PRESIDENTS JOE Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama agreed on few things, but all sought to make counterterrorism less central to U.S. foreign policy and instead focus on China, Russia, and other great powers, citing their dangerous military capabilities and desire to upend the U.S.-led international order, among other troubling actions. Indeed, with Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it seemed like the counterterrorism era had finally ended and the era of “strategic competition”—to use the words of the Biden administration’s interim national security guidance—had formally commenced.

Not quite. Confronting major powers, especially Russia, to say nothing of smaller powers like Iran, also requires counterterrorism tools, but what that means in practice differs considerably from the fight against the Islamic State (often referred to as ISIS), Al Qaeda, and similar non-state groups. Terrorism linked to great powers is usually part of broader destabilization campaigns and proxy wars, so basic counterterrorism tools like intelligence cooperation and training local security forces remain vital. The challenges, however, pose different dangers—and require different responses—from traditional forms of terrorism, and the risk of escalation is high.

TO BE sure, state-sponsored terrorism is hardly new. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its communist allies established ties to a range of terrorist groups around the world to undermine pro-U.S. regimes, sow discord in NATO countries, and otherwise further their objectives. Moscow and other communist states also used their agents to assassinate dissidents. Mao’s China, for its part, tried to spread its revolutionary message in the developing world, offering money, weapons, and training to its acolytes as was a model for insurgent action. Abimael Reinoso Guzmán, who founded the terrorist and insurgent group Sendero Luminoso in Peru, was among those who came away inspired after his visit to China in the 1960s.

In the post-Cold War era, U.S. attention focused on countries like Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, and others that backed—and in cases like Iran and Pakistan, still back—an array of terrorist groups that have attacked both the United States and its regional allies like Israel and India. At times, the sponsors’ motives are ideological: Iran supported numerous groups after the 1979 revolution as part of its plans to export its theocratic system and topple regimes it deemed ungodly. In other cases, supporting terrorists helped unpopular regimes shore up their domestic credibility. Syria worked with (but often undermined) an array of Palestinian groups in order to champion its claim to being “the beating heart of Arabism.”

The United States also frequently labels the assassination of dissidents abroad as terrorism. In addition to support for groups like Hezbollah that blew up U.S. military and diplomatic facilities, Iran also assassinated members of the former regime, Kurdish leaders in exile, and others who opposed the clerical government. The Trump administration returned North Korea to the list of official state sponsors of terrorism in part due to the regime’s killing of the Great Leader’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur in 2017. When allies do the same thing, however, the “t” word is not used, such as when the Saudi government assassinated critic Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

More often, however, states have backed terrorists for strategic reasons. Pakistan supported jihadi groups to counter India and dominate Afghanistan. Syria allowed jihadists to cross its territory and enter Iraq to weaken the U.S. position there after the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation. Even Iran’s once-ideological foreign policy has become more realpolitik, with the Islamic Republic supporting groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere to counter Saudi Arabia, weaken U.S. influence, strengthen its hold on regional states, and project power against Israel, among other strategic objectives.

For many regimes, working with terrorist groups gives them deniability, or at least its veneer. Iran’s links to Hezbollah, Pakistan’s links to Lashkar-e Taiba, and similar connections are well-known, but having the terrorist group kill and sow mayhem allows its paymaster to claim it was not involved. Even many victim states prefer this fiction to the risks inherent in confronting the sponsor, which might mean military action or even all-out war.

Today, when major powers get into the act, they often follow the logic of lesser powers, but at a greater scale and with more complications for the United States and its allies. Ideology, however, is not a factor for today’s major powers. Rather, they seek to use terrorist and other non-state groups as part of proxy warfare, trying to subvert various regional governments, increase their influence over parts of countries they see as falling within their spheres of influence, throw spanners in the works of U.S. security efforts, and undermine the West in general. At times their support is linked to domestic political disputes, such as the assassination of dissidents. Deniability, at times credible given the opacity of some relationships and at times simply a convenient diplomatic fiction, allows them greater freedom of action than if they used their own operatives.

