Presidential candidates tapped into the fear following the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, saying that police should patrol Muslim neighborhoods and that U.S. officials should bring back torture to prevent a similar attack on American soil.
“This is going to happen in the United States,” Trump said during a CBS News interview.
Members of Congress urged constituents to be more aware of their security in the wake of the attacks as well. Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said people in the U.S. should be “on alert for possible copy-cat attackers who activate in the wake of these bombings.”
But one analyst says an attack on America isn’t necessarily coming because of actions the U.S. has taken since Sept. 11 to keep Americans safe.
“Is the U.S. next? Not necessarily,” said Michael Geary, an assistant professor of EU studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and global fellow at the Wilson Center. “Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has taken active measures, in a far more coordinated way, than many EU countries at identifying and reducing terror risks.”
Attacking America could be the “prize jewel” for Islamic terrorists, said Robin Simcox, a Margaret Thatcher fellow on European terrorism at the Heritage Foundation. But it’s also one of the more difficult targets.
“There’s no doubt it has the desire to do so, but at the moment the capacity to do so in Europe is much more advanced than it is in the states,” Simcox said.
Multiple explosions in Brussels at the airport and a metro station by the European Union left at least 30 people dead and hundreds injured, including eight Americans.
It’s still unclear who specifically carried out the attack, though the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
Europe has seen a rise in foreign fighters leaving Western countries to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, then returning home to carry out attacks. It’s not yet clear if that’s what happened with those who conducted Tuesday’s incidents.
While the return of these foreign fighters poses a greater risk for European security, Geary said America is more at risk from “homegrown extremists,” Americans who may never travel to Iraq or Syria but are still influenced by the teachings of the Islamic State to conduct attacks in the U.S.
The Islamic State’s use of social media also makes it easier for American citizens to join and act on behalf of the terrorist group, Simcox said. Whereas people used to have to travel to Afghanistan to pledge allegiance in person to Osama bin Laden, people can now become affiliated with the Islamic State online.
“Now all you need is a gun and a Twitter account and you can be acting on behalf of ISIS. Both of those things are very easy to acquire,” he said.
That was the case with the two shooters in San Bernardino, Calif., who killed 14 people in December.
Geary said these types of attacks are more difficult to prevent, but that the U.S. has proven reasonably effective at stopping them.
“It is acts like these that are difficult to prevent, but the evidence would suggest that the US authorities are far more prepared than many of their European counterparts in the domestic flight against ISIS. The attacks in Brussels today could have been prevented had the Belgian authorities been more proactive in tackling extremism on its doorstep,” he said.
Simcox said Belgian investments in counterterrorism “dwarf” those made by the U.S. since 9/11, and that those additional resources should provide some comfort. But he stressed that it’s unrealistic to think that even the best counterterrorism structure can stop every possible attack. Law enforcement, he said, must get it right every time while terrorists must get lucky only once to cause devastation.
“It’s a numbers game really. The cliche is true,” he said. “America is better placed to be able to prevent an attack like the one that took place today [but]…it’s unrealistic to expect a thing to never happen because the amount of people who aspire to carry out this kind of attack is large enough that at some point down the line one of these ISIS inspired attacks will probably get through.”
