Terrorism: What Does It Want, What Could It Achieve, and How Can We Stop It?

By  Joseph Mazur

Terrorism comes in many diverse forms, from aims of a revolution, to fights for independence, to revenge. “Revenge for what?” we might ask. There have been recent attacks in Iran, Germany, Russia, and the United States, but mostly in African and Central Asian nations that are more vulnerable to large-scale killings and destruction in small cities that have little intelligence protection. Recent data shows that after decades of high numbers of attacks, terrorism is now being somewhat contained. With new high-tech weapons now on the open market, world attack numbers are high, though killings have greatly diminished since the 9/11 attacks in the United States, mostly because world-shared counterterrorism operations have smothered the main agencies of terror. With the unlawful 2025 shrinking of the size of the United States government, in particular the CIA, FBI, and NSA intelligence operations that have held terrorism at bay for two decades, the shrinking numbers of intelligence analysts will offer terrorists a return to bring forth the next catastrophe.

— Brett Holmgren, U.S.Assistant
Secretary of State for the Bureau
of Intelligence and Research. ^[1]

Cautionary definitions: How should terrorism be defined and conceptualized?

“Terrorism” had been a word since the French Revolution, when it implied intimidations, massacres, and executions that terrorized the country. It is a vague French word, “terroriste“, meaning a system supporting political change through violent attacks. In terror, those who were royalists opposed to the revolution were threatened, punished, or sentenced to death. Following the Reign of Terror, a half-century later, the term ascended to connotate the terror methods of revolutionaries in Russia. However, the term was never defined to signify the wide range of underlying facets of terror. The world changed on September 11, 2001, at 8:46 AM EDT, and so did the word “terror.” It now has an I-know-it-when-I-see-it feel that elevates its meaning beyond formal definition. The expression originated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, when Watson answers the suspect, Mr. Stapleton, referring to art, “I know what is good when I see it.”^[2]

Terrorism is political violence for political purposes mostly, but like the words “racist” or “fascist,” we use the term as if we know what it means, but we do not. In the mid-nineteenth century, the dictionary meaning of the word was: An agent or partisan of the revolutionary tribunal during the Reign of Terror in France. Since then, the definition of terrorism is, as Watson said, almost anything we instinctively think it means. But that brings confusion to a word that is so important today, with only a tentative connection to its birth during the French Revolution, a word that begs for clarity. The United States and the European Union define terrorism as “an activity involving violent acts, acts dangerous to human life, intimidation, mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”^[3] But when a term is simplified to that extent, we tend to see it in a dullness that makes us believe that we know what it means. Worse, the absence of an air-tight definition gives terrorists an escape route for their acts.

The United Nations Resolution 1566 (2004) refers to “terrorism” as:

… criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism, are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature, and calls upon all States to prevent such acts and, if not prevented, to ensure that such acts are punished by penalties consistent with their grave nature.^[4]

We know that murder, kidnapping, arson, hostage-taking, and promoting public fear must be part of whatever definition surfaces, yet, as late as 2021, many delegates of the UN disagree on how to finalize a comprehensive convention on the matter and develop a global response to a threat that has yet to be defined, particularly when identifying state-sponsored actions.

In 1999, the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings (ICSFT) defined many terms associated with terrorism: aircraft hijacking, aviation sabotage, endangerment to maritime navigation, violence at airports, kidnapping of diplomats, stealing nuclear material, hostage-taking, terrorist bombings (whatever that means), funding terrorist acts, and using an aircraft as a weapon. That UN Convention has no voted definition of terrorism: “[d]espite multiple resolutions and international conventions, the UN has, for the moment, resigned itself to the fact that it is impossible to reach agreement on a common definition.”^[5]

