Impact of Global Bad Actors Heighten Terrorist Threats in the United States
Over the past 12 months, we have seen significant changes to the landscape of threat actors across the Middle East with compounding impacts on U.S. domestic and international security. The Israel-Iran proxy war has continued with devastating results across the region and regional shifts in power dynamics. While there have been significant military setbacks for Iran and its proxies, the genesis of the conflict, in part, to scuttle regional peace opportunities and sow discontent towards Western and allied partners has largely been effective. Foreign maligned influence campaigns have inflamed the crises, bolstering the actions of regional proxies to perpetuate attacks and resistance to a ceasefire. Tragically, tens of thousands have died as a result, and the hostage crisis has continued painfully for more than a year. A strategic by-product of this unprecedented tragedy being a significant increase in animosity, hostility, radicalization, and potential for terrorism in the United States.
Against this backdrop, increased collaboration between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea against Western allies has achieved unprecedented results. Collectively, these actors have conducted cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and theft of sensitive government information, perpetuated regional conflicts, and collaborated with international criminal networks through grey zone operations to weaken Western powers.
While these actions may have been independent in nature, the overlap of these efforts have resulted in an environment that both directly and indirectly promotes terrorism. For instance, foreign maligned influence campaigns aimed at sowing discontent enable radicalization of vulnerable populations. These populations are targeted in the digital ecosystem for recruitment by terrorist organizations (e.g., the recent attack in New Orleans).
International criminal organizations and shadow economies enable the transit of resources and individuals as well as marketplaces to drive illicit business and financing to support this structure. At times, even collaborating with state actors, such as the assassination attempts on U.S. government officials in 2024.
Furthermore, the digital ecosystem has created economies, banking, and communication networks to effectively enable grey zone operations. With the increased use of sanctions and setbacks militarily and economically by Russia, Iran, and China, we can assume they, along with other bad actors, will increasingly use digital ecosystems to bolster economies and attack vectors.
To effectively address this shift, the U.S. government must continue to work with allies and private sector institutions to identify and shut down foreign maligned influence capabilities, terrorist network entry points (both physically and digitally), and illicit financing mechanisms that support the maligned ecosystem. This, combined with other diplomatic and defense measures, will help mitigate the dynamic terrorism threat environment of today.
Source » hstoday.us
