The Counterterrorism Lessons America Can’t Afford to Forget

By Emma Isabella Sage

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

America may be done with its latest war in the Middle East, but in the minds of violent ideologues, the conflict is far from over. Terrorism does not distinguish between active conflict and a ceasefire, any more than it distinguishes between combatants and civilians. The danger is that foreign terrorist propaganda will combine with domestic grievances and ethnic hatred to trigger more attacks, while the government systematically weakens the institutions built to stop them.

 

A great deal has changed for the U.S. intelligence community over the past year. When I first saw the National Terrorism Advisory System warning on June 22, 2025, of a heightened domestic threat related to the military action against Iran, I was skeptical. After all, America had spent 25 years building an extraordinary machine for detecting and disrupting exactly this kind of threat, and counterterrorism agencies have stopped at least 17 Iranian plots in the past five years.

 

All signs pointed to a weakening of Iranian proxies and to a breakdown of the command structure by which Iran directs their actions. Indeed, despite all that was made of the danger of Iranian sleeper cells, they turned out to be somewhat of a ghost story, although paradoxically, a concrete network would have been preferable to the real threat of dispersed and unpredictable self-mobilization. Either way, American counterterrorism officers have specialized in Islamist threats so deeply, and for so long, that I thought the agencies would have the capacity to keep intercepting the vast majority of plots.

 

But I now fear that the intelligence community has taken its eye off Islamist terrorism during a time of surging threats to the American Jewish community.

 

Our degraded capabilities.

 

The shooter at Old Dominion University, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, had a previous conviction on terrorism-related charges: He pleaded guilty to providing material support to the Islamic State a decade ago, and in 2017 he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Before he was arrested, not only did he attempt to send money to ISIS, he also bought an assault rifle with the intent to carry out a shooting like the one that killed 13 people at Texas’ Fort Hood Army base in 2009. At the end of 2024, he secured early release, and would go on to commit his shooting less than 15 months later.

 

The Old Dominion attack occurred in the context of a severely degraded American intelligence community. The Department of Homeland Security went without funding from mid-February to the end of April due to a political dogfight. Early in March, just days after the U.S. began strikes on Iran, news broke that the Trump administration—specifically, FBI Director Kash Patel—had fired key counterterrorism officers over a partisan vendetta. And that is neither the beginning nor the end of the ways in which the intelligence community has been cut down and redirected since Trump returned to power.

 

The vast, expensive, meticulously constructed counterterrorism machine built since September 11 should have ramped up prior to the Iran war. But instead, Americans were left to wonder how much had been sold off for scrap.

 

What a functioning intelligence community can do.

 

To understand what we are losing, one must understand what was built.

 

The American counterterrorism apparatus that existed on September 11, 2001, had no Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration, National Counterterrorism Center, or Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It also had a foundational problem that seems impossible in retrospect: Almost no one in the intelligence community could read al-Qaeda’s communications.

 

The pre-9/11 CIA and NSA were built to oppose the Soviet Union, and it showed. Russian speakers were plentiful; Arabic speakers, vanishingly rare. Those who existed were not often proficient at operational levels, let alone fluent in key regional dialects. The 9/11 Commission documented this problem, and the response over the following decade was substantial. Strong knowledge of either Arabic or another Muslim-world language—like Farsi, Dari, Pashto, or Urdu—became a prerequisite for counterterrorism work.

 

The shift went well beyond language proficiency. A generation of analysts came of age studying content like al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, with its notorious article “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” (The Boston Marathon bombers cited the piece as one of their key resources.)

 

Reorienting the human capital of the intelligence community toward a new threat didn’t come cheaply, quickly, or without controversy. Detractors from outside the field made much of the fact that terrorism killed far fewer Americans than heart disease, falling furniture, or cows. Detractors from inside the field pointed out that in more than half of the years between 1994 and 2019, right-wing extremism killed more Americans than jihadist terrorism.

 

But both critiques, rather than proving the pivot’s futility, evidenced its impressive track record.

 

Between 2013 and 2019, at the height of the territorial control and propaganda reach of ISIS, American law enforcement disrupted 46 jihadist plots in the U.S. while 27 attacks succeeded—a disruption rate of roughly 63 percent. Another crucial metric is the drop in lethality: Compared to around 3 deaths per attack at the peak in 2017, lethality fell to an average of 0.4 by 2025. While the full reasons are unknowable, diminishing lethality and improved detection and intervention may have contributed to the decrease in attempted attacks. As the number of attempts dropped, the disruption rate increased further: Data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C.-based think tank, showed a 100 percent disruption rate in 2023.

 

But today, in a moment of déjà vu for the intelligence community, al-Qaeda is once again releasing Inspire-branded content, ISIS is back in the news, and the U.S. is once again embroiled in the Middle East. Two crucial factors differentiate the present moment from the past: an administration that seems intent on undermining its own intelligence community, and a shift in terrorist targeting which is increasingly focused on specific groups. Instead of the whole-of-society attacks of the 9/11 era, one community is now facing a disproportionate share of the violence: Jews.

 

Jews as a perpetual and growing target.

 

Islamist terror organizations have previously embarked on campaigns against the civilian population at large to gain public notoriety before narrowing their targets to specific groups. And there’s a growing body of evidence that this shift is well underway.

 

The Anti-Defamation League has reported an 893 percent increase in antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism over the past decade. 2024 marked the highest number of incidents since the advocacy group began its tracking in 1979, while 2025 showed a 39 percent increase in assaults with a deadly weapon (with American Jews being targeted an average of 17 times per day).

 

Worldwide, the violence is coming from both the left and the right: In America, the far left bears responsibility for attacks including the lethal 2025 shooting of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., while the far right spawned the single deadliest attack in the history of Jewish life in America—the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue—and the imitators that followed.

 

Even at peak performance, the U.S. counterterrorism community would have struggled to handle the sky-high threat of antisemitic violence coming from multiple ideological directions simultaneously. In its diminished current capacity, the situation is unbearable. Jews have not sat idly by amid the growing danger, pouring resources into organizations like the Secure Community Network and JReady to defend Jewish communities and institutions. But none of those efforts can replace the protection of a functioning government security apparatus.

 

The attacks have sent a clear message: Publicly or privately, one participates in Jewish life at one’s own risk. Around the globe, Jewish holidays have become staging grounds for one lethal attack after another. The October 7 Hamas attack in Israel was carried out on Simchat Torah. The Boulder firebombing that killed one and injured 12, including a Holocaust survivor, occurred on the eve of Shavuot. An arsonist set a Jewish governor’s Pennsylvania residence aflame on Passover. The Bondi Beach shooting in Australia fell on the first night of Hanukkah. In Manchester, a car ramming and stabbing attack killed congregants on Yom Kippur.

 

The American counterterrorism community is still one of the most capable in the world. Its achievements are genuine and hard-won, but it now appears visibly weakened and unfocused. I believe it is possible to protect the public. But I’m not sure this government will do what it takes.