Transcript

How has the terrorism threat landscape evolved since 9/11, and what makes today’s challenges more complex? 

How is the counterterrorism response evolving in response to today’s rapidly shifting global landscape?  

How has Trump’s ‘America-First’ policy impacted the US’ relationship with the Five Eyes partners in the counterterrorism space?  

What can we do at a societal and community level to counter violent extremism? 

In this episode, Nick Rasmussen joins Sharryn Parker to discuss the evolving landscape of terrorism and counterterrorism, focusing on the complexities introduced by technology, the shifting priorities in national security, and the importance of community resilience. 

(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)

Nick Rasmussen

Australia has framed its objectives around a positive goal - social cohesion. We should all be in favour of an understanding of what it means to be Australian, an understanding of what it means to be a party to that social contract here inside Australia. In the United States, I don't know that we've reached that level of maturity.

National Security Podcast

You're listening to the National Security Podcast, the show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-Pacific, produced by the ANU National Security College.

Sharryn Parker

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Sharryn Parker, a Senior Policy Advisor at the National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present. Today I'm joined by Nick Rasmussen, a leading expert in the field of counterterrorism and national security with an impressive career that spans both government and multiple US administrations, culminating as the director of the National Counterterrorism Centre and having been at the forefront of shaping US counterterrorism strategy for over two decades. Welcome to the National Security Podcast.

Nick Rasmussen

It's an honour to be here. Thank you for organising this.

Sharryn Parker

Thank you very much. Your expertise has been in global threats, intelligence analysis, and counterterrorism practice. It's made you a prominent CT academic and leader. You currently contribute to national security discussions through your role as the Director for National Security and Leadership Programs at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University, which is an organization committed to empowering character-driven leaders. Nick, again, thank you for joining us today. Can I start by asking, what is your insight on how the terrorism landscape is shifting and what emerging threats we should be mindful of? Can I ask you to share a pivotal moment from your professional tenure that shapes your approach to counterterrorism circa 2025?

Nick Rasmussen

Well, those are both very, very broad questions, Sharryn. But I think one of the things I think about when I try to describe the terrorism landscape that we're dealing with right now—and when I say we, I mean both the United States and Australia because I there's some significant commonalities between what you here in Australia are confronting with respect to terrorism and counterterrorism and what we're confronting at home in the United States. I tend to think of the terrorism threat landscape right now as being more diverse, complicated, complex, and challenging than at really any point since 9/11. And that is now talking about a period of time that is almost 25 years in length. And it may sound a little bit hyperbolic to say things are more complex, challenging, difficult, whatever your adjective is, than at any point in the post-9/11 period.

But I tend to think of the threat landscape that we're living with as being cumulative. We keep adding on additional new things to worry about without ever really getting rid of or crossing off of our list anything that's been on our list for the rest of those 25 years. And so every time we see someone carry out a terrorist act in the modern era and it's attached to some new ideology that perhaps we weren't familiar with or it's tied to a particular strain of extremism or violent extremism or violent extremist thought that is new to us, it just simply adds more to the plate. And yet all of that stuff that was there since 9/11 all the way back to Al-Qaeda -core Al-Qaeda centred in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan - none of that's gone away, as you well know.

Sharryn Parker

Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct. And as you address the state of the threat landscape, I think the way many people in Australia describe it is VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And there seems to be no end state to that, no return to simplicity. So how has the nature of terrorism evolved since the early 2000s then?

Nick Rasmussen

It seems kind of self-evident to say this, but I think technology has served as a significant catalyst or accelerant to the spread of terrorism-related thought. Certainly, modern technology has enabled terrorist organizations to spread messages in ways that were inconceivable to them 20 years ago. The advances in modern technology, I think, have made the asymmetric nature of terrorism even more obvious than it has ever been. Even single individuals sitting alone, can become the purveyors of an ideology, a world narrative that grabs and motivates and animates people all over the planet, and ultimately could lead them to take violent action in the name of that narrative. And that is something that I don't know that we envisioned we would have to deal with at the time we were thinking about 9/11 25 years ago when it was a very different enterprise.

Sharryn Parker

So I guess, 25 years ago 9/11 was a turning point, I think, for the world. But terrorism existed before that time. Is it just the technology that's increased that ramp up? Or is there something else there that we need to be concerned about?