In contrast to countries like Iran and Pakistan that rely heavily on terrorist groups to do the lifting for their foreign policies, major powers have a wide range of other options, and support for terrorism is done in tandem with other foreign policy instruments, such as cyber operations or conventional military operations, as part of a broader campaign. They can also use their diplomatic power to impede U.S. counterterrorism, as China has done by blocking the designation of Pakistani groups at the United Nations in order to hinder Indian counterterrorism.

RUSSIA’S FAR-RANGING activities offer one guide for how great powers might incorporate support for terrorism into their foreign policies. Even after the invasion of Ukraine when Washington was condemning Moscow on a regular basis, the United States did not call Russia a sponsor of terrorism, but many of its actions fit into that category. China, so far at least, seems far more focused on crushing domestic dissent than on supporting terrorists and insurgents abroad, though India claims Beijing supports separatists in northeast India. As competition with the United States heats up, however, Beijing could change, and the Russian model is useful not only for what it says about Moscow’s current approach to terrorist groups, but also how other major powers might use them.

Russia—like Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia—uses intelligence officials and other clandestine agents of the state to assassinate dissidents. At times, this attracts tremendous attention, as when Russian military intelligence agents clumsily used a nerve agent in an attempt to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who had spied for Britain and retired to the United Kingdom. In other cases, the news is buried. When Russia killed Chechen leaders abroad or assassinated Maksym Shapoval, a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer, by blowing up his car, the world mostly shrugged.

It’s easy to dismiss such actions as simply violent domestic politics or, in the case of Chechen leaders, aggressive counterterrorism. Russia, however, has also worked directly with terrorist groups designated by the United States, as it did with the Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria. Russia formally intervened in the bloody civil war in 2015, but Hezbollah’s forces had been fighting on behalf of their Syrian ally almost since the war’s inception in 2011 and proved to be among the regime’s most formidable defenders. Russian airpower, artillery, and special forces coordinated with Hezbollah to defeat opposition forces, and during the fighting, they even established joint operations centers. As the Assad regime has gained the upper hand, Russia has encouraged Hezbollah to keep its forces deployed to Syria.

In Ukraine, Russia has worked with separatist militias against the Kiev government, which it sees as moving too close to the West. In 2014, Ukrainian separatists, with Russian arms and money as well as several thousand “volunteers,” seized cities in eastern Ukraine and declared independence for the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Dutch investigators found that Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine shot down a Malaysian commercial flight passing over the country, killing all 283 people aboard. The missile belonged to the Russian 53 Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, which was based in Kursk near the Ukrainian border, and Russian officials smuggled the missile to their Ukrainian separatist allies. While Russian activities in Ukraine have received the most attention, Russia has backed other separatists in its near abroad in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria.

Even in places far from Russia where the Moscow government does not have territorial concerns, ties to militant groups give it ways to weaken the United States and other foes. In some places, as with Russia’s cooperation with Hezbollah in Syria, militants are simply forces on the ground to be exploited.

As Moscow’s support for separatist militias suggests, much of what constitutes support for terrorism is part of a proxy civil war. By acting through Ukrainian militias, Russia can maintain a degree of deniability, however implausible, that allows it to claim it is not involved in the war—in sharp contrast to its February 2022 invasion, which compelled the United States and Europe to try to punish Moscow and aid Ukraine. In addition, such non-state efforts are less costly in both human and financial terms: the Ukrainians do the bulk of the fighting and dying. Hezbollah is an impressive fighting force (it has repeatedly held its ground against Israel’s formidable military); bolstering its fighting power is a militarily logical way to defeat Syrian rebels at less cost to Moscow.

Such wars, however, regularly witness deliberate attacks on civilians, political assassinations, and other tactics that terrorist groups also use. At times this is just due to trigger-happy forces, as may have occurred with the Malaysian airline over Ukraine. In other cases, attacks on civilians are a way to demonstrate that the enemy government cannot protect its people and to force people to flee, shifting the local demographic balance in favor of Russia’s allies. Relatedly, assassinating figures like Shapoval is logical as a way to weaken the enemy of Moscow’s Ukrainian proxies and to intimidate other leading Ukrainians into cooperating, or at least not actively opposing, Russia.

