“You can cause a lot of havoc with a cell phone and a cheap DJI drone”

Danny Crichton:

Well, Colin, thank you for joining us.

Colin Clark:

Thanks for having me.

Danny Crichton:

So obviously, there's a huge amount of news in your world. I think of this attack in New Orleans where we saw, I believe, an Islamic State or inspired individual terrorists go up and down the city there, kill multiple people. It was a huge threat. We've also seen Syria fall in the last couple of months, obviously, a long-running battle for more than a decade, terrorism on multiple sides. The US was involved, was not involved, was involved, back and forth, other examples. As you enter into 2025 and you're looking around the world today, terrorism doesn't seem to be on the front page anymore. We've got Ukraine, you have Taiwan, you have the Trump administration. So much other stuff has pushed everything off to the side. But that's what always scares me because when we think about terrorism, asymmetric warfare, it's exactly the kinds of things you're not thinking about that oftentimes are the greatest risks. So what is top of mind to you these days? What are you thinking about?

Colin Clark:

Terrorism is always top of mind for me. I live in this world every day. My wife says I have a one track mind, and it's terrorism, sadly. It's only natural after two decades of the global war on terrorism and putting the name aside, the GWOT, which, I think, is a really terrible name because why would you declare war on a tactic? Terrorism's a tactic, right? We didn't declare war on Blitzkrieg in World War II because that would make no sense. Leaving that aside, something of what I would call counterterrorism fatigue set in. We were somewhat narrowly focused on one individual piece of that puzzle, which was Sunni Jihadism, right? Makes sense. We got hit by Al-Qaeda, then we dealt with the Islamic State, and then I think we overcorrected.

So after this really intense two-decade focus on violent non-state actors, right? Which is terrorists, insurgents, militias, the pendulum swung so far back in the other direction where it was all about great powers, right? So Russia, Iran, obviously China. And I always joke only partially kidding that when I go down to Washington these days, and I'll go down tomorrow, that the conversations focus on three things: China, China, and China, and maybe sprinkle a little bit of AI dust on top, right? As everyone tries to figure out what's happening in that space.

A lot of the talented people I know that worked in counterterrorism have been moved elsewhere. They've been moved onto those big issues. And the cupboard is bare not only in terms of manpower, and to no fault of their own. When you go down and talk with analysts, some of these kids are fresh out of grad school and weren't even born until after 9/11, right? And so this is ancient history to them. A lot of the folks that lived through this fight have retired or have moved on to other portfolios. And so to me, after the New Orleans attack, I kept getting the question, "Are we entering a new phase," or, "Should we expect a new wave of Islamic State inspired terrorism?" And the honest answer is, "I have no idea."

However, I'm not somebody that chases the bright shiny object. I've been looking at terrorism, for myself, several decades, and I see it ebbing and flowing the threat. I'm someone that I'm not a threat inflator. I like to be fairly sober about these things. I don't think the sky is falling, but there's a couple of things that lead the terrorism threat to ebb and flow. One of them is geopolitical events. You mentioned Syria. That's going to have a huge impact on terrorism and counterterrorism in 2025, and we can unpack that throughout the conversation.

The other is, it ebbs and flows in relation to and in response to counterterrorism, pressure. And if we're withdrawing from different parts of the world and we're focusing on other issues, terrorist groups then metastasize. We're seeing this in Somalia right now, not only with Al-Shabaab, but also with ISIS in Somalia. And we're seeing this in parts of Afghanistan with the Islamic State-Khorasan or ISIS-K, which had a banner year last year, major high-profile attacks in Iran, Russia, Turkey, a foiled plot against the Olympics, and another one against the Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria. So I expect ISIS-K to be quite active, again, this year in addition to a range of other groups that threaten the United States and our allies.

Danny Crichton:

Let me ask you. I mean, so that's an amazing overview. We're also in 2025. And as you said, technology is rapidly changing the world, and not just in terms of technology for detection, but also for dissemination of information. You have the rise of YouTube, TikTok, all these different social media networks. How has technology changed terrorism? Because to your point, the analysts today, if they're 24 years old, they were born after 9/11. Increasingly, people graduating from college are now no longer at the start of the Iraq war.

Colin Clark:

Technology is changing the way that we look at terrorism, tremendously. I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. And so there's often a lag effect to these things. And in general, terrorists tend to be early adopters, right? Because technology can be what we call a force multiplier. So if you are a small insurgent group based in the Sahel in West Africa, and you're now tinkering around with generative AI that can set it and forget it in terms of your propaganda, you've now freed up a significant amount of manpower hours to go do what terrorists do, which is plan, plot, and conduct attacks. ISIS-K so far, I'd say, is one of the leaders in this space in terms of using AI-generated moderators to announce the news, to pre-program and set propaganda in multiple languages across multiple platforms.