 

Nick Rasmussen

What 9/11 did to the American psyche, I would argue, is it suggested that events overseas cannot be limited to the overseas domain. That our homeland, which had certainly experienced terrorism before, you made that point and you're 100 percent right. But I think we thought of conflict around the world as being offshore, as not necessarily touching on our own homeland security in any meaningful way. And of course, that was exactly what was taken away from us at the time of 9/11. We knew that events around the world very much could put Americans living inside the United States in harm's way. And I think that has forever altered the way we think about terrorism as a tactic and as a national security problem. But you're absolutely correct. 9/11 was not the first time we were confronting global terrorism. It was just the first time we were confronting global terrorism at that scale, at that level of catastrophic impact, and in a way that caused every American to sit up and take notice.

Sharryn Parker

So, how then does the industry of terrorism move forward? And I should probably point out here the industry of counterterrorism move forward. You know, we're in a time now where - post-Afghanistan certainly – America and the world is looking at global crisis in a very different way. People coming out of the last 20 years have focused specifically on the terrorism piece and the control that the hegemon of America actually has had over that. Things are changing. So how do we weave the idea of terrorism and then its counter-terrorism response into that world?

Nick Rasmussen

So I think for most of the post-9/11 era, certainly in the United States system, our national security system, terrorism sat at the top of a pyramid of national security issues. And I would say that that gave those of us involved in terrorism and counterterrorism-related work first claim on resource as it was needed to deal with our terrorism problems around the world. We organized around the counterterrorism set of missions, we resourced around that. And as I said, first claim was really ours in terms of seeking our fair share of resources to deal with whatever terrorism challenges we were facing around the world. I'd argue that's not the case at present. And I'm not – I want to be clear – I'm not lamenting that fact. I'm not somehow longing for the days when counterterrorism and terrorism sat alone at the top of a hierarchy of priorities.

It's just simply a reality now that national security and the national security space is a crowded environment. If you look across our national interests in the United States and certainly Australia's national interests, there are other significant challenges to national security that occupy the time, attention, and energy of senior leaders and that also have a fair claim on the fair share of resources to deal with those challenges. The challenge posed to international security by states such as Russia and Iran certainly rate near the top of the list of issues of concern in the United States: the Indo-Pacific set of challenges tied to Chinese activity, not only in the region but across the region; the issues of global pandemic, the issues of non-proliferation, the issues of climate change. All of these are issues that sit, I would argue, at the top alongside terrorism and counter-terrorism, at the top of a pyramid of priority and hierarchy in national security work. And what that means is our terrorism community, our counter-terrorism community rather, is for the first time not as fully resourced as it might wish it were. And that has implications.

Sharryn Parker

So you were just describing a hierarchy, but you also then lifted a number of different issues up into that top level of hierarchical focus. To my mind, that's no longer a hierarchy of resourcing. It's now a block of things that must be addressed. If you look at it from that perspective, I guess what keeps you up at night more, state backed terrorism, ISIS, Al-Qaeda remnants, domestic violent extremism. As policymakers in Australia and in America start to differentiate those priorities in that enormous block of responsibilities, what's more important?

Nick Rasmussen

I hesitate to answer the question, what's more important? But what does create concern for me is lack of visibility or lack of insight. As the United States has withdrawn from significant overseas military commitments around the world principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did so knowing that we were going to accept a trade-off. That in return, we would certainly free up resources and limit the risk to the men and women who serve in harm's way in those theatres. We would limit that risk by limiting our footprint, but we would also limit our ability to gain insight and have insight, current insight, of the sort that would allow us to anticipate and understand terrorism threats before they manifest themselves. So again, it may sound as if I'm offering a value judgment. We should still be there or we should still be forward deployed in the kinds of significant numbers we were at earlier stages in our post 9/11 history. I'm not arguing that at all. I'm simply arguing that it has created a condition in which we will have less ability to forecast and predict what may be coming at us from a terrorism perspective because we simply aren't collecting the same volume and quality of intelligence that we were in earlier times.

Sharryn Parker

So we're now talking about blind spots. Is the community, the counter-terrorism community, alerting policymakers, decision makers to this idea of risk as blind spot?

Nick Rasmussen

It’s less the case that we use the terminology blind spot, but more the case, more often the case that we use exactly the other phrase that you used there, Sharyn, which is acceptance of risk. I think as intelligence professionals or as counter-terrorism professionals, what we owe our colleagues in government and certainly the American people, and I would argue Australian officials owe it to the Australian people as well, is honesty. So that if we are less able to forecast, if we are less in a position to fully understand the full range of terrorist threats that might be headed our way, that we explain that to policymakers, to politicians, so that they understand that, and so that they can choose or not choose to accept that risk. Can that be done in a way that is crisp and rigorous and appropriately precise all the time? I don't believe so. But I think as analysts, and I'm not an intelligence analyst by trade, I ran a large intelligence organization, often ended up speaking on behalf of talented analysts who worked under me and with me. And what we owed our policy customers was full honesty and transparency about what we knew, what we didn't know, what we couldn't know, and where we were accepting risk and where we were asking them to accept risk with us.

