25 years after 9/11. Whatever happened to mass-effect terrorism?

One remaining mystery about 9/11 is why there have been no attacks of comparable scale since. But, with the combination of new motivations, enhanced means of delivery and AI -devised payloads there should be no cause for complacency.9/11 changed everything. It led to two decades when the United States and much of Europe became fixated on Islamism. Western strategists became fluent about half absorbed subjects such as Wahhabism, Pashtun tribal customs, Frontier Crimes Regulations, and the Anbar Awakening while giving insufficient attention to Chinese economic dominance and Russian military rearmament[1]. Who knows what that diversion of strategic and intellectual resources (and the chaos it left behind in the region) has cost the West?9/11 also bookends that remarkable period from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90 when peace and reconciliation seemed to break out everywhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 seemed to chart a trajectory towards a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. One year later the peaceful multi-party elections in South Africa were nothing short of a miracle. For years Afrikaners had insisted they would fight black rule until the last drop of white blood. Th...