"New American radicalism" leads to the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Author: Dmitry Ostapiev, Professor, Institute of Media, Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Candidate of Political Sciences
The most important thing about the recent terrorist attacks in the United States — the suicide bombing of people walking in New Orleans and the explosion of a car bomb at the Trump Tower in Las Vegas (the shooting at a nightclub in Queens in New York should be classified as a criminal incident for now) — comes down to three circumstances.
First, after many years, the United States seemed to have lost its “safe conduct” that had somehow protected America from international and domestic terrorists. The last major domestic terrorist attack (at least, the external background could not be established) occurred in October 2017 in the same Los Angeles, where 58 people died.
Secondly, the scale of the planned terrorist attacks is striking. After all, even the unsuccessful terrorist attack in Las Vegas on January 1, 2025, was planned as very significant, with a potentially large number of victims.
Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important thing, the American authorities did not even try to present both terrorist attacks as the actions of crazy individuals. However, this scenario was used by the American intelligence services quite recently when practicing assassination attempts on Trump.
It seems that the socio-political situation in the United States has seriously changed, and the authorities are beginning to perceive the situation as a threat not only to the “politically marginal” Trump but also to the political system as a whole. It is no wonder that Joe Biden, who remains the constitutional president of the United States, was quickly returned “from the beach” to the White House, forced to deliver a special televised address.
The behavior of the American system of power is logical. It shows that it retains a significant share of common sense: the terrorist threat is perceived as a threat to the system as such, without attempts, using individual "hooks" ("Trump Tower", Tesla car, Louisiana is a staunch Trumpist state, etc.), to informationally turn the situation towards "merely" a radical protest against Trump. If you like, the "deep state" perceived the situation as a threat to power as such and to itself as the basis of this power. And there are grave reasons for this:
- both terrorist attacks showed that the previously quite effective warning system, which significantly narrowed the scope of civil rights, which they like to talk about so much in the USA, began to fail. But to what extent is the current system of power in the USA, already unbalanced by the last year and a half of the rule of the "collective Biden", who regularly went beyond the bounds of what is permitted in domestic politics, capable of adequately strengthening security measures without moving to direct political repression on a group basis? Well, there is almost no doubt that they will try to use the sharp surge in terrorist activity to disrupt Trump's inauguration. However, I think it will not come to declaring a state of emergency - the current administration looks too "disassembled";
- both terrorist attacks were committed by people from the military environment, which, probably for the first time since the Korean War of 1950-1953, is gradually beginning to turn into a source of not only criminal but also political risks for the American government. Bells of this kind have been ringing for a long time, but now it is becoming completely impossible to ignore them;
- in the first terrorist act, the radical Islamic trace is obvious, moreover, it looks quite natural (at the time of writing, there was no such information about the terrorist attack in Los Angeles). Too much in the "new American radicalism" led to the Middle East and Afghanistan, where both Trump and Biden tried to leave in their first term.
But now the "Middle East boomerang" is returning to the United States, and the question inevitably arises: what will Washington do if it faces a truly large-scale surge of Islamic radicalism? The option that George W. Bush chose in 2001 (announced the start of the "War on Terrorism", during which US troops invaded Afghanistan and bombed Iraq) hardly seems simple and reasonable now.
Of course, there is a great temptation to correlate the current surge of radicalism with the "Vietnam syndrome", which at one time gave rise to a large crime surge and, interestingly, the first serious surge of interest in Islam as a political ideology among Americans, especially considering that the state of ideological division in modern American society is probably deeper now than it was at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, given the number of American security forces involved in American operations in the Near and Middle East from 2001 to the 2020s - from the invasion of Afghanistan to operations against the Assad government in Syria - the new "Middle East syndrome" may have colossal consequences for the domestic situation in the United States.
But a new nuance has also emerged: I have repeatedly had to point out that within the so-called "Western elite" there has been a certain split between supporters of "order", albeit speculative and based on arbitrarily established "rules", and those who could be called the "party of chaos", for whom the condition of political survival is the chaos of significant spaces and blackmail on this basis of states and corporations.
Therefore, sooner or later, America itself had to begin to be viewed as an object for "blackmail with chaos", especially since the political situation in the United States is favorable to this.