Russia also uses ties to a range of minor extremist groups in the West, including some that use violence, as part of its foreign policy. Russian military intelligence has ties to the Night Wolves, a biker gang with a presence in several European countries, including Germany and Latvia, and it may have even been involved in an attempted coup in Montenegro. The nationalistic and white supremacist Russian Imperial Movement provided paramilitary training to a host of individuals on Russian soil. This included two of the neo-Nazis behind the bombing of refugee shelters and a cafe frequented by leftists (both in Sweden) who were linked to the Nordic Resistance Movement. Groups like the Russian Imperial Movement are private actors, but they could not act without Putin’s implicit blessing.

Russia’s information campaigns also try to polarize Western societies, with violence as one logical consequence. Portraying political opponents as fundamentally evil, whipping up conspiracy theories, and similar rhetoric may inspire some weak-minded individuals to take matters into their own hands. Rather obliquely, the 2019 Department of Homeland Security Strategic Framework warned that “foreign states” are trying to polarize American society and foment strife, and even to “spur vulnerable individuals or groups to commit acts of violence.”

For Russia, this sort of violence is part of a much broader campaign. Shapoval’s assassination was accompanied by a massive cyberattack that downed numerous Ukrainian critical infrastructure systems, including banking, the power grid, and airport computer networks. Russian “volunteers” added more traditional conventional military power to Russia’s operations in Ukraine, and in Syria, airpower was the most effective form of Russian intervention, greatly augmenting the power of groups like Hezbollah. Ties to terrorist groups, attacks on civilians, and other behavior that can be put in the terrorism bucket are often part of these broader efforts. Even ties to far-right groups in the West are part of broader Russian disinformation and subversion attempts that seek to polarize Western countries, and in Europe, they are backed by threats to energy supplies if European states resist Moscow’s aggression.

IN THE face of great power support for terrorism, counterterrorism tools and methods developed in the struggles against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State can help, but only so much. These tools must be adapted to address how great powers use terrorism.

Perhaps the most important counterterrorism tool is global intelligence coordination, an unglamorous but vital way of disrupting terrorist activity. Information gleaned from spies, interrogations of suspected terrorists, intercepted communications, and other sources often reveal links between cells in different countries. When the involved countries’ intelligence services cooperate, they can unearth and roll up entire networks. In addition, such cooperation may reveal the identity and locations of senior terrorist leaders, enabling them to be arrested or, if they are hiding out in remote parts of countries (as is often the case in places like Pakistan and Yemen), targeted with drones.

Intelligence cooperation is even more important, though harder and less effective, when great powers are added to this equation. Terrorists trained by state intelligence services are likely to have better operational security and otherwise are usually better able to hide their tracks: Hezbollah, for example, has a sophisticated counterintelligence capability, often uses encrypted communications, and otherwise displays a high degree of professionalism, in large part due to Iranian training. In addition, the masterminds may be safely living and plotting from the soil of the great power itself. When leaders cannot be targeted, stopping potential violence will involve more defense and less offense, identifying and picking off various local operatives but being unable to go after the core of the network—a constant, and constantly frustrating, game of cat and mouse where the mouse always has a bolt-hole.

Intelligence cooperation is also a form of currency that is useful for cultivating allies. As former U.S. counterterrorism coordinator Nathan Sales contends, counterterrorism cooperation “can cement relationships with existing and potential partners.” He also points out that counterterrorism support is important to help manage the inevitable ups and downs of bilateral relationships, serving as a reminder of the rewards of cooperation. For example, despite the many problems today in the U.S. relationship with Turkey, Ankara and Washington both work together to fight ISIS. Moreover, as Sales argues, U.S. counterterrorism efforts often try to build the rule of law in vulnerable countries, which can make allies more resilient to authoritarian disinformation campaigns such as those pushed by Russia and China.

Already, counterterrorism cooperation is emerging as an area of competition between the United States and other great powers. Russia uses a state-linked mercenary group, the Wagner Group, to provide security assistance in the Middle East and Africa, among other places, as an alternative to U.S. assistance. Indeed, if the United States neglects counterterrorism assistance to potential partners and instability grows, it creates a vacuum that Iran, China, Russia, and other powers can fill.

