The Myth of the “Lone Wolf” Persists

Shortly after the recent terrorist attack in New York City, Governor Cuomo referred to its perpetrator as a “lone wolf,” a term frequently invoked after such incidents. Frederick W. Kagan finds the phrase “profoundly misleading,” not least because police have already been searching for an accomplice:

[One] impetus behind this now almost-instinctive denial of foreign terror connections comes from the Obama administration’s intensive efforts to sustain the notion that it had defeated al-Qaeda long after it had become apparent to careful analysts that this was not the case. This effort spawned the popular “lone-wolf” thesis. . . .

This matters because Americans must change the way they understand the terrorist threat at home. There will be an increasing number of people radicalized within the U.S., conducting attacks that are not directly ordered or controlled from overseas.

Eliminating terrorist safe havens in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sahel [region of Africa] will not end the problem of domestic terrorism. But allowing them to continue to flourish will unquestionably make it much worse. Safe havens give groups places to develop and transmit the messages that radicalize people in the West, as well as to perfect and propagate methods of carrying out attacks. They are, above all, evidence to those who seek it that these groups and their ideas can win.

The anti-terror strategy we’ve been following for a decade—and which the current administration is largely continuing—is failing and must be replaced. Rather than dismissing the most recent attack as yet another “self-radicalized lone wolf,” and thereby separating it from the global Salafist-jihadist problem, let’s take it as a call to reevaluate our overall approach to the problem and find more successful ways to ensure the security of the American people.

Read more at AEI

More about: Barack Obama, ISIS, Jihadism, Politics & Current Affairs, War on Terror

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF