The United States has been playing a major role in the world for the past 60 to 80 years. However, the role they have taken on has impacted the US for the better, and for the worse. The views many countries today have about the United States, are not good ones, and that could be in correlation with our military presence almost everywhere. This is one of main reasons why I think that the threat to the United States national security from international terrorism has increased immensely. On page 132 of our book, Controversies in Globalization, terrorist attacks are reported annually, and "Casualties from terrorism soared after the mid-1990s, although the majority of them resulted from sectarian violence with Iraq. The 9/11 bombings in the United States, while tragic, were only a small portion of the total terrorist attacks and casualties." Since the attacks on 9/11, terrorism has attracted a huge amount of attention in the United States, with terrorism being televised on news stations everywhere. With the attention growing around terrorism, the degree of violence has been escalating as well. Starting in the 1970s with Al Qaeda era, and moving to the IS, the means to how violence is conducted has no boundaries. Recent Islamic State movements have brought on beheadings of our own journalists, along with many more attacks.
Even with the threat being on the rise, there is some hope that the threat to national security may be reduced. The cause of this reduce could be explained from the evolution of global balance of ideologies. On page 135, the author states that the post Arab Spring environment has led to a trend that "has certainly reduced the threat of international terrorism." However, this is not the case. The author again argues on page 136, that "Arab Spring Phenomena may tend to reduce the ideological antipathy toward the United States." But if we look at recent data, the exact opposite of what they argue is true.