And so that's one way, but there's a number of other ways. Think about unmanned aerial systems or drones. That's a really big concern that counterterrorism experts have. Encrypted communications, virtual currencies, 3D printed weapons. I mean, we can go on and on. And I think as more non-terrorists, right? More people in the general population adopt and start using these technologies, we'll also see greater adoption by terrorists because there's more covering concealment. If, in two years, we're all getting our Amazon packages delivered by drones, that sets the stage for someone with nefarious intentions to join that fray, use that as a Trojan horse to do things that we've seen them do on the battlefield in Syria and elsewhere.

Laurence Pevsner:

We saw this, of course, with the New Orleans attack, where my understanding is that the individual used Meta Ray-Bans to blend in, right? So it used to be if you were wearing some kind of AR tracking goggles, you would stand out like a sore thumb.

Colin Clark:

[inaudible 00:06:10] a weirdo, right?

Laurence Pevsner:

Yeah, you'd be a total weirdo. Now, if you're just wearing Ray-Bans, then you completely blend in, which is really striking. Are these companies, whether it's Meta, whether it's OpenAI, the folks on the frontiers of new technologies, are they working with counterterrorism experts to try to stop this type of usage? What kinds of safeguards can they build in?

Colin Clark:

They are working with terrorism experts not nearly as much as they should be. I think they're doing just enough to keep people off their backs, including the federal government. And it's only going to be, sadly, when something terrible happens that we have this big commission. We look into it and say, "Actually, social media companies can and should be doing more." Too often we fall into these traps of buzzwords and buzzphrases. We hear them all the time like, "I advocate a whole of government approach." That means nothing to me. Who advocates that we work in siloed approach? Right? But it's bled into the conversation on terrorism and technology because you hear all the time, "Well, what are we going to do about this?" And someone says, "Public-private partnerships." Yeah, that sounds really good and it looks cool on a policy paper. What does it mean? What's the enforcement mechanism?

And there's entities out there like GIFCT, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. There's GNET, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, a place where I published an article with my colleague, Clara Broekaert. And so they're doing enough, but they're only going to do as much as they need to do because their main business isn't counterterrorism, right? It's making technologies that their consumers want to use. But I always think about it as the dark sordid underbelly of globalization. Anytime you show me a technology and tell me how great it is for the world, I'm automatically going red teaming, and I'm thinking about ways that people will use this to kill others.

Danny Crichton:

Well, it's funny. My favorite version of words you hear in government is single pane of glass with the idea of-

Colin Clark:

Self-licking ice cream cone.

Danny Crichton:

Yeah, exactly. Which, of course, it's like, "Yes, we want all the data on different charts that no one can see and can't find." But obviously, that's a much harder challenge. And, I mean, to your point, one of the things we always try to do with all the risk scenarios that we're designing here is to identify those sorts of unusual secondary effects that come from new technology. So on one hand, you're creating a technology that can save lives, that can develop new drug development. At the same time, it could be used as a bioweapon. That bioweapon is suddenly available to people who don't have a multimillion dollar lab funded by the National Institutes of Health in a secure facility, but it could be somewhere very small that has access to a couple of chemicals is able to go forward with it.

When you think about this, there's always an arms race, right? There's a new technology. There's people who are good and use it for good. There's people who are bad who use it for bad. And then from the US government and allies perspectives, we're trying to counter that. And we're saying, "Yes, they use drones, but we can do Counter-UAV. We have other ways to combat this." Where do you think that balance is right now? Who sort of has the first mover advantage on a lot of this stuff?

Colin Clark:

The bad guys always do because they don't have to play by the rules. They're unencumbered by laws, authorities, and policies, right? And so in that sense, we're always several steps behind. We're always playing catch up with the bad guys. That's just always going to be the case. I think there are ways that we can anticipate ways that technology will be misused, abused, etc. But that requires money, resources, a lot of brainpower. And I think right now, we're obviously going from a Biden administration to a Trump administration. There's a ton of government reshuffling, to put it mildly, that's going on right now. And I think one of my concerns is we're just very myopic and we're looking at exactly what we're doing today, what's right in front of our face, and we're failing to think several steps ahead of, "If these new technologies are coming online, what are some ways..."