Why is there no international agreement on the definition of terrorism? The UK Terrorism Act based on MI5 intelligence went into effect in 2000, was amended in 2006 and 2009, and has not been amended since. In the United States, the FBI defines terrorism through terms that involve previously established criminal laws involving violence against persons or property and intimidation against civilians or the government. The EU has the most concise definition: criminal acts intended to intimidate the population, compel a government to execute or abstain from performing any action, or destroy the fundamental political constitution, economic or social structures. Strangely, EU law mentions neither the word “violence” nor its synonyms. The UN, however, has an exhaustive list of acts that changes occasionally, intending to bring members together for a comprehensive move on terrorism. “[T]he states members of the United Nations solemnly reaffirm their unequivocal condemnation of all acts, methods and practices of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, wherever and by whomever committed, including those which jeopardize the friendly relations among States and peoples and threaten the territorial integrity of States.”^[6]

None of these definitions of terrorism distinguish between political resistance and revengeful anger over a style of religion or life. We have treaties, UN resolutions, and law opinions, but those policies, practices, and agreements are open to legal challenges without a universal and comprehensive definition of criminal offenses. Some UN member states express the definition with hesitance by arguing that international law is already in place to handle war crimes.^[7] Definitions have problems when they include statements such as the Security Council Resolution 1373, which labels terrorism as “criminal acts against civilians with intent to cause death or serious bodily injury … with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or a group of persons.” That inclusion forwards two issues: one confuses treaty law with domestic law (with no prevailing rule), thereby hitting inconsistencies between military and domestic laws, and another uses the circular phrase “state of terror,” which confuses the meaning of the word “terror.” And where does the word “intent” come in? Nowhere. With multiple resolutions and international conventions, the UN has tried to find agreements on a universal definition, finding the problem interminable.^[8] So far, the most comprehensive UN definition can be bulleted in three sentences:

• Requires parties to take steps to prevent and counteract the financing of terrorists, whether direct or indirect, through groups claiming to have charitable, social or cultural goals or which also engage in illicit activities such as drug trafficking or gun running.
• Commits states to hold those who finance terrorism criminally, civilly or administratively liable for such acts.
• Provides for the identification, freezing and seizure of funds allocated for terrorist activities, as well as for the sharing of the forfeited funds with other states on a case-by-case basis. Bank secrecy is no longer adequate justification for refusing to cooperate.

From that all-inclusive bulleted list above, Alex Schmid, Director of the Terrorism Research Initiative, who edited The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, is correct for this instance in saying that “definitions generally tend to reflect the political interests and moral judgment (or lack thereof) of those who do the defining.”^[9],[10] In the absence of universal definitions, and in the shallow depth of what that term means, we have a hampered and confused model for processing violations of military, domestic, and human rights laws and counterterrorism endeavors. Moreover, the ambiguity brings into play the Latin precept nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without law). In other words, a group or person committing what we – the “we” meaning those of us who are confused about the meaning – understand to be allegedly a criminal act turns out to be inapplicable in criminal law, because terms are too vague to reach a verdict under the regulating legal standard of proof axiom requiring evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

An example to ponder is the new United States executive order designating illegal Latin American drug cartels and anyone aiding them as foreign terrorist organizations. So, the broad mix of national and international attempts to legally define the term “terrorism” brings with it confusion in international cooperation. According to Schmid, there are at least 250 definitions of terrorism listed in an appendix of his book.^[11] Though published in 2011, that book gives us the most up-to-date information on why it is so difficult to have an agreed-upon definition of terrorism. With no absolute definition, the perpetration of a criminal act involving transnational terrorism avoids punishment from UN international courts. To tackle terrorism, we must have a global consensus of narrowed definition. We are not there yet!

What do terrorists want?

Hamas’s original objective was to liberate historic Palestine, meaning all of Israel and Gaza. Now, a modified aim is to create a Palestinian state that includes territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. But Hamas is a proxy war group supported by Iran, which is also designated by Western countries to be a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s position has always been to lead Palestinian resistance and reject any permanent partition of Mandatory Palestine.

