After signing the Camp David Accords, the Carter administration pushed to increase American security cooperation and military presence in the Middle East. Though often seen as a response to the regional instability caused by the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hardening of US policy toward the region was also due to the Arab rejectionist threat to the Egyptian-Israeli peace process that Washington saw as a prerequisite to regional stability. This essay highlights the connections between the peace process, the collapse of Soviet-American détente, and the reorientation of US policy in the region toward the Persian Gulf.

“Deadly Detours: Why Terrorists Do Not Attack US Bridges and Tunnels,” ICCT Research Paper (December 2022).

Given the potential economic, psychological, and human consequences of such attacks, it seems terrorists would attack US bridges and tunnels regularly. After all, terrorists have attacked such critical infrastructure in other countries; why not in the United States? Shockingly, while there has been some discussion of the risk of such attacks, there is a lack of research addressing why they have not happened. Using foiled plots as case studies, I present several major explanations as to why these plots fail—and, more importantly, what deters terrorists from pursuing them. These include counter-terrorism measures, perceived structural soundness and target hardness, expense, and terrorist preference for high body counts.

“The Devil’s in the Details—or Is He? The Ethics and Politics of Terrorism Data,” Perspectives on Terrorism 15, No. 2 (April 2021): 125-141.

In the United States, domestic political violence has recently become a focal point of discourse among scholars, policy makers, journalists, politicians, and the public. This is in large part due not only to the recent increase in domestic terrorist plots and attacks by ideological extremists, but also to the recent civil unrest surrounding the COVID–19 lockdowns, Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2020 presidential election. As think tanks like New America and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have compiled data and produced reports to inform this discourse, they have made some serious missteps in their coding of data. Between omitting conflict events and miscoding the ideology of perpetrators in such a way as to obscure the violence of left-wing, Black separatist/nationalist/supremacist, and anti-White extremists, they unintentionally give the impression of political bias in their coding, thereby undermining their credibility in the eyes of a public that is increasingly skeptical of experts. This article identifies some of these data problems and discusses their implications.