if there's a national security threat from jihadism in the us, is it to any degree contained, and if not, where is it coming from?
1. since 9/11, deadly attacks in the us have almost all been lone wolves (i include couples and family members in the lone wolf category).
2. this probably suggests one of a couple of things; jihadis aren't mounting organised attacks; and/or the us is successfully combatting them. the approach to combatting attacks includes disrupting jihadi organisational architectures and networks, as well as intelligence, police work, border security etc.
3. lone wolf attacks are sporadic and vary in deadliness. i am not aware of an increase in their frequency. if this is true, the threat isn't increasing even if once in a while a lone wolf like the one in orlando kills many victims. lone wolves by their nature mount smaller scale attacks. these are individually more-or-less comparable in scale to active shootings.
4. i doubt that reducing lone wolf attacks to zero is an achievable goal any more than reducing active shootings to zero is possible - without imposing major constraints on freedom. in this sense, accepting occasional lone wolf attacks is the price of liberty.
5. so who are the jihadi lone wolves operating in the usa? well, it looks like they are mostly people who have grown up in the usa, mostly male, mostly late-teen-to-early-twenties, mostly radicalised online.
6. while i don't suggest that enhanced screening at the border will not catch additional bad apples, and the mere fact of delaying applications may disrupt plots, it looks to me as if the current us administration is focussed on the wrong target. the least constrained risk is youthful, home-grown, moslem men.
7. to the extent that trump might have been concerned by the increased immigration from islamic countries arranged by obama, this might have been easily countered by lowering the volume under trump.
8. otherwise, i doubt there's any way to reduce jihadi terrorism to zero. the best thing to do is probably to avoid giving gratuitous cause for outrage while outfits like isis exist (while not backing off on our freedoms). to prepare for attacks on a location by location basis. and to try to limit the damage whenever an event begins.
the lucky thing for the us is that it has a relatively small population of moslem immigrants. this means that the concentration of moslems doesn't reach a critical mass in which networks of angry islamists emerge in isolation from the society they inhabit. this is not true for europe which has a far, far, larger problem. 3m or so moslems live in the us. 20-25m live in the eu.
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