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, JNIM) is an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb North Africa and a Salafi jihadist group highly active in Burkina Faso and Niger. With little popular support, it seeks to replace the entire region of established state authority with Sharia law.^[12]

Chart 1. JNIM-ISGS war predecessor groups.

Al-Shabaab (Party of Youth) is considered a terrorist organization, but by what definition? It pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda, though technically it is a Sunni Islamic guerrilla group operating in East Africa that grew from being a military wing of the Islamic Courts Union, a legal Mogadishu armed resistance force against the 2006 Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia. It had international support, as well as encouragement from Somalians and recruitment from Western countries. Its tactics follow a terroristic jihadist ideology, but because of terror’s all-inclusive definition, this resistance army is considered a terrorist organization. What does it want? To bring back Salafism, though their primary goal is to establish a stable Islamic state for Somalia.^[13]

From its founding, the ISIS goal is to have an Islamic state of its own.

As Brett Holmgren said in the epigraph, “Groups like ISIS have found ways to exploit the circumstances, especially in the Middle East and Africa, to slowly and quietly rebuild. As a result, today we are in yet another transformational phase of the global terrorism landscape, a threat that is more diverse, more complex, and more decentralized.”^[14]

Al-Qaeda, the best known of extremist fighters because of the 9/11 attacks, is an extremist group that regards any state as infidel if it does not follow its interpretation of Islam. Moreover, it fights for a pan-Islamic califate for the Muslim world. It and its many affiliated groups consider any state that supports other infidel governments or institutions to be fair game for violence, principally Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and the United Nations. It was once the largest militant terrorist network. However, since the 9/11 attack on the United States, intelligence agencies around the world have been sweepingly monitoring Al-Qaeda’s activities such that, though still a threat, it has a diminished capability to attack well-developed countries.

Figure 1. Map of main countries, where the international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda has been active.

According to the United Nations Security Council Committee, 53 other small groups are considered organizations designated as terrorists. That does not include home-grown individuals who hang on the coat tails of established groups. The number seems high, but that comes from what happens when a definition is broadly stretched.^[15] 

What can terrorists achieve?

That question is difficult to answer, partly because those shifty definitions of terrorism put us on a balance board that sways according to how we wish to interpret the word. If we go back centuries, then, yes, many terroristic wars of independence were successful. By fuzzy definitions, George Washington would today be considered a terrorist. Groups that we might call terrorists could also be called freedom fighters. Many of those fighters have made countries independent, and others who call for internal political change were considered terrorists. The African National Congress (ANC) toppling the South African apartheid government is one similar example among many.

Consider the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It has had a complicated existence for 106 years of attempting to unify Ireland and make the island a republic independent from British colonial rule. The UK had designated it to be a terrorist organization. However, even though it used violent tactics to empower its cause, it has been more like a revolutionary paramilitary organization.^[16] In its early days, it achieved dominion status for 26 counties, leading to limited independence and later complete independence for southern Ireland. Six remaining counties continue to be part of the United Kingdom. I would say that it is an enormous achievement. Other than the IRA accomplishment mentioned, designated terrorists, not intending to overthrow governments, never come close to their stated goals. Their highest achievement is in recruiting new members.

A similar example of an international threat is the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK), a militant organization that the United States, the European Union, and NATO consider to be a terrorist organization. It has achieved a few carved-out pieces of territory safe for Kurds, though they still have no homeland state.

One might argue that internal wars have meanings and clear goals based on public opinions in favor of righteous directions for the country. Therefore, though guerrilla or terror tactics are immoral behaviors, revolutionary armed behaviors fall into a different category of crimes against humanity. In August 1975, the Indonesian National Armed Forces violently massacred Timorese civilians. Then, during the decolonization of East Timor in 1999, the Indonesian New Order government invaded and occupied East Timor by genocidally killing between roughly 60,000 and 308,000 civilians.^[17] The Timorese Social Democratic Association (ASDT), now a center-left political party in East Timor, was once the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), an armed group waging a guerrilla resistance against the Indonesian government. It proclaimed itself “the sole representative” of the East Timorese people. And now, it has 19 of the 65 members in the National Parliament. That is a good outcome for a group that was once declared terrorist.

