Hey! Although it is a common belief that terrorism is more prevalent now than ever before, that doesn't quite hold true. I'm going to use figures from within the 20-year rule but, as they are concrete numbers and from a reputable database, I hope they should be allowed.

Looking at the Global Terrorism Database we can find that between 1970 and 1989 (the earliest the database goes and the fall of the Berlin Wall) there were 15,543 successful or attempted terrorist attacks in North America, Western Europe, and the Middle-East/North Africa. Even if we exclude the Middle-East/North Africa, all ambiguous cases that may not have been terrorism, and all unsuccessful attacks, there were still 8,962 successful attacks in Western Europe and North America in that 19-year span.

If we apply these same criteria to the post-9/11 span of time from 2002 until 2015, we find that there have been only 1,730 successful terror attacks in Western Europe and North America. Including the Middle-East back into the mix (but still only accounting for successful attacks) that number rises to 25,044 attacks. If you look at the year-to-year chart, you can see that there was a large spike in 2011. Additionally, many of these attacks were in a single country. 15,469 of the attacks from 2002 - 2015, or 61%, were in Iraq. Terror within Western Europe and North America can clearly be seen to have dropped.

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Looking at the time-period of the cold war, several events stand out. A major one of these, and one often overlooked by Westerners believing that religious-political troubles are unique to the Middle-East, is The Troubles in Northern Ireland. During this roughly 30-year span, over 3,500 were killed and near 50,000 wounded.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, it was left-wing terror, including groups such as The Red Brigades in Italy and The Red Army Faction in Germany, that posed the greatest threat to Western Europe and Northern America. This article from the Atlantic talks some about left-wing terror and the threat that it posed. For example, it states that in the 1950s and 1960s, there were on average 5 aircraft hijacked per year. This left-wing terrorism began to steeply fall off after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of much of its funding.

It was only in the 1990s that right-wing terror, and later Islamic terror, would rise to the forefront. Many of these Islamic terrorists took their cues from Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer thrown in prison in the 1950s and executed in 1966. Along with the Palestinian founder of al-Qaeda, Abdullah Youssef Azzam, Qutb is often considered the Father of Modern Jihad. One of the largest impetuses for Islamic terrorism came with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in which radicals from across the Muslim world flocked to the country to defend it against invaders. Notable among these foreign-fighters was the Muhajireen of Osama Bin Laden, who would later co-found al-Qaeda with Azzam. As the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan can clearly be linked to the Cold War and a desire to prop up friendly Communist governments, one could even argue the case that the Cold War led to the situations that prompted much of the terror in the world today.

So did the Cold War put terrorism in check? I would argue that it did not. Domestic terrorism within the West was much more common than it is today, with many of the groups being linked to the Communist cause. Additionally, it was the Cold-War prompted invasion of Afghanistan that set off the next large wave of terror, Islamic terrorism, that many view as the face of terrorism in the modern day. Terrorism has always existed and, so long as it is an effective form of pursuing political/religious/economic goals, it always will. Terrorism has largely changed shape since the Cold War but we should not assume that means it was not present then. Indeed, as the numbers from the Global Terrorism Database show, we are much less likely to be the victims of terrorist attacks now than 40 years ago.