Sharryn Parker

So I'd really like to pull the thread on, the running of the agency and working with those analysts. I like the term honesty in the delivery of the analysis. I think, you if you were still there, you would have CT analysts talking about their work and asking the question, what are we missing? Do you see that there was a pattern of behaviour or any insight from them that still leads to 2025? Is there an identification of some of the things that we are missing because of the noise that is occurring in the broader analytical space?

Nick Rasmussen

I think I'll take it back to where I was a few minutes ago in talking about our physical presence around the world. I think it's widely documented by watchers of terrorism that Africa is an extraordinarily active theatre for both Al-Qaeda affiliated groups, ISIS affiliated groups, and then groups that are not affiliated with either of those global terrorist organizations but still very much could be defined as terrorist organizations. It's a simple truth that we are not physically present in Africa in the kind of way that would allow us to be as fully understanding of that threat as we would need to be to be able to do something about it. Does that mean… so what are we likely to miss? We're likely to miss the kind of growing capability that a terrorist organization can engage in that would allow it to over time create what we used to call an external operations capability. The ability to not only act locally, to not only threaten personnel - Western targets in a particular capital in Africa - but also to have the capacity to organize and deploy and plan and operate in an overseas environment and ultimately even in a homeland environment, taking something all the way to the United States homeland.

And again, when you are not in a position to be on the ground collecting intelligence in real time against those groups that might maintain that ambition but not yet have achieved that capability, that's something you might miss. I guess the last thing I would say on that point is this isn't the first time we've had to deal with this reality and the typical US response has been to try to rely on partners. Partners either locally - friendly governments with whom we could work who would help us understand the landscape in a particularly difficult part of the world - but also partners in our Five Eyes set of relationships or some of our other close partners around the world who would have their own comparative advantage in understanding what's going on in a particular region of the world. And I think all of us are feeling the resource pinch. And so I think together we are accepting more risk in these difficult locations than we have in the past.

Sharryn Parker

So you talk about the resource pinch, but at the same time, you've mentioned Africa. Is this because you see Africa as a potential problem in the future?

Nick Rasmussen

I think yes, because it is the part of the world where I believe there is the most active expansion, spread, or growth of what you might call the global terrorist enterprise, if there is such a thing. Tied to either Al-Qaeda or ISIS, or groups that are, if not formally affiliated with those organizations, certainly sympathetic and aligned with them. So having seen report after report after report of different parts of the African continent where that phenomenon is taking place, we have to assume that over time that will result in some increased capability for those groups to draw upon when they wish to consider attacks against Western interests, either locally or potentially globally.

Sharryn Parker

So what is it then that they want?

Nick Rasmussen

I don't think there's a single answer to that question. I think that's one of the things that we may perhaps be losing insight into with our inability to collect intelligence in the same way that we did before. Ideally, if you're looking at a terrorist organization, you want to be able to do a number of things. You want to understand what is their strategy? What are they trying to achieve? Are they trying to drive a Western presence out of their location? Are they trying to create a new form of governance in the state that they're located in? Are they simply trying to put a marker on the wall on behalf of a group like ISIS or Al-Qaeda that suggests they are active and successful in this location? So you want to understand the strategy, but at the same time you also need to understand at a very tactical level what threats exist at this moment in time. Where are we at risk? What vulnerabilities do we have? So you have, in a sense, a requirement to understand both the strategic and the tactical when you're dealing with terrorist organizations, and yet when in a condition of declining resource, I would argue that we're simply not putting the effort in to gain that kind of fidelity that we might need.

Sharryn Parker

So what does it take then to deliver that from an American perspective?

Nick Rasmussen

It takes a wider and broader set of partnerships and partner relationships around the world that we can draw on to fill in the gaps that we cannot fill ourselves. It has always been the case that we've looked to some of our closest partners for insight into their areas of particular comparative advantage. It's no secret, for example, that in all the work that Australia and the United States and our other Five Eyes partners have done to deal with the terrorism challenges in Southeast Asia, we've looked to the Australians because you have true comparative advantage in that space. It's your people from the police, from your intelligence services, your diplomats, who are on the ground in greater numbers than Americans, in greater numbers than other partners. And so it's always been from my perspective comforting, a source of great comfort, to know that we could turn to our Australian friends for a better picture, a more complete picture in this part of the world than we might be able to have all on our own.