Apart from the IRA, the PKK, and Fretilin, three designated terrorist organizations that are in a different sense “freedom fighters,” it seems that no other terrorist group active in this century has ever achieved any part of its goal. Others, transnational religious groups that aim to control religious practices, had little or no success accomplishing their goals.

Terrorism is war

Using the UN definition and excluding separatists and internal politico-moral reactionaries, terrorism often has no specific justifiable ideologies. It aims to build fear and to “provoke the authorities into using illegal, unconstitutional, and repressive measures and thereby to lose public support.”^[18] As for objectives, all we can say when we include the combined 57 groups designated as terrorists is that terrorism’s main aim is to exploit fear, chaos, threats, and public violence to sway citizens in political or religious directions. Laws and rules of war are strategically broken to bewilder government counterterrorism intelligence. Terrorists need publicity, though not necessarily favorable exposure. They exploit the news media and whatever glorifying propaganda they can get from mass and social media to gain positive recognition, though they rarely present their cause. Every attack is used as a glorification to recruit more members. Let’s think of it for what it is: communication to disenfranchised audiences, a cause that seems mystifying to some and resoundingly correct to those audiences that are aligned with difficult life situations. Take, for example, Palestinians who once lived in Gaza and are now enraged by the inhumane circumstances of a ravaging war.

Terrorism is war by another name. It can be a political or emotional act, an individual or collective protest. It is a power tactic for powerless people or groups violently fighting a strong nation-state. The objective is to create fear and possibly to provoke retaliation. Some approach those goals with assassinations of enemies with hopes of gaining media attention and influencing public opinion. But before we get into the deeper reasons for terror, we should understand that terrorism is explained by understandings that divide categorically, partly because all attacks happen for different reasons – economic, political, religious, revenge, or other untamed causes, for example, race, deprivation, or poverty. Those measures have sub-reasons that include separatism, political, religious, and social styles, and criminal (narco-terror) viewpoints. Add insanity and state-sponsored positions and we almost have the whole bundle saying there is no universal oneness to how we think of terrorism. That is part of the definition problem. All we can say is that terrorism is a type of warfare that weakly enables small groups that are angry with more dominant powers to have their grievances recognized. “What are their grievances?” you ask. We do not know, because their ideologies are as free range as their objectives. For some, it is the secession of territory to form an independent state. For others, it could be about the dominance of recourses for an ethnic group, righting the wrongs of economic depravity, or religious fanaticism.

Table 1. Islamist terrorist attacks.

The graphs speak

Graph 1. Deaths, injuries, and incidents for the 10 highest terrorist attacks.

Graph 2. Deaths from five terrorist groups over 15 years.

Graph 3. World deaths from terrorism from 1970 to 2022.

Figure 2. Number of terrorism attacks worldwide in 2021.^[20]

Counterterrorism and counterintelligence divisions

In my previous article for this magazine, I wrote, “Terrorism is a world issue that cannot be curtailed without understanding that there are, and will always be, large and small groups rightly or wrongly perceiving oppression, opposing political, social styles, or religious beliefs.”^[21] That is still true, but wars change things, because destruction feeds revenge, and revenge nourishes radicalization. Before 9/11, aside from the fledgling old social media platform SixDegrees, there was no worldwide facility with instant connection between people sharing independently truthful and freely fabricated information. In this age of social media, extremists have a platform that facilitates recruiting through falsely inspired messaging. The 2025 New Year’s Day truck killings in New Orleans were carried out by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a domestic terrorist indirectly inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) to carry out the attack. ISIS uses social media to encourage sympathizers, individually radicalized or group-wise through foreign fighters, to carry out attacks on its behalf. But ISIS, defeated after the Iraq War, is dispersed enough to be limited to rogue states in Africa trying to recruit foreign fighters from anywhere. 

