the narrow obsession with international terror and mitigate the extremist threat at home."

Reviewing changes in the US political situation since 9/11, Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, said that around 2018, Washington decided strategic competition with countries such as Russia and China－not terrorism－was now the primary concern for US national security.

Whether it was the previous Republican government or Biden's Democratic administration, a mistake had been made in identifying China as an enemy, he said.

"The enemy of the United States should not be China, but the common enemies of mankind, such as the COVID-19 virus, climate change challenges, the threat of nuclear proliferation, and terrorists at home and abroad," he added.