Now for the Good News: Five Problems America Has Largely Solved

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

One: Islamist terrorism a shadow of its former self.

 

Whenever I write this, I knock on wood; the world seemed peaceful and quiet on September 10, 2001, too. But the available data indicate that the preeminent threat in American life for most of the past quarter century is genuinely smaller, weaker, and so minute a menace that most Americans rarely ever think about it.

 

From the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):

 

First, the frequency of recorded jihadist attacks and plots against targets in the United States has been low since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State in 2019. Between the beginning of 2020 and New Year’s Day 2025, CSIS counted 8 jihadist attacks and 10 disrupted plots — an average of about 3 attacks or plots per year. Between 2013 and 2019, jihadists conducted 27 attacks, and 46 jihadist plots were disrupted — an average of about 10 attacks or plots per year.

 

Second, the lethality of jihadist terrorism in the United States has fallen since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State. This decline is likely the result of a decrease in the Islamic State’s ability to inspire violence rather than a loss of operational support from international terrorist organizations.

 

The U.S. National Security Strategy, published by the Trump administration in November, used the words “terrorism” and “Islamist” once in 33 pages, and the word “terrorist” three times. The words “al-Qaeda” and “ISIS” did not appear. Yes, some of that might reflect the administration’s own priorities and worldview. But reviewing the major threats to the U.S. and not mentioning any Islamist terrorist group would have been unthinkable in the days of the “Islamic State,” or while Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was alive.

 

ISIS is barely a factor in Syria anymore. “ISIS attacks declined by 17 percent in the months following the SDF’s losses (that is, from January to April 2026) and then plunged by a further 67 percent after the departure of American forces (from April through June 2026).”

 

Note that as Islamist terrorism has become a non-factor in the average American’s life, we can’t say the same for our friends in Europe; the monitoring group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data writes, “Since 2020, ACLED has recorded 41 jihadist attacks in Europe, six of which took place in Germany.” Still, even in Europe, there’s a bit of a silver lining in that the attacks are getting less sophisticated. “Vehicle rammings and stabbings have become the dominant methods used in Islamist attacks across Europe, reflecting a broader shift towards violence that is less sophisticated and easier to plan and carry out. Compared with the large-scale jihadist coordinated bombings and shootings Europe experienced a decade ago, perpetrators increasingly rely on readily available methods that require little preparation or specialist capability.”

 

Things have gotten so bad for some former employees of al-Qaeda front organizations that they’ve been forced to desperate methods of making a living, such as running for Congress as a Democrat in New Jersey. Because of the heavy Democratic lean of the Garden State’s twelfth district, there is a good chance that Adam Hamawy, who testified as a witness for Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, will become a representative soon. Hamawy can already start thinking about what he’ll wear for his swearing in; I’m sure somewhere in his wardrobe he has a vest that is pure dynamite.

 

Two: The terrifying spike in violent crime from during the pandemic is . . . largely fixed?

 

After a troubling spike during the pandemic and immediately after, the violent crime rate has not just returned to pre-pandemic levels, some analysts contend it is now dropping to levels lower than before the pandemic. From the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ):

 

Following the historic 30 percent increase in homicide from 2019 to 2020, CCJ’s last report estimated that the 2025 national homicide rate will likely be at its lowest level since at least 1900. Trends through the first half of 2026 show that the decline, which began in the second half of 2022, has continued, advancing well beyond the “return to normal” phase seen after the spike in 2020. There is no single or easy explanation for these historic lows. Researchers and practitioners have pointed to a range of possible influences, including changes in criminal justice operations and strategies, technological advances, and broad shifts in society and culture.

 

This report updates CCJ’s previous analyses, examining yearly and monthly rates of 13 violent, property, and drug offenses reported to police from 2018 through June 2026. The analysis is based on data from a sample of 36 large American cities that have consistently published monthly crime figures over the past nine years and make those data available shortly after each month ends.