That plays out in return in other theatres around the world. I know the United States is certainly more present in Iraq and Syria than our Australian friends. And that allows us to be able to share with partners here a sense of what the threat picture is in that part of the world and how it might impact Australian interests, either in the region or ultimately even here inside Australia. So I think expanding that network of partnerships and relationships is one way of dealing with the resource challenge that I've highlighted. Now, working with Five Eyes partners is the easy stuff. We share values. We share a common commitment to the rule of law. We share so much that I can't even articulate how much we share. But the other kinds of partners that I'm talking about are often states or even subnational groups where the degree of comfort in terms of how much we actually have in common with that partner, the degree of comfort is not that high. And so we are in a sense relying on partners with whom we do not have a strong and deep track record of shared anything for that matter.

Sharryn Parker

I like the term the degree of comfort. And I guess this takes us to this idea of America - the hegemon, and whether dealing with America across the theme of counterterrorism, whether America can actually be trusted to fulfill its obligations, but also the promises it makes not just bilaterally, but multilaterally. And let's first consider that from a five eyes perspective, but I'd also like to understand what you think from outside the five eyes perspective.

Nick Rasmussen

I think it's fair to say that a shift in the direction of what the Trump administration refers to as an America first foreign policy, an America first foreign policy does not have to be one that leaves our partners not able to rely on the United States. America can pursue its interests around the world in my view without sacrificing the interests of its closest partners. During much of the first Trump administration when the rhetoric around foreign policy and national security was so remarkably different from what was the rhetoric employed during the Obama administration, I took great comfort from the fact that, despite those rhetorical changes, the actual day-to-day working relationships that were ongoing at the practitioner level in our military services, our intelligence services, our law enforcement services, our diplomats, all of those relationships, from my perspective, still very much carried on business as usual.

And that was a great source of comfort to me because even though the rhetoric was quite different, I felt like the strategic underpinnings of our alliance relationships were untouched and relatively unaffected. I'm less confident about that in the current environment, in part because the rhetoric is stronger than it was several years ago during President Trump's first administration. The willingness to actually engage in some form of conflict with some of our closest partners using, for example, trade policy as a weaponized lever against allies and partners, suggests to me that we cannot take for granted that security ties will always be insulated from other parts of the relationship that may grow more difficult.

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Sharryn Parker

I guess a lot of it is just about putting those conversations on the table and having them in a transparent way. I think that is part of the conversation that is occurring here. And although we don't necessarily like the conversation, it makes Australians feel very uncomfortable. You know, we are a sceptical bunch at best, and that question is asked behind closed doors and individually as, you know, our own society. We're well aware in Southeast Asia and across the world as a middle power, Australia can bring certain things to the table, but not everything. And I think this is where America has been leaned on since World War II certainly, by many nations - not just within the Five Eyes community. We can turn to even Europe now when we talk about some of the issues of counter-terrorism and the practices that are being put into play in Europe and across NATO. How is America able to respond but also answer the questions that are being asked domestically in America?

Nick Rasmussen

I think if there's any silver lining to the difficult patch in alliance relationships that we may be experiencing at present since the new administration took office in January - if there's any silver lining in that landscape, from my perspective, it comes from the fact that the friction in the relationships that has emerged has led almost all of our partners, including Australia, I suspect, to look inward and say what more could and should we be doing to take care of our own security. And ultimately, I think that is a good thing. We've seen this play out in the context of debates over what levels of defence spending NATO partners should be pursuing. And you can agree or disagree with President Trump's tactics and the way he's talked about those issues and the way he has been quite vocal in even attacking certain European partners, certain NATO partners. But there's no question but that the NATO allies almost to a country are stepping up their game and bringing more resources into the fight. And again, we may not like how we got there, but I would argue that that is probably a direction in which the alliance needed to move and has needed to move for some time. And so again, I will focus on the positive aspects of that, a silver lining as it were.

Here in the Pacific, in the Indo-Pacific, I think we've always had a mature, open and transparent dialogue about the different roles that the United States wants and expects partners to play. So I don't see that as having been shaken or altered or thrown off kilter by some of the friction we've seen with some of our other alliance relationships. Would I like to see some stability and calm around our political relationships to create more harmony and leave us less questioning of these national security, less questioning of whether the underpinnings of our national security relationships are at risk? Yes, I would. I think we'd all feel better if that were the case. But I still feel like when push comes to shove, our leaders can sit down across the table from each other and rely on each other to play the role that we need each other to provide.