This world has a background of terror far earlier than the French Revolution. But terror is different now, with politics shifting to benefit strongmen – yes, they are almost always men – who are in office to help themselves and so look to the future with glances over their shoulders in worries that their steps forward will be harmful to themselves. Their biggest frights are terror acts, sometimes from illegal organizations and other times lone extremists who believe in a cause or who are insane enough to think that death in an act of terror is a comforting salvation. However, terror does not come for strongmen. Two reasons: the constant and tight surveillance tools of their secret service industry, and the deterrents are fierce. China, for example, has over 200 million cameras that identify citizens through facial recognition, and the Skynet system constantly monitors everyone in public spaces. The United States has 85 million cameras in commercial districts of urban areas. Many are used for traffic monitoring but also for crime prevention. Russia’s surveillance is not as sophisticated as China’s. However, with more than 15 million facial recognition cameras actively monitoring social media and using its “cyber-gulag” as a tool of control that tracks and censors its population, it might deter terrorists but also activists engaged in protests. So, the question resulting from this information is: does sophisticated surveillance deter terrorist attacks? Thirty-five people died and 43 were injured in southern China last November. It was an incident of madness, not a planned event connected to a terrorist organization. The last terror attack in China was in 2014 in Yunnan Province, when five terrorists randomly killed 31 people and wounded 143 others. Shannon Tiezzi, Editor-in-Chief at The Diplomat, an Asian affairs magazine, wrote, “The deadly attack in Kunming may forever change the way China thinks about and deals with terrorism.” That was 11 years ago, but recent terrorist attacks have hit the far western region of Xinjiang, with violent random attacks surging “across the country as economic growth stutters, unnerving a public long accustomed to low violent-crime rates and ubiquitous surveillance.”^[22] As for Russia, it had its burden of attacks (table 2).

Table 2. Terrorist attacks in Russia from 1999 to 2024.

The rocky future of counterintelligence and the humanitarian cost

How should we count the critical issues that we face that connect to terror and global security? Terrorism is a manifestation of fermenting dissension. Omitting health, forced migration, poverty, and climate change would neglect the roots of those connections. Doing so ignores bases for political unrest, increased fringe group recruitment, and the spread of organized terrorist attacks. Most developed governments have put enormous capital into critical issues and do not ignore the roots of unrest. They share counterterrorism information. That goes for the United States and Russia, a security collaboration network we overlook. So, what happens when government agencies are diminished in bludgeon-gashing speed excused as efficiency routing? The answer depends on the motive, which, in the case of the new United States government, has been secretly brewing at the Heritage Foundation for more than half a century before publishing its intentions through its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise for two years.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man (for the moment), has targeted a humanitarian aid agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for closure. It is a foreign policy mistake that will soon cause immense problems for the United States. Number 1 on the list is terrorism. Humanitarian aid is the number one foreign policy that protects civilians from radical groups that sometimes have legitimate yet illegal complaints. USAID is an independent agency of the United States government with a $44 billion budget, less than two-thirds of 1 per cent of the 2024 United States federal budget ($6.75 trillion), that administers foreign aid and socioeconomic development assistance to underdeveloped countries, some under the threat of brutal internal wars. That aid keeps hungry children alive, improves water management to provide access to clean water in underdeveloped countries, and funds life-saving HIV/AIDS programs in Africa. The agency began with an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Soon after, the United States Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act to create an agency to administer economic aid. Why? To help foster better relationships around the world and less antagonism to the United States.

It may be odd to score terrorism attacks on countries, but we have such a grading for statistical accounting. It is called the Global Terrorism Index (GTI). Deaths, injuries, destructions, and hostage-taking numbers are submitted by 163 countries every year. They are weighed and averaged over five-year periods to become indices that tell us something about terror attacks localized by country. Only two countries have an index as high as 8: Burkina Faso and Israel.

