In modern history, say from 1900 to the present, there are a number of deadly events which one could call “iconic” because of the huge impact they had on the world. While something happens every day somewhere, including major actions with important local or regional implications, it is rare for a given occurrence to have a disproportionate, global effect. These incidents are truly transnational and international in nature.
Take, for example, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina) in June 1914 by a Serbian terrorist. That one act led soon after to the outbreak of World War I, a war which saw the mechanization of warfare on a scale never seen before and a death toll of at least 20 million soldiers and civilians. While it is true that a war in Europe could have erupted in the absence of this royal killing, it was nevertheless the linchpin.
The history of that war is known to all, even more than a century later. We are undoubtedly familiar with the carnage of trench warfare and the human slaughter caused by artillery shells and poison gas. The shock of this maelstrom of killing convinced some to call this conflict “the war to end all wars.”
That epithet did not last a generation.
On December 7, 1941, a Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor in what was United States–controlled Hawaii (not yet a state) was the key factor in America’s decision to enter World War II, which had begun with German leader Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland more than two years previously. That war resulted in the deaths of between 40 and 50 million, twice the number of WWI, and the unleashing of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, which alone killed as many as 250,000 people. Had Japan elected not to target the US, the war would most likely have had a very different outcome. WWII was not only catastrophically deadly but led to a whole new world order.
The aftermath of WWII was, of course, the Cold War, which, although not lethal on the scale of the two world wars, did place the planet on the knife’s edge of MAD—mutually assured destruction—for almost half a century. The West’s erstwhile ally in WWII, the Soviet Union, morphed into a mortal enemy, one that was the focus of the West’s military and security intelligence apparatuses for decades. Given the increase in nuclear arsenals on both sides and proxy wars aided by both the US and the USSR, civilization was put, perhaps for the first time, at risk of total annihilation. Several “near misses”—the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is perhaps the best known—took us to the very edge of global conflict and collapse.
Then came 9/11.
Terrorism did not start on that Tuesday morning in New York and Washington. The group responsible for the attacks, al-Qaeda, had been active for more than a decade before that day and had attacked the US, albeit mostly abroad, on several occasions in the 1990s. There were also many other forms of terrorism that had arisen over the previous decades, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century (generally seen as the time when terrorism as a tactic of violence began to spread). Nevertheless, the al-Qaeda airliner attack led many to see terrorism as something very serious as it immediately reached a height and prominence in the public’s eye that still dominates a quarter century later. Never before had a terrorist organization successfully carried out an act that took so many lives and led to a global response in the months and years to follow.
As a strategic Middle East analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), it was my job to understand events in that part of the world and any implications for the security and safety of Canada and its allies. Terrorism was not my specialization in 2001—Iran was—but I was nevertheless well-positioned to learn more about this particular brand of violent extremism. To say that this one day had a lasting impact on my career would be a vast understatement.
Over the ensuing twenty-five years, both on the “inside” and the “outside,” I made it my goal to understand Islamist terrorism—its history, ideology, main players, and designs—and to help my colleagues identify individuals and groups within this broader movement who meant to do harm here and elsewhere. My career gave me access to sensitive intelligence on terrorist operations in Canada and abroad and the time and space to fully develop a deep knowledge of where this phenomenon had come from and where it was headed. I had access to SIGINT (signals intelligence), HUMINT (human source intelligence), and other pieces of information that informed me then and still do to this day. Our collective job, with the help of our allies within the so-called Five Eyes network and beyond, was simple: do everything possible to stop another 9/11. In that, we succeeded, although this should not be seen as a claim that we prevented all terrorist attacks, especially those at the hands of jihadis.
To me, the most important takeaway is that, despite claims to the contrary by those who profess to be “terrorism experts,” jihadism is showing no signs of slowing down. True, major figures, such as al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and the head of Islamic State (ISIS) Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, are dead, as are tens of thousands of other jihadis around the globe, but the death toll in attacks in dozens of countries is still alarmingly high. Not a day goes by without at least one act of terrorism, and usually more than one, resulting in deaths and injuries; most of these incidents are perpetrated by jihadis (and not by those beholden to other types of terrorist ideology). Claims of counterterrorism successes are often hollow.
In November 2025, German media outlet Deutsche Welle published a piece in which it states: “more than two decades after 9/11, al-Qaeda hasn’t vanished, it’s adapted.” Whether it is al-Qaeda itself or one of its “affiliates” (al-Shabaab, JNIM, etc.), the terrorist conglomerate continues to carry out attacks on several continents. The very same could be said about ISIS. It, too, maintains a vicious pace of violence in its original territory of Iraq/Syria/Kurdistan and through its provinces in Asia and Africa. There is simply no end in sight.
Yes, the West has seen a much lower level of jihadi activity, but it is not immune at the time of writing. Smaller scale attacks are carried out, and many more are thwarted by security intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This type of terrorism is not at risk of ceding top spot to any other form of extremist violence.
The bottom line, then, is that the state of terrorism worldwide a full quarter century after 9/11 can be ably contained in the French phrase, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” (little to nothing has changed over this time period and is not likely to any time soon).
9/11 wasn’t a failure of information, at least not entirely. For those watching from inside intelligence communities, the shock was real, but it was not the shock of discovering that jihadi terrorism existed or that groups such as al-Qaeda had declared the West an enemy. Reports had been written, signals had been intercepted, sources had been assessed, and warnings had moved through the machinery of government.
