The price of support, weapons, training, and safehavens might well become actual terrorist activity, not the ideological purity previously demanded by sponsoring nation states.
It seems likely that the current world situation will invert the previous “understanding” enjoyed by the major countries. If anything, this problem is very likely to grow, since under the previous world situation, the major nation states placed firm limits on terrorist activity-these limits enforced by controlled access to weapons, funding, training, and safehavens. But along with that we must face the fact that there remain many experienced and trained international terrorists still roaming the world, some with lingering contacts with national intelligence agencies-plus the fact that some nations, while not desirous of a direct confrontation with American or other Western nations, could still make use of the remaining terrorist “free agents” for more narrow political goals. With the demise of the Soviet Union and other nation states with political positions adverse to American and Western interests, the likelihood of a major international confrontation is at an all-time low. There is good news and there is bad news. In 1996, John Clark wrote a memo to the CIA expressing concerns over the rise of international terrorism since the end of the Cold War and recommended the creation of a NATO response team to rapidly deploy to terrorist situations.
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