Graph 4. Ten highest GTI scores.

The current United States GTI score is 4.141. That is not high compared to the top 10, but also not low for a country with a $101.6 billion intelligence budget.^[23] What does that money do for homeland security? The global war on terror that began after the attacks of 9/11 and ended in 2020 cost the United States government more than $5.4 trillion, not including an additional trillion dollars of medical and disability ongoing expenses that will continue for the next 34 years. No matter how the Office of Management and Budget slices it, war is almost 2.5 times the price of peace through either diplomacy and / or generosity to underdeveloped countries that can explode with terrorist attacks, both domestic and international. As GTI indicates, the United States’ score is average, but only because its intelligence arm (which is being quashed under President Donald Trump) has for the past 20 years had a somewhat iron-dome system that protects its citizens within the country from the violence of terrorism that happens to citizens abroad.

Table 3. Non-zero GTI ranked scores for 88 of 164 countries rank above zero. Seventy-five others not on the list are ranked 0.

Reasons why this is so important

It is tough to criticize one’s own country. I must say that I am fortunate to be permitted to write these distressing messages without government interference, and I am proud to be a bimonthly columnist for a magazine that gives me that permission. We still have a few countries left willing to go along with criticisms, but we do not know how long that freedom will last.

It might be that Musk, the puppet master behind the White House curtains, is an “unelected, unaccountable, out-of-control billionaire” who is interfering with United States government payment systems. He claims to know how to make governing more efficient. Sure, he could do that with his tech businesses, as he always has, to further profits under his addiction to greed, but governments are not commercial businesses. They work best when they are beneficiaries to foreign countries and groups that cannot succeed in their best intentions to assist underdeveloped countries that teeter on brinks of internal strife. Musk’s message is tragically clear: his crew is willing to extract sensitive data and damage the system so heavily that it will be impossible to repair quickly. When Musk’s team fired hundreds of highly skilled employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency that protects the world from nuclear accidents and secures nuclear weapons that could get into the hands of terror organizations, we worry about how insane governments can become. When Trump signed an executive order on January 25, 2025, saying “that no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States,” it immediately ended foreign aid programs. ^[26] He must know what he had unleashed! Despair for the sick and poor people in areas of Africa who are hungry and in need of medicine. Foreign assistance from the United States not only saves lives by preventing malaria and distributing life-saving drugs for many diseases worldwide, but it also shows a humanitarian touch to stop terrorist groups from exploiting attack motives. That hold does not stop attacks, but does diminish excuses because, though “terror” groups commit massive human rights abuses, they generally do consider public support for their ideals and do not want to tread on popular issues, such as UN programs that assist so many of the poor folks they claim to fight for.

When a leader of such a powerful country falls into – to use Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s phrase – “a web of disinformation,” the world falls too. Trump wants the United States to “own” Gaza and create a Middle East Riviera through ethnic cleansing, forcing Palestinians to emigrate to Egypt and / or Jordan. Such statements are well beyond madman theories and over the lunacy border. We cannot laugh at the suggestion. If we do, we will be encouraging almost every terrorist organization to unlock its best cells and unleash whatever terror they can to attack all sides of any countries that bend to Trump’s designs of building Trump towers and spas in Gaza City alongside the Blue Beach Mediterranean Resort. “The United States will take over the Gaza Strip, and we’ll do a job with it, too. We’ll own it,” Trump said during a press conference alongside the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East.”^[27] Just imagine how insane such an idea is and how much of a gift it would be to jihadists. After 77 years of Middle East wars involving Palestinian distressful moves, the insanity of kicking 2.1 million Gazans out of their homes would bring justified terrorism violence to the United States from every Arab country that will chant from the Riviera to the sea with every surefire opportunity for terrorist recruiting. What will a Middle East Riviera bring to American security issues? I can tell you: it’s the circle of ferocity. Ethnic cleansing brings anger, anger brings resistance, and resistance brings terrorist recruiting. Doubly displaced Gazans will see the Middle East Riviera as a real estate developer’s profit-making deal. How many of those 2.1 million will be recruited by Hamas?