Sharryn Parker

Yeah, I think it might be playing out in what we would consider an unsophisticated way, but that the idea of friction between friendly nations is not necessarily a bad thing. Again, it goes back to that transparency piece that the democracies around the world actually do. Having those conversations are sometimes hard and hurtful, and there might be some metaphorical blood on the table. But they're proving to be strengthening actions.

Nick Rasmussen

I think so, and I think if nothing else, certainly in the United States, the voting public has a better and deeper understanding of these national security issues than they might otherwise have had if they had not been raised as they have been in the domestic political context as well. It's interesting that even in the seven or eight months since the Trump administration took office, support for greater US levels of assistance and support to Ukraine, for example, have gone up, even though that's not necessarily the direction that the president has wanted to move in. I think you have more Americans paying more attention to what is happening with Russia, what is happening with Ukraine, and reaching their own conclusion that it is in the American interest to do more to blunt Russian aggression by doing more to support Ukraine. So again, trying to focus on the positive, I think it’s probably on balance a good thing that the domestic political debate has focused on national security because that's probably a better place to be than if politicians and leaders are making decisions about national security without having the backing of the majority of the voters who support them.

Sharryn Parker

So if we can turn then to that domestic piece, terrorism in its circa 2001 definition was very much of the international. Now, terrorism and violent extremism is merging domestically in America. What's your perspective on how the counterterrorism community can respond to that?

Nick Rasmussen

It goes back to something we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, the fact that the different kinds of threats that we face are a more diverse, complex, challenging, and ultimately difficult set of threats than we faced at the time of the immediate post-911 era. And it seems silly to kind of lament and look back with a little bit of nostalgia on that immediate post-911 period. But it was true that our most significant at threat at that particular moment was tied to an organized, hierarchically structured terrorist organization that we could map pretty successfully and target pretty successfully and understand by devoting the right amount of effort and resource to the problem. We could understand and ultimately look to dismantle that capability that Al-Qaeda directed at the US homeland. I would argue now we are in a much more challenging space from an intelligence and law enforcement perspective.

If we were to wake up tomorrow morning, or I were to wake up tomorrow morning here in Australia and read in the news about a terrorist attack that had taken place in the overnight hours, I could probably say to myself there are three or four or five different kinds of attack that might have been. It might have been someone who was motivated or animated by a global jihadist ideology like that of ISIS or Al-Qaeda. It might be someone who was motivated or animated by someone who was driven by racial or ethnic hatred or bias - someone who is engaged in an attack against a particular community in the United States, whether it's the African American community, the Jewish American community, the Muslim American community, the LGBTQ community in United States, could be any. An attack on any given day could have been aimed at any of a number of different communities in the United States, and the perpetrator might have any of a wide range of different ideologies that were driving them to take the horrific action that they took. And just the fact that we can't know which one was the most likely the night when the attack was first learned about should suggest how much we are asking of our law enforcement and intelligence personnel right now.

I think back to New Orleans on January 1 of this year when we all awoke after New Year's Eve celebrations to learn that there had been an attack overnight in New Orleans. And again, my first thought, still sitting in government at the time, was that this was likely someone who was acting on behalf of some racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist grievance or agenda. Well, it turned out not to be that at all. It actually was an individual who was very much attached to the ideology and worldview of the Islamic State, ISIS. In some ways, it was an attack that seemed reminiscent of what we might have experienced here in the United States in 2014, 15, 16, 17. And yet here we were in 2025 facing that. How does your law enforcement and intelligence community get across that when most of these individuals are acting on their own without engaging in a structured relationship with either a terrorist organization or even a set of fellow travellers ideologically? It's asking a lot of our authorities to anticipate and prevent such acts of terror.

Sharryn Parker

So turning and facing some of those problems has been a very real issue for Australia most recently. We lost two Victorian police officers in the last few weeks as they went to deal with an alleged sovereign citizen. That kind of issue where we have our domestic police forces actually killed in the line of their duties - very shocking to Australia. So we absolutely understand it. I guess the question now, of course, is going to be raised as to where we should be applying some of that intelligence effort. And now that we're post-Afghanistan, there is a withdrawal of the American policies and politics into the domestic space. President Trump and his administration are turning to face and answer the questions that are being asked. Might that be reflected in Australia and certainly across the world within the Five Eyes community, even outside it?

