For two decades, the American psyche was defined by the image of a hijacked airliner. We built a massive global counter-terrorism apparatus to ensure that specific nightmare would never recur. But as we enter 2026, the “War on Terror” has been relegated to the history books, replaced by the strategic chess match of Great Power Competition with Russia and China. In our rush to pivot toward the future, we have inadvertently created a series of global “fault lines” that are shifting beneath our feet.
If the next 9/11 occurs on U.S. soil, it won’t be because we weren’t looking; it will be because we were looking at the wrong things. The threat landscape has evolved into a lethal cocktail of resurgent extremism, democratized technology, and domestic fragmentation that traditional intelligence agencies are struggling to map.
The most immediate external threat stems from the vacuum left in Afghanistan. Since the U.S. withdrawal, Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) has transformed from a regional nuisance into the most potent arm of the Islamic State. Unlike groups focused on local insurgencies, IS-K has demonstrated a chilling “external operations” capability, exemplified by the devastating 2024 Moscow concert hall attack.
Today, IS-K uses a “Lone Wolf Multiplier” a sophisticated digital radicalization machine that targets vulnerable youth in the West. Their goal is no longer to fly planes into buildings, but to inspire decentralized, high-impact strikes on “soft targets” like the upcoming 2026 World Cup venues or transit hubs. When radicalization happens in an encrypted chat room rather than a training camp, the “flash to bang” time, the period between an individual’s radicalization and their attack—shrinks to a window almost impossible to intercept.
We must also confront the fact that the “9/11 of the future” may not require a pilot’s license, but a high-speed internet connection. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have “democratized” precision-strike technology.
We are seeing the migration of drone swarm expertise to Western-based extremist cells. Small, off-the-shelf unmanned aerial systems (UAS), enhanced with basic AI for autonomous navigation, can now bypass traditional security perimeters. Simultaneously, the threat of an AI-enabled cyber attack on critical infrastructure—our power grid, water systems, or financial markets—poses a risk of mass-casualty disruption that could paralyze the nation as effectively as a physical strike.
Perhaps most concerning is the blurring line between “terrorism” and “organized crime.” As the U.S. takes more aggressive military action against transnational cartels—even designating some as Foreign Terrorist Organizations—we face the risk of “horizontal escalation.”
Security reports suggest that cartels, feeling the heat of extradition and military pressure, may no longer limit their violence to the border. Instead, they could employ “deniable” proxy groups to conduct high-visibility attacks on U.S. soil—targeting shopping malls or law enforcement—to force a political retreat. This is the new “gray zone” of warfare: where state-sponsored proxies and criminal syndicates use terror as a tactical lever.
Why are we so vulnerable? Because our resources are elsewhere. Intelligence assets are being diverted to monitor the South China Sea and the frontiers of Eastern Europe. This “security vacuum” has left massive blind spots in the Sahel and Southeast Asia, regions rapidly becoming the new epicenters of global jihadism. While we focus on hypersonic missiles, our adversaries are thriving in the shadows we’ve stopped watching.
Finally, we cannot ignore that the threat is now domestic. The rise of “memetic” extremism—where individuals are radicalized by nihilistic online subcultures rather than established organizations—means the next attacker may have no “terrorist” profile at all. In a polarized 2026, the most dangerous actor may be a neighbor radicalized by an algorithm.
To prevent the next catastrophe, we must move beyond the “counter-terrorism” models of the 2000s.
- First, we need a “whole-of-society” approach to digital resilience, treating radicalization as a public health crisis rather than just a police matter.
- Second, we must invest in defensive AI and counter-drone infrastructure for our cities.
- Third, we cannot allow Great Power Competition to blind us to the foundational threat of non-state actors.
The 9/11 Commission famously cited a “failure of imagination” as the reason we were caught off guard in 2001. In 2026, our failure isn’t imagination—it’s attention. We know where the fault lines are. The question is whether we will act before the ground begins to shake.
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