The problem was not complete ignorance. It was the far more difficult matter of understanding what scattered pieces of information meant before they became obvious in retrospect. It was the shock of seeing a threat long studied, reported on, briefed, and debated take a form so audacious that it instantly rendered every previous assumption inadequate.
We now risk repeating the mistakes of the past twenty-five years later. It is rarely a good idea to declare something “over.” WWI was billed as the “war to end all wars,” and yet an even larger conflagration consumed us a generation later. Why then do we continue to insist that we have “defeated” jihadi terrorism and can move on? The current data does not support the pollyannish view that this particular kind of threat no longer demands our attention and resources. Maybe we need to think like the Taliban who, during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization–led war in Afghanistan for twenty years, reminded us that “you have the watches, while we have the time.”
In November 2025, the director of CSIS, Dan Rogers, did something remarkable: he gave a public speech on what keeps him and his team up at night. While Canadians had access to CSIS annual reports, they had never had a chance to hear from the head of the country’s spy agency on what we face as a nation when it comes to threats. It was a truly eye-opening event.
Those of us who worked in national security know that threats and intelligence priorities change over time. Actors come and go, as do governments, whose interests and political perspectives mirror their underlying philosophies. What one administration sees as the number-one issue may not carry over to another.
As an analyst who lived during Cold War, saw it draw to a close, worked through 9/11 and its aftermath, and retired a few months after two lethal jihadi attacks against soldiers in Canada, I have had a privileged view of threat and how it shifts. Nothing much has changed in the last quarter century. As the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
The threats we faced during the Cold War—Soviet/Russian espionage, Chinese technology theft and interference in our societies, North Korea, Iran (since the 1979 Islamic Revolution), and terrorism (of a variety of sorts, even if jihadi extremism is the dominant form today)—and the immediate lead-up to 9/11 never went away. We may have decided that it was no longer necessary to be worried about them and dedicate the necessary resources to combat them, but that does not entail that those decisions were the correct ones.
We have deluded ourselves on so many occasions in the recent past with respect to those who intend us harm. We naively believed that Russia was a counterterrorism ally after 9/11 and was slowly rejoining the West (President Vladimir Putin has had other ideas and is seeking to re-establish a neo-Tsarist empire—with him as Tsar, of course). We were also convinced that if we trade with the People’s Republic of China, it will democratize and abandon communism, seeing our way as superior (President Xi Jinping has other ideas and wants his nation to be the planet’s sole superpower by 2047).
Somewhat foolishly, we concluded that jihadis were “yesterday’s threat”: al-Qaeda had been defeated with the death of bin Laden, while ISIS was “totally defeated”—as per then US president Donald Trump—in 2019. Many nations crow about the “end” of a new insert-terrorist-group-here in any given year. The jihadis beg to differ.
Advocates crowed that cyber and artificial intelligence would be the saviour of humanity, ushering in a new era of economic growth and prosperity. To be determined. The flood of disinformation and “fake news,” wielded by our adversaries, not to mention some very worrisome incidents where AI has provided teenagers with instructions on how to create bioweapons, seems to suggest otherwise.
There are already those who speak of the “next” threats we will need to face. It is certainly likely that newer demons will arise, some perhaps from unexpected directions, and nations will have to rise to the challenge. At the same time, however, “yesterday’s” threats are still with us today and will most probably be with us tomorrow. For instance, on the terrorism front, many have weighed in on the next “wave” of violent extremism, as per David Rapoport’s “Wave Theory” of terrorism, citing cyber, Iran-backed groups, the far right, and “nuclear” terrorism.
This is a curious development, as two of the up-and-coming actors are already with us and have been for decades—Iran and the far right. Governments have long worried about nuclear proliferation and agonized over a terrorist group or autocracy getting the technology (the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was largely justified on the belief that Saddam Hussein was on that pathway). Cyberattacks have also been a scourge for some time already.
In addition, the jihadis have not gone away and show no signs of ending their campaigns of violence in the name of their interpretation of Islam. Suggesting that countries can divert resources away from this threat is unwise. In essence, while states have to do medium to long-term forecasting on what is headed our way, they must also continue to deal with the here and now. Those threats—jihadi terrorism, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and others—require our full attention and will for some time.
As Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the murdered Russian activist Alexei Navalni, wrote in The Economist in September 2025, “When the Soviet Union collapsed, the world had no clear understanding of how to engage with the new Russia. There was a naive belief that after shedding its Soviet past, Russia would naturally blossom into a liberal democracy. Based on this assumption, alarming signs—including the impoverishment of tens of millions by botched economic reforms and corrupt privatisation—were largely ignored.” Ignored to our peril, I would add.
Vigilance and a realistic view of the threat environment are absolutely necessary. We cannot afford any more “peace dividends,” “end of history,” or “thousand points of light” perspectives. The West, as well as other nations facing similar challenges, must ensure that their intelligence, law enforcement, and military forces have the required resources (fiscal and human) to continually monitor those that mean us harm. To do otherwise is insanity.
Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from 9/11: The Unfinished Battle by Phil Gurski, published by Optimum Publishing International, 2026.
Phil Gurski is the president and chief executive officer of Borealis Threat & Risk Consulting. He worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS from 2001 to 2013, specializing in al-Qaeda/Islamic State–inspired violent extremism and radicalization.
