Threat is inflated – terrorists are incompetent.

In the decade after the Cold War, a similar process of threat identification took place as problems previously considered to be of minor, or at least of secondary, concern were promoted. Anxieties about international terrorism substantially increased during the 1990s and were set into highest relief with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Extrapolating wildly from 9/11, a terrorist event ten times more destructive than any other in history, terrorism of that sort has repeatedly been taken to present a direct, even existential, threat to the United States or to the West — or even to the world system or to civilization as we know it.6 Wild extrapolations have precipitated costly antiterrorism and antiproliferation wars and huge increases in security spending. In these ventures, trillions of dollars have been squandered and well over two hundred thousand people have perished, including more than twice as many Americans as were killed on 9/11.7 There has been a tendency to see these exercises as misguided elements of a coherent plan to establish a “liberal world order” or to apply “liberal hegemony.“8 However, the overwhelming impetus was far more banal: to get the bastards responsible for 9/11.

Islamist terrorism in the United States has killed some six people per year since 9/11, and far more people in Europe perished yearly at the hands of terrorists in most years in the 1970s and 1980s.9 But there has nonetheless been a tendency to continue to inflate al-Qaeda’s importance and effectiveness.

In fact, al‐​Qaeda Central has done remarkably little since it got horribly lucky in 2001. It has served as something of an inspiration to some Muslim extremists, has done some training, seems to have contributed a bit to the Taliban’s far larger insurgency in Afghanistan, and may have participated in a few terrorist acts in Pakistan. It has also issued a considerable number of videos filled with empty, self‐​infatuated, and essentially delusional threats.10 Even isolated and under siege, it is difficult to see why al‐​Qaeda could not have perpetrated attacks at least as costly and shocking as the shooting rampages (organized by others) that took place in Mumbai in 2008, in Paris in 2015, or in Orlando and Berlin in 2016. And, although billions of foreigners have entered legally into the United States since 2001, not one of these, it appears, has been an agent smuggled in by al‐​Qaeda. The exaggeration of terrorist capacities has been greatest in the many overstated assessments of their ability to develop nuclear weapons. In this, it has been envisioned that, because al‐​Qaeda operatives used box cutters so effectively on 9/11, they would, although under siege, soon apply equal talents in science and engineering to fabricate nuclear weapons and then detonate them on American cities.11

It is possible to argue, of course, that the damage committed by jihadists in the United States since 9/11 is so low because “American defensive measures are working,” as Peter Bergen puts it.12 However, although security measures should be given some credit, it is not at all clear that they have reduced the amount of terrorism significantly. There have been scores of terrorist plots rolled up in the US by authorities but, looked at carefully, the culprits left on their own do not seem to have had the capacity to increase the death toll very much.13 As Brian Jenkins puts it, “Their numbers remain small, their determination limp, and their competence poor.“14 Nor can security measures have deterred terrorism. Some targets, such as airliners, may have been taken off the list, but potential terrorist targets remain legion.15 To a considerable degree, terrorism is rare because as Bruce Schneier puts it bluntly, “there isn’t much of a threat of terrorism to defend against.“16