And look, I'm not somebody that thinks that you can defeat terrorism. Again, I go back to it's a tactic. We should have called it the global war against Al-Qaeda. That would have been much more circumscribed, much more discrete, arguably achievable. I mean, we could argue on the merits of that, but you're not going to defeat terrorism. We like to use these very simplistic frames. Remember the war on drugs? Pretty sure drugs won. The war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on gluten, whatever you want to go to war with, right? But I think that's part of it is we don't actually accurately identify what it is we're fighting. We're never going to win. I mean, we start at the definitions at the base.

So I think terrorists, violent, non-state actors always have first mover advantage, and they also need it. Think about it. If you declared war on the United States, you issue a fatwa and say, "I'm at war with the great Satan," you're going to war with the most powerful military in the history of mankind. So how are you going to close that asymmetric gap? You're going to look for shortcuts. You're going to look for ways. You're not going to start building a conventional military of tanks. It makes no sense. You're going to look at hacking. You're going to look at using AI, all these ways that you can close that asymmetric gap to make it a more fair fight.

Danny Crichton:

When I think of international relations over the last 60, 70 years, there's a very tight distinction between a nation state actor and an asymmetric terrorist. You had small groups, decentralized, oftentimes motivated by maybe a religious conviction or something. On the other hand, you had nation states. I'm thinking great powers that use conventional warfare, that followed certain norms. And then over the last couple of years, and I'm thinking particularly Russia, but they're not exclusive to Russia, we've seen this sort of merge of the two styles, right? Whether it's through Wagner Group, whether it's through independent groups. We've had Daniela Richterova, political scientist over at King's College London on the podcast recently, who wrote about how Russia is using basically a gig economy, a mix of cybercrime, cryptocurrency to basically fund people doing tasks throughout Europe, in some cases, for a couple hundred bucks to burn down a building.

How does that change counterterrorism in your mind, where there's not this sort of siloing of like, "You follow Al-Qaeda, we've got a Russia office, and they're just different tactics, different people"? But the tactics are sort of overlapping. And does that mean those groups work together? Does that mean that they're still separate?

Colin Clark:

Yeah, that's a good question. And it makes things complicated. And we talk sometimes about this concept of the crime-terror nexus. It's a highly debated topic, because to me, when I think of a nexus, I think of a lasting relationship, right? Oftentimes when we see criminals and terrorists cooperating, it's a temporary marriage of convenience. It's a one-off. There's a story, and I don't know if it's true or if it's apocryphal, that Osama bin Laden approached Mexican drug cartels at one point and said, "I'll pay you this significant amount of money to poison the cocaine supply," to which they said that, "Why would we do that? That's bad for business."

But if you think about it from that perspective, now, people can write cute articles like Wither Westphalia, right? The erosion of the nation state and the rise of non-state actors. I look at power as a continuum, a spectrum, right? You have states on one end, you have non-state actors on the other, and you have a lot of room in between. Wagner is a great example. I actually have a book coming out on the Wagner Group through Columbia University Press, probably later this year. It's with Chris Faulkner and Raphael Parens. And so we look at how Wagner operates all around the world. You want to call the mercenaries, PMCs, private military companies, what have you. Those are going to become increasingly more common because they provide a layer of plausible deniability, a layer of non-attribution, right? And by the time we figure out what happened, go back to the original seizure of Crimea with the little green men, by the time we figured out what was going on, it was a fait accompli. It was too late. It wasn't random.

Vladimir Putin and the Russians are aware of what the NATO response cycle is, that they could go in, make this a reality on the ground before NATO could even react and respond. And I think a lot of countries, including the Chinese, watch that closely and say, "That was nifty how they did that without significant blowback." Now, you could argue in the more recent invasion in February, 2022, the Russians bit off more than they could chew. They weren't expecting such a robust response from the West, and they've been suffering badly. I mean, if you look at their losses on the battlefield. But even that conflict itself is interesting because I think Ukraine, right now, is a battlefield laboratory. I think that's where a lot of innovation around technologies, right? What's the saying? Necessity is the mother of invention. This is a country that's fighting for its life. And I think some of the most interesting developments that we're going to see related to drones is going to come out of Ukraine. They may not all be positive, but we'll see.

Laurence Pevsner:

On this idea of there being a whole spectrum of power and actors, one thing I was thinking about is the funding of all of this, right? In addition to an evolution in our technology for being able to develop drones, develop terrorism and anti-terrorism tactics, there's also new technologies that we're seeing on this funding, right? In our game that we host on AI and election security, one of the routes that we explore is how, say, North Korea might try to profit off the election by having people buy Bitcoin and gain money that way, and you don't realize that's what it's going to, right? All these different funding mechanisms. And we've seen similar tactics by terrorist groups too, and I'm wondering if you see that as an evolving threat as well.

