Moving Towards the End of 20 Years of War on Terror?
Twenty years after 9/11, the assessment of the “War on Terror” is mixed: heavy financial and human costs, weakening of Al-Qaeda central and the Islamic State in the Levant, but creation of affiliates in different locations, fatigue of endless wars, etc.
The Western powers have never been able to deal with the political problems that persisted after their military successes. A new hierarchy of security challenges seems to have put terrorism in its rightful place: a strategic problem among many others.
Élie Tenenbaum is the Director of Ifri's Security Studies Center. He co-authored, with Marc Hecker, La guerre de vingt ans : djihadisme et contre-terrorisme au XXIe siècle (The Twenty Years' War: Jihadism and Counterterrorism in the XXIst Century), published by Robert Laffont in 2021.
Article published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 86, No. 3, Autumn 2021.
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