f the September 11, 2001, attacks never happened, Americans would be marking some later date as the anniversary of the most devastating terrorist strike on the homeland in modern history.
The high water mark of terrorist attacks against Americans remains the late 1980s. Fueled by Kremlin funding, most of the attacks came on foreign soil: Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Congressional hearings on terrorism became as numerous as new Taylor Swift boyfriends are now.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the checks stopped coming, transnational terrorism threats quickly trended down.
In the ‘90s, transnational terrorism made only occasional headlines. Among them were the first World Trade Center bombing (Feb. 26, 1993), which killed six and Ahmed Ressam, the inept “millennium bomber” arrested trying to enter the U.S. on Dec. 14, 1999.
Rather than raise red flags, these attacks evoked images of the Keystone Kops. If that was the best the terrorists could muster, most Americans thought, then we had little to worry about.