Financial tools may also play a role in fighting both regular terrorists and those sponsored by great powers. “Following the money” proved one important way to identify terrorist cells and operatives in the War on Terror, and it works against state paymasters too, helping reveal disinformation networks and proxy relationships as well as terrorism links. In addition, the United States and its allies often apply financial sanctions against individual terrorists, countries, and entities within them (e.g., a bank involved in payments or an intelligence agency), which can complicate terrorist operations by making it harder for groups and individuals to move money and at times denying dangerous actors the funds they need to conduct more operations.

MUCH OF the counterterrorism playbook, however, will not work against state-sponsored groups. If the supporting major power provides the group a haven, leadership decapitation and other efforts to strike at the core of the group cannot be done without great risk to the operators and a significant chance of escalation. International cooperation via the United Nations, as was done to stop Al Qaeda and ISIS financing, will be blocked by major powers with a veto on the UN Security Council. Special operations forces expert Jack Watling points out that, against actors like Russia and China, special operations forces cannot count on operating from secure forward bases, monopolizing reconnaissance and surveillance over their areas of operations, and otherwise enjoying superiority in capacity across every dimension: states can hit back with drones, missiles, and their own covert operators, as well as employing their own reconnaissance capabilities to assist their proxies.

Coercing major powers to stop their support for terrorists will prove difficult. Even against mid-level countries like Iran, the mix of military, economic, and diplomatic pressure the United States and its allies wielded achieved at best limited success. Weaker countries like Libya were vulnerable to pressure, though even then it took many years for the impact of sanctions and isolations to be felt.

Terrorism-related condemnation does not achieve much unless it is accompanied by a much broader set of punishments, with allies joining as well, but getting allies to sign on will also prove difficult. In contrast to the Libyas, Syrias, and Irans of the world, Russia and China have the muscle to push back against economic pressure by increasing subversion against those who stand up to them by, for example, disrupting gas supplies to European states, blocking trade, or hindering investment in their domestic markets. It took a massive and highly visible Russian invasion of Ukraine for the world to act; Moscow’s less-visible actions over the years through proxies met far less opposition.

The context of counterterrorism will also change with the United States involved in proxy wars and competitions. In contrast to the United States, Russia is comfortable operating in the so-called gray zone between open war and peace. Ukraine, for example, may emerge as an arena where U.S.-backed insurgents battle Russian forces or a Russian puppet government that claims sovereignty over all or part of Ukraine. Here, many of the skills the United States and its allies gained over the last twenty years in working with warlords, militias, and other substate actors against terrorists will be helpful, but it will require recognizing that success will remain elusive and the purpose is often to use local actors to undermine the influence of rival powers rather than defeat a discreet terrorist enemy.

One of the biggest changes needed to U.S. counterterrorism efforts is to prepare for escalation during counterterrorism campaigns. China, Russia, and important regional powers like Turkey can use cyberattacks, economic pressure, and, of course, their own conventional military operations in order to back their proxies. Thus, limited back-and-forths between proxy groups can escalate into something much bigger. In some cases, perhaps many, the risk of escalation will outweigh any small advantages that come from working with proxies or attacking those of rival powers.

As satisfying as it might be to use the terrorism label to shame countries like Russia, that is usually a mistake. Much of what these countries are doing when they manipulate proxies in civil wars better fits Cold War concepts like “revolutionary war” or “subversion” rather than terrorism. Analytic concerns aside, officially designating a country as a state sponsor of terrorism brings with it a host of automatic punishments that would curtail U.S. policy flexibility without achieving much to stop the support. Better is the approach begun in the Trump administration, which designated the Russian Imperial Movement in 2020. Whether intended or not, this decision highlighted Russia’s involvement with right-wing terror without adding the state sponsorship label.

Making this all even more complex is domestic support for U.S. rival powers in the United States and allied democracies themselves. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has cultivated support from an array of populist parties in Europe in particular, and he is also admired by some right-wing voices in the United States, supposedly embodying a mix of masculinity, nationalism, and traditional Christian values. Tucker Carlson, for example, declared in 2019, “I think we should probably take the side of Russia, if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

THE QUESTION today is not about a choice between the terrorism threat and the great power competition challenge. Rather, it is how to use the weapons America has honed and wielded for two decades more effectively, recognizing that the challenge differs and the response must change as well in this new era.

Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. His latest book is Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism.

Image: Reuters.