Colin Clark:

The first book I wrote was on the financing of terrorism insurgency and irregular warfare. And I think, again, that's an area where states and non-states are getting creative. And to go back to this image of power on a spectrum, whereas it used to be only the state that was the only game in town, right? Because you could tax your citizens and raise a standing army, right? You had defined borders. Those were the units of analysis we spoke about in international relations. At the total opposite end of that spectrum is what the US Army started calling, maybe about 10, 12 years ago, super empowered actors. That could be one individual. Elon Musk is a non-state actor. He happens to be extremely wealthy, very powerful, and influential. That's one person still though, going all the way up to the high end of the spectrum.

So I think terrorists are always looking for different ways to insert themselves into these equations. And Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the so-called Axis of Resistance, they've benefited from Iranian largesse for a really long time. So there's a state sponsoring a non-state actor, right? Using it as what they call the Ring of Fire to encircle the Israelis. And because this was allowed to go on for so long where they built up these proxies in large part, that's why we've seen such a devastating and lethal conflict over the last 16 months in the Middle East.

Laurence Pevsner:

Yeah. When I was working at the State Department and working at the UN, one of the major problems that we dealt with was the cross-border mechanism between Turkey and Syria, right? And trying to keep that instated. And one of the counterarguments or one of the difficulties we were dealing with there, which was very real, and I'm curious what you think about it, was that, "When we get supplies into cities that really are desperately in need of food and medicine, things like that-"

Colin Clark:

Who's controlling those supplies?

Laurence Pevsner:

We know who controls it, and it's not the good guys. But also, if we're going to be humanists and altruistic... They were holding those innocent civilians hostage. And if we just cut off supplies, they would die.

Colin Clark:

Sure.

Laurence Pevsner:

And so that leads us to a really hard set of questions where no one wants to admit, "Hey, we know that some of this is going to be going towards the very terrorists that we are against, but what else are we going to do?"

Colin Clark:

It's inevitable. So here's a case of perfect being the enemy of good. In 2011, I was working at the RAND Corporation, which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank, mostly doing work for Pentagon. And they said, "Hey, you're doing really good work. We want to reward you. We're sending you to Kabul, Afghanistan for three months." And I was like, "That sounds like a punishment." So there I go to work on a task force led by, I think, then one-star General HR McMaster, who ultimately became National Security Advisor under Trump during his first term. I think it lasted a year and change, but it was called CJIATF-Shafafiyat, Combined Joint Interagency Task Force Shafafiyat, which was the Dari, Pashto word for transparency. So it was a counter-corruption.

So one of the things we prided ourselves on was being realistic and pragmatic, because you're not going to go in and solve corruption in Afghanistan. I mean, we can't solve it in our own country. We're not going to go to a country that lives and survives on a war economy and change that. But you could set a threshold that was acceptable to you like, "How much are we going to tolerate here?" Because there's going to be money that gets into the hands of bad actors, "What are we willing to live with?"

One of the ways that bad guys were making money there was, we had to send toilet paper and water and food all over the country. Well, we had contractors that we were paying to do that, and they would then pay the Taliban to not attack them. And so there's a million different ways to say nothing of the narco-economy there and opium and all of those things that the Taliban profited off of over the years. So extortion, protection, narcotics, humans, weapons, all of the different ways that you can make money from smuggling and trafficking. These guys have their fingers in the pie, even really innocuous stuff that you'd think, "Why would they bother with that?"

Lebanese Hezbollah down in the tri-border area of South America has long made counterfeit merchandise, right? Like knockoff NBA and Major League Baseball jerseys. They sell counterfeit baby formula, counterfeit Viagra, and other medicine. So anything that these guys can make a buck off of, they will. Then look at all these different hotspots throughout the world. We call them ungoverned spaces. I've always thought that was a misnomer. I think they're alternatively governed. We just don't recognize that form of governance. If it's ungoverned, it's a desert. There's no one there doing anything. But these are just different kind of forms of governance that, again, we don't see it, generally, right? This is black market, illicit economy, things like that, but it's a big part of the world.

Danny Crichton:

This reminds me of a piece by Ted Friend in the New Yorker from a year, year and a half ago, focused on wildlife trafficking. And we're talking about NBA uniforms or MLB knockoffs, but this was about how many different sources of wildlife are desired by traditional Chinese medicine, desired by elite collectors in Europe and in America. And it's all part of this transnational crime networks. And what's interesting is there's almost like a triangular trade. You have drug traffickers who need to move money to certain places, Chinese who want money out of China and into dollars. And so they're able to circulate this all throughout the economy.