Graphs 5a and b. Number of terrorist attacks (left) and number of deaths (right) in the United States from 1970 to 2021.

Table 4. Average number of attacks and deaths from 1970 to 1979 and from 2012 to 2021, comparing the United States and world data.

Ripping those agencies apart extinguishes many of the counterterrorism instruments developed since 9/11. Sources and methods that have been keenly collected over the last two decades to give us detection and early warning intelligence and vigilance will be adrift if those agencies become weapons of retribution under political control. With limited warnings, the world could – or do I dare say “will”? – be bleakly ill-prepared for terrorism crises that could result in catastrophes almost anywhere in tangled political hot spots of world-clashing governing styles and ideologies. Without a strong intelligence force of agents constantly surveilling terrorist organizations, indoctrinations, and home-grown cells, terrorism will return with a vengeance we have not seen in the last decade, when the number of attacks in the world averaged over 10,000 a year.

Downsizing government agencies that protect the world may save a few dollars and favor the goal of siphoning out government workers who do not align with regime policies. But an adage, coined before the United States entered WWII by Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, tells a lifesaving truth about that pound-foolishness: “Dollars cannot buy yesterday.”

The United States now has a head of state saying things that would make invaders of Ukraine blush. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, referring to the now infamous belligerent meeting between Zelenskyy and Trump in the White House Oval Office on February 28, 2025, “We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States.”^{[30], [31]} That meeting – a made-for-television setup that boomeranged into a diplomacy embarrassment for the United States – demonstrated a lack of understanding that America benefits from its generosity of foreign aid through a moral basis of doing immense good at slight cost to help the poorer nations provide medicine and save lives. Frum ended his article by saying, “The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.”

Watching the event as an American, the scene sickened me with shame for my country.

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

Follow his World Financial Review column at https://worldfinancialreview.com/category/columns/understanding-war/. More information about him is at https://www.josephmazur.com/

References

1. https://www.csis.org/analysis/global-terrorism-landscape-acting-director-national-counterterrorism-center#:~:text=In%20this%20context%20terrorist%20groups,Africa%20reflects%20this%20new%20reality.
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14. https://www.csis.org/analysis/global-terrorism-landscape-acting-director-national-counterterrorism-center#:~:text=In%20this%20context%20terrorist%20groups,Africa%20reflects%20this%20new%20reality.
15. https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/
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17. https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1680222/Saul.pdf
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19. https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/GTI-2024-web-290224.pdf
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21. THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER FOR A FOOTNOTE THAT WE WILL HAVE A URL FOR WHEN THE PIECE GETS PUBLISHED.
22. https://thediplomat.com/2014/03/is-the-kunming-knife-attack-chinas-9-11/
23. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10524#:~:text=For%20FY2025%2C%20funding%20requested%20for,and%20$1.6%20billion%20less%20respectively.
24. https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/global-terrorism-index/#/
25. https://worldfinancialreview.com/why-are-there-so-many-wars-especially-now-an-obscure-brilliance-of-arms-dealing-keeps-wars-coming/
26. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-and-ending-funding-to-certain-united-nations-organizations-and-reviewing-united-states-support-to-all-international-organizations/
27. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-gaza/681574/?utm_campaign=trumps-return&utm_content=20250205&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Trump%27s+Return
28. https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/GTI-2024-web-290224.pdfhttps://ourworldindata.org/the-global-terrorism-database-how-do-researchers-measure-terrorism
29. https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/GTI-2024-web-290224.pdf https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-terrorism-database-how-do-researchers-measure-terrorism
30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2s2pogllis
31. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/least-now-we-know-truth-about-trump-and-vance/681872/?utm_campaign=trumps-return&utm_content=20250228&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Trump%27s+Return