Nick Rasmussen

I'm going to pivot a little off your question, Sharryn, because I actually don't think that pouring more money or resource right now into the intelligence part of the equation is actually where we are likely to realize the greatest benefit to our security. And I would certainly not want to be too prescriptive in talking about how Australia manages its terrorism challenges here in Australia. But I suspect there are commonalities. But if I had the extra dollar, or the extra million dollars in the American context right now, I wouldn't be putting it towards intelligence. I would be trying to bolster architecture of what I would call prevention. Upstream activity that looks to identify individuals who might ultimately be vulnerable to radicalization and who might ultimately end up pursuing a path to becoming someone who engages in violence on behalf of an ideological cause. That is not the same as gathering intelligence, breaking up a cell, listening to people's conversations, intercepting their emails. This is work that is done by non-national security professionals every bit as much as it's done by terrorism experts and terrorism practitioners. In the United States, I think we've learned that our best chance to get ahead of our terrorism problem in the homeland context is to identify those individuals in advance who might be vulnerable to that particular outcome and to try to find a way to change that outcome, to divert the individual from that path using other tools, non-traditional national security tools. That is an easier, more productive pathway from my perspective than simply trying to use our traditional law enforcement tools to tackle this particular form of the terrorism problem.

What I mean by that is you often hear law enforcement in both Australia and the United States say we can't arrest our way out of this problem. And I think that's right. We can't simply wait for the individuals who ultimately might carry out these horrific acts to carry them out and then arrest them, prosecute them, and hope that that will somehow prevent the next one of these attacks from happening. We would do far better in my estimation if we were to engage in more effective prevention work. Here in Australia, you use the term countering violent extremism to describe that basket of work. And a lot of really effective countering violent extremism work takes place at both Commonwealth and state level here in Australia. We use slightly different terminology in United States, in part because the terminology around CVE, countering violent extremism, became somewhat baggage-laden in the period after 9/11 when CVE work was seen somehow as being targeted or aimed at our Muslim community. If you describe these kinds of activities through a prevention lens, then you're reframing the objective around creating healthy safe communities rather than trying to find the bad guys in a particular community.

Sharryn Parker

So for decades we've squeezed those departments of funding and humans and support, but this really now comes back to the social contract that government in both of our nations has got with its communities. The National Security College is doing work on social cohesion as a point and a very important point of national security. I think Initially, a lot of people are actually very confused as to how social cohesion and local communities actually connect with national security. But what you've just described there is that very link.

Nick Rasmussen

And it's one of the things I admire about the Australian approach to these challenging issues is that you may not have succeeded in reaching the end state that you're seeking, but at least Australia has framed its objectives around a positive goal - social cohesion. We should all be in favour of social cohesion, an understanding of what it means to be Australian, an understanding of, as you say, what It means to be a party to that social contract here inside Australia. In the United States, I don't know that we've reached that level of maturity in the way we think and talk about our efforts in the counterterrorism space. It's still very much, I think, viewed through the lens of law enforcement and intelligence work trying to identify who the bad actors might be so that we can use the tools and authorities that law enforcement and intelligence professionals have in order to prevent that from happening. I'd like to broaden the definition or broaden the approach in the United States so that we are engaged in an effort to create healthier, safer, more resilient communities in which terrorism can't thrive, where it's much more difficult for extremist ideas to take root among the population.

That to me seems like a more positive way to frame the set of objectives. It should create a climate in which all communities regardless of what past relationship they might have dealing with central government, it should be the kind of objective around which all communities can rally and organize. And I don't know that we've reached that place in the United States yet. And I will get a little bit on the policy soapbox for a minute here. And this is one area of government work, the prevention space, where unfortunately I believe the new administration has taken steps backward rather than steps forward. Even the modest levels of work or of investment and of resourcing that we were doing with respect to prevention in our system in Washington, some of those programs have been eliminated or frozen or resources reallocated to other purposes. And I think that's a tragedy because I think it's exactly those resources that are the ones that should be growing and we should be looking to scale up our prevention capacity and capability, not shrinking it.

Sharryn Parker

So the idea of prevention is such a great one. Australia is certainly taking steps to try and understand what that prevention landscape might look like. You've just highlighted that America is a little bit different at the moment in that it's in a process of cancelling a number of policies and departments, et cetera, that might support this. How does America come back from that?

Nick Rasmussen

I think some of this work can migrate from government to outside government. You can have the academic world which can produce the kind of research, the evidence-based analysis that allows us to understand what works and what doesn't work, what might work in the prevention space. You can certainly look to the NGO, non-governmental organization world as another place that can help grow and expand the kind of capability that we have as a nation in the United States to engage in effective prevention work. I would argue that is probably not optimal because that ensures that we're relying on philanthropic dollars, that we're having to look to raise new money outside of government budgets to support this work. And I think this is money that's worthy and deserving of government support. I'd like to think that the expertise that government has in this space can be nurtured and harnessed and put to good use outside government as well. And I'm hopeful that will be the case.