And I'm curious, because you focus so much on finance, going all the way back to your first book, as you mentioned, up to the present day, I mean, has this gotten better? Do we have better intelligence around this? I mean, I only bring this up because Senator Mark Warner, who hosted one of our risk games back in November, shares an appointment on the Senate Intelligence Committee as well as the Senate Finance Committee. And so it was very interesting in banging networks in terrorism, counterterrorism and how do these crime networks get funded. Is it getting more sophisticated in terms of our ability to understand what's going on?

Colin Clark:

I'd say we have a greater understanding of what's happening, but the terrorists still have the first mover advantage, right? And so, in fact, it was 2015, I was invited to Paris to give a talk at the OECD. It was an illicit economies conference. And there was someone there talking, his name was A.J. Clarke, about wildlife trafficking. And there's a scholar at Brookings named Vanda Felbab-Brown, who's done some really great work in that space. But I'll loop in a current event to show you guys, or try to highlight how I think illicit economies are about to expand. And I would point you to the decision to essentially abolish or significantly limit USAID.

So that money that used to flow into the Global South, into all of these poor parts of the world that's no longer there, that void, that power vacuum is going to be filled, and it's going to be filled by bad actors that don't like the United States. I think it's an own goal. I'm not against cutting wasteful spending, waste, fraud, and abuse. But to do it reactively without a really serious long-term study, I think, is going to have second-order impacts that we're not prepared to deal with.

If you look at the way that terrorists and insurgents acquire political legitimacy, it's often through the provision of services. That's what made Hezbollah into the juggernaut it is. After the earthquake in Pakistan, I think it was 2015, the Pakistani government was either unable or unwilling to provide earthquake relief, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief to certain parts of the country. So who stepped in? Lashkar-e-Taiba. They then become even more enmeshed in the social and political fabric of the country, making them extremely difficult to get rid of in the long run. I think we're going to see a range of illicit actors fill the void that humanitarian workers, that role that they were playing in some pretty dangerous parts of the world. And I don't think we've exactly thought through how that ends.

Laurence Pevsner:

I'm wondering if you see the same trend with other countries stepping forward as well. I think of when we arrived at the UN, one of the first things that I noticed that I thought was really startling during the Biden years was, when Trump had pulled back in the first time from the UN, how much of the counterterrorism apparatus there had been taken over by China and its allies. That's a lot of money, a lot of power, a lot of resources that might, as you pointed out, be directed in a different way. As we get tired of counterterrorism, are other countries starting to step up on that mantle? And how will that change the global dynamics?

Colin Clark:

Other countries are stepping up and it's beyond counterterrorism. I'd say it relates to geopolitics more broadly. China is filling that void. They are looking to do it through the Belt and Road Initiative, right? Which is their signature foreign policy piece. The good thing for the United States is that the Chinese tend to still be quite cumbersome, ham-handed, and they're trying to fill the void in a way that isn't necessarily convincing other countries that they want to live in a world with a Chinese-led order. Let's look at a place like Angola. China comes in, they want access to oil. So what are they're going to do? They're going to build some roads. But every rainy season, those roads wash out because they're built poorly. And at the end of the day, if China gets better at improving those types of things, I think you're going to see Beijing gaining some serious traction.

At the same time, we used to refer to the United States as a benign hegemon, the only country that could provide leadership of democracy, human rights, wave the banner there, give people hope. And China doesn't give you those same warm and fuzzies. Now, we could argue whether the United States lived up to that. Was it hypocritical? We could dissect that all day long. But by and large, the United States was, is, and I hope will continue to be a beacon for people around the world, a beacon of hope and liberty and freedom. And the Chinese don't really come with that same vision. It's a lot more transactional. Now, could that change with the way that we're retrenching? You want to call it neo-isolationism. And if the Chinese get a little bit more sophisticated about how to wield soft power, then I think we're in trouble. I just haven't seen it yet.

Danny Crichton:

Well, in many cases, the Belt and Road Initiative is not just helping other countries. It's also a jobs program for Chinese citizens. So, as you pointed out, many of these organizations locally, whether it's in Pakistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon, built up social services, built up humanitarian aid, essentially tried to jumpstart some of these economies where, obviously, it's very moribund. There are very few job opportunities, very few people are making money, people are struggling. In China's case, when they build that road that is built with Chinese labor, that is labor that's coming from China, hosted in Chinese dormitories, and is designed to help fund itself, essentially. And so those sort of surplus overset effects that are going out into the economy just don't apply as much. So you don't see that kind of multiplier effect that may come from a USAID or similar aid where we are working with local partners and local construction, and we're not sending Americans there.

