UN chief António Guterres called the 9/11 terror attack “an assault on humanity itself” to mark 25 years, but the Global War on Terror has squandered the solidarity that the entire world, including US enemies, felt with all Americans after that heinous act. Following the shockingly tragic deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans and people from over 90 countries at the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in New York, even Russia, Iran, and North Korea stood alongside Washington in mourning and in near-unanimous support.
Repeated American military interventions, human rights controversies, and shifting U.S. administrations have deeply polarized global public and political opinion. The global war on terror has turned into America’s longest “forever war”, far outlasting its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the latest war on Iran is currently bedeviling President Donald Trump.
That nascent war may be Trump’s nemesis, burdening him with growing daily frustrations. He is trapped in an asymmetric quagmire engineered by a militia he has designated as terrorist, fighting an enemy he calls the world’s ‘number one sponsor of terrorism’—all while it relentlessly swallows the U.S. military he boastfully describes as the ‘most powerful’ fighting force in human history.
Across a quarter-century, the highly lethal American global war on terror, which the UN system and almost all countries assist in various ways, has dramatically worsened the situation. It is riven by profound policy failures. Terrorism has spread from a small patch at the boot of Manhattan to engulf vast territories all the way from the Pacific Ocean tips of Indonesia and the Philippines to the Atlantic Ocean coast of Africa, remaining entirely relentless.
Despite Guterres’s outrage at terrorism, the UN’s unanimous Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) of 2006 is floundering in providing an alternative to the heavily militarized, unilateral US war on terror. The GCTS’s Ninth Review of July 2026 highlighted deep divisions when Israel and Argentina joined the US in rejecting a 28-page consensus text that Washington labelled as plagued by “nonsensical redundancies” and being “bloated, outdated, and lacking focus”.
Trump paid little heed to Guterres’s determination to prevent terrorists from actively exploiting artificial intelligence, commercial drones, and encrypted tools to finance and execute attacks. The UN is already transitioning its strategic focus toward a highly digitalized, data-centric framework. Its Global Counter-Terrorism Programme on Autonomous and Remotely Operated Systems (AROS) trains and equips countries, including across Africa and Central Asia, to detect and mitigate, among other threats, the weaponized swarms of commercial drones increasingly used by terrorists.
Trump seems to hold the UN system in disdain, but its work on terrorism deserves more attention and support because it brings many terrorism-affected countries together through specific programmes to provide contributions that the US cannot generate on its own.
For instance, the UN’s 2024 Counter Terrorism and Technology Plus (CT TECH+) Initiative is working with Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Iraq, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Funded by the European Union (EU), it is run alongside INTERPOL to actively build the capacity of weaker countries to gather digital forensics, monitor blockchain-based terrorist financing, penetrate the Dark Web, and use automated algorithms to rapidly scrub deepfakes and algorithmic propaganda from the internet.
The US can benefit greatly from the UN’s leading-edge project on AI and Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE), which studies how machine learning models can be used to predict local radicalization patterns and map community vulnerabilities before violence breaks out.
The project’s local and community-based findings can be particularly helpful for the global war against terrorism and lower costs for Washington. Local expertise and willing cooperation would also help the Pentagon provide better-tailored counterterrorism support for countries most impacted by radical Islamist Jihadists—such as those operating in the vast Saharan and Sub-Saharan desert wilderness. Backed by South Korea, the PCVE project examines how machine learning and generative AI impact national security.
A recurrent fear in democracies like the US, Europe, and India is interference in elections by hackers often based in Russia, Iran, and North Korea, who proliferate propaganda and disinformation on social media. A particularly useful project element is documenting how terrorist groups use Generative AI and synthetic media to produce automated, hyper-realistic propaganda and deepfakes.
Their deployment on chat systems to turn vulnerable local individuals into lone-wolf terrorists is a tremendous national security risk, as is their circulation of automated misinformation to deepen polarizing divisions among voters.
Despite Trump’s pretensions that U.S. power never needs anyone’s help, terrorism is no longer as raw as it was in 2001. Rather than the honest explosions of the past, it is now more like a depraved Venetian masked ball—disguised by millions of social media sites and revelers armed with 3-D printed weapons, stealthily devouring democracies from within.