Foreign Affairs · Aug 18, 2026

“The Strategy of Terrorism”

A quarter century before 9/11, an upsurge in global terrorism prompted the historian David Fromkin to examine its purpose and method. Terrorism was a strategy of the weak, Fromkin wrote in these pages, but modern technology had enabled it “to enter the political arena on a new scale.” And its surprising success seemed to be due, in large part, “to a miscomprehension of the strategy by its opponents.”