Let me redirect to conversation. So we were talking about 2025. We've talked about terrorism financing. We've talked a little bit about technology. We talked a little bit about the threats that we're seeing today. But what is sort of the unknown unknowns? Obviously, there are unknowns we're not going to really literally talk about, but there are these concerns that as the agenda changes and we're sort of losing our focus on some parts of what you've been working on over the last 20 years. What should we be concerned about going forward? Is it the traditional actors here? Is it new actors that are coming on that we haven't really heard from before? What's top of mind?

Colin Clark:

It's interesting because as somebody that is a counterterrorism expert and lives in this world, I can tell you before October 7th, 2023, there was a handful of people outside of Israel that worked on Hamas. It was just a group that was under the radar. No one was thinking about them. It was all about Isis, Al-Qaeda, even white supremacist extremists, neo-Nazis, and the like. But no one was talking about Hamas. It was yesterday's news. And I think even groups like that that were just an afterthought have maintained the potential to totally upend geopolitics, which I would argue that they did on October 7th, 2023. They plunged the region into a war that's still going on, that's fought on multiple fronts.

Another group that very few people, outside of a handful of scholars and analysts, Charles Lister, Aaron Zelin, Dareen Khalifa, Jerome Drevon, and some others, was Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, right? They were hanging out up in Idlib, doing their thing. The Assad regime, an odious dictator with a lot of blood on his hands, seemed fairly well entrenched. And actually, he was being socialized around the Arab League, again, primarily by the United Arab Emirates. But it was like, "Well, he's not going anywhere. He's back in business." And then over a couple of weeks, Assad is gone, and everyone's left slack-jawed, "What just happened?" Right?

So I think ISIS is always the sexy group that everyone wants to talk about, but there's other violent non-state actors out there in the world that really have the potential. That's the unknown unknown, who's out there? Right? Is it Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines? Is it FARC in Colombia? These groups that were yesterday's news. And terrorism is the great equalizer. It has the potential. I mean, let's go back to Obama, right? We're leaving the Middle East. We're pivoting to Asia. How's that working out? I'm pretty sure we're still firmly entrenched in the Middle East.

Danny Crichton:

There was an amazing book published last year that was like, "The pivot to Asia, second decade. Let's do it again-"

Colin Clark:

For real this time.

Danny Crichton:

Well, this gets at a question, I think, that every president, politician around the world faces, which is, you want to set the agenda. You want to have your own vision for how the world works. And then sort of reality strikes. Most famously, Jake Sullivan published an article in Foreign Affairs weeks before the October 7th crisis, basically like, "The Middle East, never been calmer." And it was sort of nixed on the online version, but still in the paper copies, if you can track down.

Colin Clark:

I have it.

Danny Crichton:

There you go. Probably a valuable commodity on some collector website. But it is this case of like, these actions are asymmetrical. Now, one of my questions though is, are people sharing tactics better today? Because one of the things that we focus on when you think of the technology industry is increasingly countries around the world are sharing knowledge. We're able to learn from each other. We're able to figure out the tactics, the codes, etc. You look at the speed at which OpenAI and ChatGPT has spread, went from zero to 100 million users in a couple of months. Facebook took years to do the exact same thing. Because of internet connectivity, digital divide has been going away for a long period of time. Do you see the same thing happening among these different groups? They're copying each other's tactics, the strategies, the products that they're using. Or do you still think they're relatively independent of each other?

Colin Clark:

No, they're absolutely watching each other. They're learning from each other, seeing some recent cooperation between Al-Shabaab and the Houthis and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. So different groups cross sectarian cooperation, but the barriers to entry are being lowered. And there's a great book by Audrey Kurth Cronin called Power to the People, how terrorists use technologies. And she starts with dynamite. She goes all the way back to the invention of dynamite, and then comes all the way up to drones, right? And all the other things that we have today.