Sharryn Parker

And drawing some of those government dollars back into departments, do you think that will be a way ahead?

Nick Rasmussen

I right now those dollars are just being spent to pursue other priorities. It's no secret that the Trump administration has a strong focus on controlling borders. That was a promise that the Trump administration ran on and they've clearly taken steps to limit migration to the United States. And certainly I would expect that to the extent that they have the ability to direct resources to pursue their priorities, that the Trump administration would continue to increase the level of resourcing aimed at dealing with immigration and migration challenges and away from some of these other areas that we're talking about today.

Sharryn Parker

So having some of the commitment back into the social structure of America is certainly important. But I just want to pull that thread on the prevention piece just a little bit more. You were talking about some of the policies being shut down for focusing on some of the harder nails that need to be hit, like immigration. If, as you suggest, we uplift and shift our focus from say policing and intelligence services into that preventative space, then a lot of that has to do with education, with community mindedness and the money of course always lands with departments, not necessarily the philanthropic dollars. They can't do as much. There is a connection between departmental heads, the bureaucracy and then the political process of democracy at large. That doesn't appear to be working in America at the moment, how do you draw it back around to something that is balanced?

Nick Rasmussen

I don't know that I have a clean, crisp answer to that, because we're still, I would argue, dealing with and making sense of the government's divestment in this space. The idea that the federal government is stepping back from carrying the burden of leading the prevention effort across the country. Even when the government was leading on prevention. It was still doing so at a relatively modest scale. It was trying to play a catalysing role using its resources out of Washington to curate and develop best practice to fund and support the kind of evidence-based research that would allow local communities to have confidence that their prevention efforts were grounded in good social science. I would argue even when prevention was very much a priority of the previous administration, it was still being done at a very modest scale. And I say that in comparison to some of the funding that typically goes to support physical security, for example. I'll give you just one quick example. In the period after the start of the Israel-Gaza war in the October of 2023, we saw an immediate spike in threats to multiple communities across the United States - but particularly the Jewish American community and the Muslim American community both found themselves in that immediate period facing a greater volume of physical threats, not only to their communities, but to their houses of worship, their schools, any place where their communities would gather.

And so our Congress, using grant programs mostly sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security where I was working, looked to bolster the array of resources available to those communities to provide physical security for themselves. So think of locks, alarms, security guards, barriers, cameras, all of the kind of tools you would use to try to keep a place of worship or a school safe. And nobody would argue that that was money that was poorly spent. But the hundreds of millions of dollars that were allocated to support that effort were exponentially higher than the amount of money we were spending at steady state in the prevention space. And again, if you were thinking about this analytically, you might say to yourselves, shouldn't we look to balance that a little more? Shouldn't we try to provide communities with the tools to not only harden themselves with physical security measures, but also provide communities with the tools they need to engage in behavioural threat assessment - to identify that potential perpetrator long before he or she becomes a violent extremist or a terrorist. And the fact was we were doing one at one scale, one set of activities at one scale and the other set of activities at a microscopically small scale.

Sharryn Parker

So I'm intrigued by this idea of threat and feeling the threat. What then do you think is the difference between a threat and a perceived threat? You know, I think that potentially, analytically, has actually got to be part of the answer. You know, was that money spent worth it because people were feeling threatened? Had the threat really changed domestically after, you know, Gaza took off?

Nick Rasmussen

It certainly had because we had data to support the notion that threat had increased and we certainly had a volume of data to suggest that the velocity of information in the online space, that the volume and frequency that individuals and organizations and groups were being targeted with rhetoric and threatening activity, that was all in the increase. Again, the measures are fairly simple. The number of leads being pursued by law enforcement, particularly our Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. The number of times the FBI is physically in receipt of threat information that causes them to then investigate it, look at it, and decide if it's serious or not. All of those numbers had spiked and they were spiking rather dramatically. Thank God we did not find ourselves in a situation where too many of those threats resulted in actual acts of physical violence or terrorism aimed at our faith communities in the United States.

But if you look below the waterline of that data, you'll probably see a pretty dramatic increase in the next level down of such threatening activities: hate crimes, aggressions against faith communities, acts of vandalism - even if they don't turn out to be acts of terrorism. All of that suggested a heightened threat environment. And the real measure there, to your point Sharryn, is do people feel safe or do they not feel safe when engaging in the normal activities of worshipping, taking their children to school, gathering as a community. And if communities don't feel safe doing those simple things, then we have a problem, and that problem needs to be addressed.

