The horrendous ramming of pedestrians on a densely packed New Orleans street hours into New Year’s Day celebrations was a revolting display of senseless violence. The attack using a truck, which killed 14 people and injured dozens of others, was quickly categorized as an act of terrorism inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group, whose propaganda has proved quite effective in capturing the minds of individuals who are alienated, aggrieved or going through some sort of trauma.

Federal authorities are investigating to determine why the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, did what he did, whether he had any accomplices and whether police may have missed any clues. We already know quite a lot. Jabbar served in the U.S. military, was deployed to Afghanistan and served there from 2009 to 2010. We know he had trouble adjusting to civilian life after he was discharged. His personal life was a mess: He was twice divorced and separated from his third wife, and he was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The FBI also said Jabbar traveled to New Orleans twice before, apparently to surveil the Bourbon Street area.

Some observers, however, are jumping to too many conclusions. Because Jabbar declared his allegiance to Islamic State, terrorism analysts and pundits have used the New Orleans attack to put forth a number of frivolous claims about terrorism and questioned America’s capacity to prevent it. We’re being led to believe that Islamic State is resurgent again, that terrorism and the gross ideology the group represents are ever-present, and that Jabbar’s strike in the heart of New Orleans shows that Washington needs a more aggressive counterterrorism strategy.

But some perspective is in order. First, while there’s no disputing that acts of terrorism are shocking psychologically, they’re also very rare in the grand scheme. Counting the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, jihadists have killed 121 people in the United States since 9/11. On average, that’s about five terrorism deaths per year. All casualties are regrettable, of course, but based purely on the numbers, the chance of getting killed by a terrorist is infinitesimally small compared to other causes of death. For instance, an estimated more than 18,700 people died in car crashes in the U.S. during the first six months of 2024, and more than 90,000 people in this country died from drug overdoses from July 2023 to July 2024. This isn’t to make light of the threat but rather to demonstrate just how statistically unlikely it is that somebody walking down the street will be killed at the hands of a terrorist.

Second, it’s important to grasp the nature of terrorism today. In the months and years after 9/11, U.S. national security officials were obsessed with the notion of the territorial safe haven — the ungoverned space where terrorist groups could plan, train and dispatch operatives overseas to slaughter innocents in the United States and Europe. The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were driven in large part to destroy those safe havens (although the war in Iraq wound up creating more anti-U.S. terrorists than it killed). The “We need to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” mindset dominated the landscape — and, in many ways, still does.

But terrorists don’t need safe havens to carry out attacks. The New Orleans attacker certainly didn’t. Indeed, the vast majority of terrorism incidents inside the U.S. and Europe since 9/11 have been perpetrated by people with little or no connection to the terrorist organization they ostensibly pledged allegiance to. Examples include the 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California; the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida; the 2016 lorry strike in Nice, France; and the 2017 truck ramming attack in Manhattan. All of them were undertaken by people who did the planning themselves, without any assistance from associates overseas.

In fact, this is likely why authorities couldn’t prevent these attacks ahead of time: Because there was no coordination, the ability to intercept communications was lacking. And because all of these attacks involved basic instruments and were unsophisticated (albeit, still deadly), the warning signs U.S. authorities may have been able to look for were absent.

How, then, is the U.S. supposed to conduct effective counterterrorism? There are those who believe that perpetual U.S. military deployments in troubled spots such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria will keep the boot on Islamic State’s neck and therefore decrease the likelihood of a major attack against Americans.

The problem with this analysis, however, is that there’s no tangible evidence that any of these deployments is doing much good for U.S. security. After all, each of the attacks mentioned above occurred when the U.S. still had thousands of combat troops in Afghanistan. The truck assault in New Orleans is no different; approximately 4,500 U.S. troops are still deployed in Iraq and Syria on what long ago turned into a never-ending counter-Islamic State mission. To think that more of the same will produce different results is to miss the point entirely. Having American troops patrolling or sitting in a base in the middle of the Syrian desert won’t, and can’t, stop attacks by a person in Texas, Ohio or Florida who watches a copious amount of jihadist propaganda and deludes himself into thinking he’s fighting for a just cause.

Improving coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement, combating domestic radicalization, ensuring social media companies work with police when suspicious activity is taking place and installing basic security precautions along America’s streets is a more cost-efficient way to keep Americans safe from terrorism.

The worst thing we can do is overreact.

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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