I mean, think about it. If you are a lone actor, I don't really like the term lone wolf, but lone wolf, lone actor, single individual, you can cause a lot of havoc with a cell phone and a cheap DJI drone. How do you get smart on this stuff? Well, there's hobbyist rooms where you can go and talk to other people that are drone enthusiasts, and you can learn pretty much everything you need to know about how to use these things. You can even tune into ESPN and watch drone racing. You can go out and you can equip this thing. You can soup it up. If you can integrate AI into drones, program drone swarms, right? There's all these ways that you can use drones. And that could even be a sideshow, right? That could just be a distraction. Think back a couple of years ago when there was drones over Gatwick. They basically shut the airport down. These types of incidents are going to become more common.

And I think terrorists are always learning. They're always watching. They're a lot smarter than we give them credit for. People want to talk about cave dwellers and these people that are operating in the seventh century. That's really a misnomer. That's a mischaracterization of what these groups are and what they're doing. And I would say, if we go back to October 7th, why did Hamas strike then? Because Yahya Sinwar, who had spent a lot of time in an Israeli prison, learned Hebrew, and studied Israel, studied the psyche of the nation, was watching these protests happening on a regular basis in the streets against Netanyahu.

There was IDF reservists being interviewed on TV saying, "This is negatively impacting military readiness because the countries are at each other's throats," right? And they saw that as the perfect time to strike, because the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces and even the Mossad, right? Is vulnerable at the end of the day. So they're watching. They're talking to each other, and they're laying in wait. 1984, the Provisional Irish Republican Army tried to blow up the Brighton Hotel and kill Margaret Thatcher. They missed her. And in the press release that they issued after, they said, "You have to be right always. We only have to be lucky once." And that remains true today.

Laurence Pevsner:

Given that that's the case, that the lone individual can do so much damage so easily, I almost want to ask the opposite question of why we don't see more terrorist attacks. Why aren't they on the front pages every day? When I take the subway to work, I encounter a lot of, unfortunately, mentally unwell people. They're obviously not planning terrorist attacks around me, fortunately. Why is it that we aren't seeing this even more often?

Colin Clark:

When you think about root causes and ideology, right? Grievances, those are the types of things that drive people. What we're now seeing, though, are these kind of attacks. And I'd point you to what happened in Nashville a few weeks ago. There was a shooting at a school. We lead the world in school shootings. We're the United States. Today, it's another Tuesday, nobody really even reacts anymore. Politicians offer thoughts and prayers, rinse and repeat. I mean, we've grown callous to the loss of human life there.

This individual was pretty interesting. He was African American, but he hated black people. He was a neo-Nazi self-identified. He was also an incel, right? Which is an involuntary celibate, a whole other thread of ideology that motivates terrorist attacks. And what we're seeing today, former FBI director, Christopher Wray, called it salad bar terrorism. It's people picking and choosing different pieces of ideology. And then to be labeled terrorism, there's got to be a political motive there. There's got to be an ideological motive. If you think back to the shooting in Brooklyn on the subway a couple of years ago, some people have called that a hate crime. This was an individual that was writing these rambling writings against white people. It was an African American that conducted the attack. I've never seen a clear case enough of that.

There was an incident in Highland Park, Illinois, on a 4th of July parade a couple of years ago. There's this heavy dose of nihilism and internet irony that is laced and woven throughout the manifestos that we see that people are doing this for shits and giggles, for lack of a better term. It's a very weird place that we're in. But if it's somebody like we saw in New Year's Day in New Orleans that throws up the black ISIS flag, I mean, we're going to cover that on the news for the next month.

So it's interesting what we tend to focus on versus, "Well, it wasn't motivated by politics or ideology. So it's garden variety crime, or it's mental illness." A lot of times, these things overlap. It's difficult to disaggregate. And I think mental illness is one of those things, right? Was this person mentally ill or were they a terrorist? Well, can't they be mentally ill and a terrorist? These things aren't mutually exclusive.

Danny Crichton:

To what degree? I mean, this is a good point of what the media chooses to cover and what gets additional propaganda value versus most. And to me, a lot of it is surprise. It's spectacle. It's something that is shocking. Oftentimes, [inaudible 00:35:06], and we think of the aircraft we ride on and we don't think of them as weapons. And that was sort of the shock when it was 9/11. You pointed out a couple of these examples where we're very used to sort of inured to the violence in schools or the violence in a subway system. But if someone put out a black ISIS flag and killed one person in New York City in the next year, I mean, we'd be sad and we'd be shocked. But I mean, people are murdered sort of consistently in the city, thankfully, at fairly low rates. But it's true. It's not so dissimilar. Is that flag the only thing that makes a difference?

