Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the “war on terror” can appear to belong to an earlier era. Al-Qaida’s central leadership has been severely weakened, the territorial “caliphate” established by the Islamic State group (ISIS) has been dismantled, and governments are now focused heavily on interstate war, artificial intelligence, and competition among major powers.
Yet terrorism does not disappear when policymakers shift their attention. It adapts to political conditions, technological change, and the conflicts from which extremist movements draw recruits and narratives.
The next major terrorist threat is unlikely to resemble 9/11. It may not be directed by a large, hierarchical organization or require operatives to cross several borders after years of preparation. Instead, it could emerge from a small network or a single individual combining extremist propaganda, commercially available technology, online knowledge, and tactics borrowed from contemporary wars.
The main risk is not necessarily a return of the old threat, but a failure to recognize its successor.
Peter Bergen’s All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror traces how successive US administrations confronted adversaries whose structures, methods, and geographic reach repeatedly changed. That history also shows the limits of a purely military approach. Campaigns eliminated leaders and disrupted organizations, while some interventions created political vacuums, grievances, and recruitment narratives that outlived the operations themselves.
How Today’s Wars Shape Tomorrow’s Narratives
That lesson carries renewed relevance after the Iran war and amid the continuing devastation in Gaza.
The Iran conflict has concentrated regional attention on missiles, drones, critical infrastructure, and waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb. Attacks on commercial shipping have demonstrated how states and armed nonstate actors can impose costs well beyond an immediate battlefield without engaging in traditional conventional warfare.
Its longer-term ideological effects may be harder to see.
Wars do not automatically produce terrorism. Most people exposed to conflict, injustice, or political anger never embrace violence. Still, conflicts generate images, grievances, and narratives that extremist movements can manipulate selectively. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped mobilize a generation of foreign fighters. The 2003 Iraq War became a potent recruitment theme for al-Qaida in Iraq and later ISIS. The Syrian civil war enabled extremist organizations to recruit internationally, seize territory, and cast themselves as defenders of besieged communities.
Violent organizations now can draw simultaneously on Gaza, the Iran war, and perceptions of international double standards. They may present complex conflicts as proof of a single civilizational assault and depict violence as the only meaningful response.
Rhetoric Is Not the Same as Capability
Such propaganda merits attention, but it should not be confused with operational capacity.
Extremist groups commonly intensify their messaging during periods of upheaval as they compete for relevance, recruits, and funding. A statement threatening retaliation does not establish that a group has the personnel, finances, access, or logistical infrastructure needed to mount an attack. Effective threat assessment requires distinguishing between propaganda meant to inspire supporters and observable signs of operational preparation.
At the same time, the gap between aspiration and capability may be narrowing.
A recent Soufan Center report on the future of the global jihadi movement warned that commercially available technologies are giving individuals and small cells capabilities once associated mainly with states or well-funded organizations. The principal concern is not a single technology, but their convergence.
An attacker could combine an inexpensive drone, commercial navigation systems, encrypted communications, online reconnaissance, and AI-assisted technical guidance. Generative AI may also help translate propaganda, tailor messages to distinct audiences, and reduce some knowledge barriers for inexperienced actors. These tools do not remove the practical difficulties of organizing violence, but they can make extremist communication and rudimentary experimentation faster and more accessible.
ISIS’s weaponization of commercial drones offered an earlier warning. The technology was widely available, but security institutions were initially slow to anticipate how an armed group might adapt it. Current wars are accelerating that process, producing public archives of battlefield innovation. Tactics developed in Ukraine, Gaza, the Red Sea, and elsewhere can be studied and imitated far beyond their original theaters.
The Houthis illustrate both the value and the limits of the comparison. They are not simply another version of al-Qaida or ISIS. Their objectives remain tied largely to Yemen, the Red Sea, and confrontation with Israel and the United States. Their use of relatively inexpensive missiles, drones, and maritime tactics to disrupt global commerce demonstrates how an armed nonstate actor can create effects disproportionate to its resources.
Other violent actors may study those methods even when they do not share the Houthis’ ideology or political objectives. What spreads across conflicts is often practical knowledge rather than organizational allegiance.
A Counterterrorism Challenge Beyond Organizations
The next phase of counterterrorism cannot focus only on established organizations and familiar chains of command. Intelligence services must also understand fragmented online ecosystems, self-radicalizing individuals, cross-platform propaganda, and the transfer of tactics from war zones to domestic environments.
Gulf states enter this period in a stronger position than before 9/11. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and regional partners have improved intelligence cooperation, terrorist-financing controls, aviation security, border surveillance, and protection of critical infrastructure. Those measures have made it substantially harder for large organizations to move money and operatives unnoticed.
Systems built to identify organizations, though, can struggle to detect people with little or no direct contact with one. Lone actors and small autonomous cells often generate fewer conventional intelligence indicators. Their motivations may also be ideologically mixed, combining religious extremism with personal grievance, conspiracy theories, nihilism, or fascination with violence.
The appropriate response is neither indiscriminate surveillance nor an automatic return to large military campaigns. Heavy-handed policies can reinforce narratives used by extremist recruiters. A more durable approach combines precise intelligence collection, protection of vulnerable infrastructure, oversight of dual-use technologies, cooperation with technology companies, and credible community partnerships that identify concerning behavior without stigmatizing entire populations.
Regional conflicts also need to be managed with attention to their political afterlife. Civilian casualties, prolonged displacement, and perceptions that international law is selectively applied do not make terrorism inevitable. They can, though, create material that violent movements exploit long after fighting ends.
Counterterrorism policy must therefore address two questions simultaneously: how to prevent an immediate attack and how today’s response may shape the environment in which future extremists recruit.
One central failure of the post-9/11 period was the assumption that tactical success necessarily produced strategic success. Leaders were killed and networks dismantled, but instability generated by some military interventions helped new organizations emerge. Governments won battles while sometimes strengthening their adversaries’ wider narrative.
Twenty-five years later, complacency may be as dangerous as overreaction. The next terrorist threat may develop gradually where regional conflict, personalized online radicalization, and accessible technology meet. Its participants may be linked less by formal membership than by shared imagery, propaganda, and tactical knowledge.
The lesson of the post-9/11 period is that terrorist threats evolve faster than many institutional assumptions. The effectiveness of future counterterrorism efforts will depend on whether governments can identify emerging forms of radicalization and operational capability before they develop into sustained threats.