 

The cities studied in the CCJ report include a nice, wide geographic range: Albuquerque, N.M.; Arlington, Texas; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Dallas; Denver; Detroit; El Paso, Texas; Fayetteville, N.C.; Fort Worth, Texas; Lincoln, Neb.; Little Rock, Ark.; Los Angeles; Louisville, Ky.; Minneapolis; Nashville-Davidson, Tenn.; New York City; Norfolk, Va., Omaha, Neb.; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Raleigh, N.C; Richmond, Va.; Rochester N.Y., Salt Lake City; San Antonio; San Francisco; Seattle; Saint Louis; Saint Paul, Minn.; and Washington, D.C.

 

There are those who argue that city crime statistics only tell part of the story; once certain crimes become ubiquitous, like stolen bicycles and property crimes, local residents stop reporting them to the cops. The National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, offers another measurement, but that database is currently only updated to 2024, and as crime data analyst Jeff Asher concludes, “Neither property nor violent crime were statistically different from 2022 and 2023 levels.”

 

Right now, the only city on the CCJ report list that has National Guard troops still on patrol is the nation’s capital. The National Guard just concluded an eight-month deployment in New Orleans, and National Guard troops are still in Memphis, Tenn., but neither of those cities are on the CCJ list. The guard deployments to Los Angeles and Chicago ended in December, and the one in Portland, Ore., ended in January. Troop deployment may have been a factor in reduced crime rates in those cities, but because the decline in crime occurred in so many cities that never hosted a National Guard deployment, it clearly cannot be the only factor and may not be much of a factor at all. (With that said, only an idiot tries to snatch a purse in front of a National Guardsman.)

 

Notice that several cities on the CCJ list changed their district attorneys or chief prosecutors. In San Francisco, when Brooke Jenkins replaced Chesa Boudin after his 2022 recall; the city saw a steep drop in a wide variety of crimes in 2024. In Baltimore, Ivan Bates replaced Marilyn Mosby in 2023, and that city’s homicides dropped by two-thirds from 2022 to 2025. In Los Angeles, Nathan Hochman defeated George Gascón and took office in December 2024; in 2025 the city’s homicide rate dropped to 5.9 per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the city since 1959.

 

The idiotic Soros prosecutors are getting flushed out and replaced by district attorneys who actually believe in putting violent criminals behind bars for a long time, and lots of big cities are safer because of that change.

 

Three: Drug overdose deaths are declining rapidly.

 

It wasn’t that long ago that the term “deaths of despair” — fatalities caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related diseases — was common in our discourse and a sign of a faltering, failing country.

 

But we’ve made significant progress on the drug overdose front over the past three years. Total opioid drug overdose deaths dropped from 105,007 in 2023 to 79,384 in 2024. The provisional count for 2025 is 70,637; that’s the steepest drop ever recorded, and we’re on pace for about 68,000 this year. As the AP noted about last year’s figure, “The 2025 total is about the same as the tally in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

 

What’s driving this welcome change? One factor is an increase in the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, commonly referred to as Narcan. There are also signs that U.S. policies, or pressure on China, have finally had a measurable effect on the availability of fentanyl:

 

Yet, in the past year, Caulkins has been struck by what appeared to be an important disruption of supply. In the study published in Science, he and five other U.S. researchers looked not just at data on fentanyl seizures and fatalities, but what the actual users were saying. Examining the Reddit platform, the researchers found the number of posts complaining of fentanyl shortages rose in July 2023, spiked later that year and remained high in 2024, roughly tracking the drop in overdose deaths.

 

There were other signs of a supply shock. The DEA reported a decline in fentanyl purity throughout 2024. It appeared that fentanyl cooks in Mexico were finding it harder to get key ingredients for the opioid from China, the main producer of such precursor chemicals, the agency said. Mexican cartels are the main supplier of U.S. fentanyl. The U.S. researchers hypothesized that a Chinese government crackdown on precursors led to a huge fentanyl shortage. To test that conclusion, they examined fentanyl overdose deaths in Canada. That country’s fentanyl is largely produced not by Mexican traffickers, but by domestic criminals. Therefore, “whatever we do on the southwest border will have no effect on Canada,” said a second researcher involved in the Science paper, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But Canada also had a notable decline in overdose deaths. What their fentanyl producers had in common with the Mexican cartels was the use of Chinese precursors.

 

There’s another grim potential factor, mentioned by Mary Beth Sheridan in her article linked above: “Fentanyl killed off many of its customers.”