Sharryn Parker

If I can try and lead us to this idea of leadership in this environment, which as we said right at the beginning of this interview was volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. What of the future for this idea of terrorism and counterterrorism? Where are people listening to this podcast now going to be in 10 years with this theme?

Nick Rasmussen

I think one of the things I look back on my 20 plus years of work in the counter-terrorism space with some degree of regret about is the way in which we have framed our objectives over time. I think in the early period after 9/11, we didn't think about terrorism, we said terrorism was something to be defeated. We had a GWOT, a global war on terrorism. That was our avowed strategy for dealing with what had happened to us at the time of 9/11. And yet I would argue that that's really not a realistic objective. I don't think we will ever be in a position, whether it's in the United States, in Australia, or indeed pretty much in every, any country, I don't think we'll ever be in a position where we can say that terrorism is no longer a concern. When I think about strategy to deal with our terrorism challenges, I tend to think more around words like manage, mitigate, minimize. That's what we really aim to do. We aim to manage and minimize the threats to our communities so that our communities can feel safe. When you frame things around maximalist objectives, like defeating or destroying your terrorist adversary, you set yourself up for failure because you can never or almost certainly never achieve that ultimate goal.

Sharryn Parker

Right, it's very prescriptive.

Nick Rasmussen

Exactly.

And I think we owe, I certainly feel like if I were to serve in government again in the future, I feel like I would owe my colleagues in government and I would certainly owe anybody from the public that I was serving or speaking to a greater degree of honesty. The terrorism is likely to be an enduring feature of our security landscape, but what we can do is take steps to minimize and manage that condition such that it doesn't affect the way we live our daily lives.

Sharryn Parker

There's that theme of honesty and trust with the social contract once again.

Nick Rasmussen

I think so. And I think most Americans and I suspect most Australians are not asking for perfect security. They simply want to know what they should be aware of and what measures and steps they can take to contribute to their own security in their own communities. And I certainly feel like we were doing the American people a disservice in suggesting that we could somehow, through massive application of military force and other means, eliminate terrorism as a problem. I think the track record of the last 25 years suggests that was something we were never going to achieve. I think if we reframe our objectives around something that suggests that this is a manageable condition and that if we all cooperatively engage in efforts to enhance our own security and move us in the direction of greater social cohesion, we can decrease dramatically the impact that terrorism has on daily life. That seems to be much more of an honest and authentic way to think about the problem.

Sharryn Parker

Fantastic. Can I ask you one more question before I let you go? You have had quite the career roller coaster in your time. If you were going to give a couple of minutes on leadership and capacity in the professional space around counterterrorism, what kind of advice would you give?

Nick Rasmussen

Successful leaders that I have worked with and for across my career in the national security sphere in the United States have all been individuals who were collaborative trusting and probably most importantly self-aware. They understood not only their strengths but their weaknesses, so that they could compensate for their weaknesses and look to play to their strengths. Most leaders find themselves having to lead under conditions of both daily normal life but also under highly pressurized crisis conditions. And from my perspective, the best leaders that I saw and lived with and experienced during and across my 25 plus years working in counterterrorism, were individuals who were equally at home in both of those environments and who did not find themselves operating in a different way simply because the stakes were higher or the tensions were greater. And it takes, of course, a special and unique person to be able to operate in a crisis environment and not look as if they're operating in a crisis environment. But I know I went to school on some of the very best in this space early in my career, and I've tried to model that behaviour and emulate that behaviour across my career.

Sharryn Parker

Find what right and good looks like.

Nick Rasmussen

I think that's right. I often talk about how when I'm speaking to younger national security professionals, one of my great regrets is that I did not have as much formalized leadership training as I might have gotten through other career paths. Our military, I suspect as in your military, does a much better job of creating structured opportunities for leadership and leadership training. I had a career path that had me zigging and zagging and not necessarily having those opportunities or taking advantage of those opportunities. So, to your point, Sharrynn, I've learned to emulate and model what looks good and what works and to try, just as importantly, to observe and note what doesn't work. And we've all worked around leaders that we have felt were less successful. And you can learn just as much from looking and observing a leader who is not successful as you can from looking at a true role model.

Sharryn Parker

Nick Rasmussen, I love the term observe and note. You are an analyst at heart. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Nick Rasmussen

Thank you, Sharryn. I enjoyed it.

National Security Podcast

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