Colin Clark:

I want to focus on your comment on shock, right? Or surprise. And I used to talk about this a lot in my... I taught a class on terrorism and insurgency at Carnegie Mellon University, and we would talk about, if there's a suicide bomber at a market in Nigeria, 52 people are killed. It's on page A17 of the New York Times. Why is that? Some people would say it's racism. Other people say, "Well, we expect bad things to happen in that part of the world. There's no surprise or shock there." But if a police officer is stabbed in Paris, I'm going to be on CNN that night talking about it, if it's an ISIS inspired attack.

So why is one person being stabbed leading the news, but 52 people dying at a suicide, right? They're both terrorism, arguably, both inspired by the same group, but one gets significantly more coverage versus the other. And we can speculate all day about that, but I think it's the shock value, right? We don't expect those types of things to happen in the United States or Europe, and we expect bad things, rightly or wrongly to happen in the Global South, in war torn conflict zones.

Danny Crichton:

Let me pivot to the final question. So you mentioned you're working on this book on the Wagner Group. We've covered a little bit over the last couple of years, publishing it later this year. Prigozhin, crazy guy, smart guy, most brilliant businessman in the last 30 years. How do you sort of construct-

Colin Clark:

All the above.

Danny Crichton:

I know. When you think about all the profiles, obviously, a lot coming out. I'm sure you've done a lot of work. To me, it's like one of the most fascinating up to and including the final moments of his life of sort of backing off from this sort of random attack against his mentor for multiple decades, eventually dying in the plane, exploding a couple of weeks later. How do you put that whole story together? How do you even get a sense of grounding on a story that's almost half apocryphal, but you know all of it is true, but maybe none of it? How do you construct that narrative?

Laurence Pevsner:

And was he a good cook or not?

Danny Crichton:

Yeah. Was the food good?

Colin Clark:

I stayed away from the plutonium salad.

Danny Crichton:

About his salad bar terrorism, to your point.

Colin Clark:

That's right.

Danny Crichton:

There you go.

Colin Clark:

That's a good one. I think he was maybe all of the above. When I think of Prigozhin and I think back to those videotape rants that he would send out against Gerasimov and Shoigu and all these guys in the Russian military or Ministry of Defense that he had a beef with, one, he always went to great lengths to avoid criticizing Putin directly, which is a good way to stay alive. Russia is known for having really drafty windows. You don't want to accidentally fall out of one after you've gone after Putin. I think he had huge balls. Am I allowed to say that?

Danny Crichton:

Of course, yes.

Colin Clark:

I mean, massive balls, right? This guy was leading a march of mutiny against Vladimir Putin. There's only one way that ends. I think he was even surprised at his own success, right? I was joking with my friend. I was like, "In the beginning, it felt a little bit like Will Ferrell in Old School." He's like, "Come on, we're going streaking. Come on, everybody. Come on, are you behind me?" And everyone's like, "No, we're not marching on Moscow, buddy." I think they were surprised at the reception they got among ordinary Russians that were cheering them on, right? Ukraine wasn't going well. People were dying. Russia's mired in high levels of corruption and secrecy. And who was going and being sent to fight in this. It was the downtrodden in Russian society. So the ordinary people, the Russian Street were celebrating this pushback, this middle finger. It's a Putin.

But again, you don't insult Putin and live to tell about it. He killed them one month to the day on a plane with Dmitry Utkin, who was the Spetsnaz guy that was one of the leading founders of the Wagner Group. And then the Kremlin reasserted control over this group. It's now been rebranded as Africa Corps. And I guarantee you, they're never going to let it get too big or too autonomous again, right? It's a very useful Swiss Army Knife of an actor for the Russian State, because they can do things that regular flagged Russian military can't get away with. And they're also heavily involved in helping Moscow evade sanctions with all sorts of extraction and smuggling and various types of... They have their fingers in oil and gold and all of these other things.

So Prigozhin, I've spent a lot of time talking about him, studying him, thinking about, what did he accomplish? If he didn't challenge Putin, would he still be leading this group today? Really a fascinating figure. And I think that we're going to see another Prigozhin type warlord emerge maybe from the Russian set, maybe from what other countries start using PMCs. I think the Chinese are very interested in this model, but they also see the downsides, right? They're not going to let it get that big, that autonomous. Turkey's using PMCs now. And I would guess that we're going to see more American PMCs active under the Trump administration because as we draw down, if we pull troops from Syria, if we draw down from Somalia, I would imagine there's going to be some backfill there, and it's going to be some type of PMC, maybe Erik Prince's group, maybe a different one.

Danny Crichton:

Well, I'm looking forward to reading the book later this year. But, Colin Clark, thank you so much for joining us.

Colin Clark:

Thank you for having me.

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