 

Four: The teen birth rate hit another record low in 2025.

 

Think of this as the silver lining to the declining birth rate discussed earlier this week. While every child is a blessing and parenthood is one of the greatest joys in life, we all recognize that high schoolers having children of their own is extremely suboptimal. This is part of a 35-year-trend; in 1990, there were 521,626 births to U.S. women aged 15-19 years, and last year there were only about 126,000. But what’s more, in 1990, there were approximately 8.83 million teenage girls aged 15 to 19 living in the U.S.; in 2025, there were 10.76 million teenage girls.

 

Somewhere out there, someone will argue this reflects the availability of abortion. But the teen abortion rate is also in a long-term decline: “From 2013 to 2022, abortion rates decreased among all age groups, except women aged 30–34 years for whom it increased. The decrease in the abortion rate was highest among adolescents (33 percent and 34 percent for adolescents aged <15 and 15–19 years, respectively) compared with any other age group.” (I’ll admit I wish we had more recent statistics in this category.)

 

Some will also argue the lower teen birth rate and lower teen abortion rate reflect more widespread access to contraceptives. While that’s no doubt a potential factor, other data suggest that today’s teenagers simply aren’t having as much sex as generations past. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey from 2023, 32 percent of high schoolers said they’ve ever had sexual intercourse. That’s a noticeable drop from 54 percent in 1991 and 47 percent in 2013.” (Insert jokes about the reliability of teenage boys’ accounts of their sexual conquests here.)

 

For those of us who grew up in the era of ABC Afterschool Specials, warning teenage girls not to sleep with Rob Lowe, it is extremely bizarre to see a Heritage Foundation report entitled, “The Decline in Teen Sexual Activity: A Warning Sign.” No doubt, the trends decried in that report — less dating, less in-person social interactions, retreating into digital spaces, sexting, porn, etc.– are genuine concerns. But considering the large-scale life disruption caused by teen parenthood, the decline in teen sexual activity feels like a net positive.

 

Five: The sharp rise in cancer survivorship.

 

As of 2025, about one out of every 18 Americans — 18.6 million people — was a cancer survivor. About one half (51 percent) of survivors were diagnosed within the past 1ten years, and nearly four out of five (79 percent) survivors were aged 60 years and older.

 

This is a positive development that can seem negative, as people say things like, “It seems like lots of people I know are getting diagnosed with cancer!” Yes, it seems that way because we’ve gotten better at spotting the signs, run more tests, run better tests, and are much better at treating cancer!

 

From January:

 

New findings from the American Cancer Society’s annual report released Tuesday show for the first time that the five-year survival rate for all cancers has reached 70 percent, with the most notable survival gains occurring among people diagnosed with more fatal cancers such as myeloma (a blood cancer), liver cancer and lung cancer.

 

“Seven in 10 people now survive their cancer five years or more, up from only half in the mid-70s,” Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at ACS and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “This stunning victory is largely the result of decades of cancer research that provided clinicians with the tools to treat the disease more effectively, turning many cancers from a death sentence into a chronic disease.”

 

This wonderful trend is driven by a variety of factors:

 

For example, the HPV vaccine, approved in the U.S. in 2006, combined with cervical cancer screening, “can eliminate cervical cancer,” says Dr. Cardinale Smith, chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Other notable areas of progress include improved screening for breast cancer and lung cancer, Smith says, and decreased rates of smoking. Smoking rates in the U.S. fell from about 42 percent in 1965 to about 11 percent in 2021.

 

Cancers that tend to be more fatal, such as myeloma (a blood cancer), liver cancer and lung cancer, saw the largest survival gains, the American Cancer Society report found. For example, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer, which is the deadliest cancer in the U.S., increased from 15 percent in the mid-90s to 28 percent by 2021; for liver cancer, the survival rate rose from 7 percent in the mid-90s to 22 percent.

 

Presuming the day is not overtaken by breaking news, tomorrow’s edition will list five more positive trends and examples of America solving big, thorny problems with ingenuity, innovation, good policies, good decision-making, and strong leadership. See, this newsletter isn’t always gloomy.