A failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday was mounted with explosive-armed drones, according to news reports. Nine days earlier, and on the other side of the world, terrorists claimed to have sent an armed drone to attack the international airport in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. No one was killed in either case, and the circumstances of both remain murky. But a new and dangerous era in non-state-sponsored terrorism clearly has begun, and no one is adequately prepared to counter it.

The deadly civil war in Yemen has reached a climax after three ugly years. No one can know for sure, but it looks like the coalition led by Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a major victory that could push the Iranian-backed rebels into an enduring cease-fire.

The legitimate Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, is poised to retake control of the vital port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s fourth-largest city and its principal port on the Red Sea. Yemen depends on imports to survive and Hodeidah is the port of entry for most outside goods. International aid groups worry a long-term siege there could disrupt the already-limited flow of medicine and food into the country. But the pain is worth the gain – especially for U.S. interests – because of Hodeidah’s strategic importance.

In early April, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen led a delegation of 11 Harvard graduate students to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Consisting of students drawn from across the Kennedy School and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the delegation marked the first official visit for the Belfer Center’s Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security Project to Saudi Arabia.

One day, we imagine, drones will carry products right to consumers’ doorsteps. Retailers, supermarkets and restaurants will deploy squadrons of remotely controlled flying machines to deliver whatever people want whenever they want it.

At least that’s the popular lore. Unfortunately, the reality is different. For now, broad adoption of drone delivery is neither economical nor practical. Today’s commercial drones simply can’t carry anywhere near the weight of ground vehicles. They also are a lot more expensive to operate than trucks or trains. On top of that, air traffic controllers couldn’t manage them safely nor would the public tolerate them constantly buzzing their neighborhoods – even if they could be managed.

The future of drones is in the data not the products they can deliver.

Since 11 September 2001 the United States has been able to drive the global counterterrorism agenda as it saw necessary. Those days are over. The global environment has permanently shifted. The open rivalry with Moscow and growing competition with China are going to increase the potential costs on U.S. counterterrorism activity and outright restrain it in others.

Saudi Arabia's new leadership views Iran’s continued destabilization of the region, through increased sectarianism and growing support to terrorist proxies, as untenable. The new Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has demonstrated an unprecedented willingness to decisively address this issue to preserve regional stability, security and prosperity.

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) will be devastating for US-Saudi relations, US ties with the Arab world, and overall US foreign policy.

It is ironic that when President Trump finally made his first major foreign policy decision, he ran with the advice of his “cooler heads” — the Generals he admires — over his own instincts to cut U.S. losses and get out of this jungle. In extending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan for the narrower purpose of battling the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and associated groups, every U.S. soldier killed and wounded in Afghanistan from this day forward becomes in effect a casualty of the scourge of terrorism the president is determined to thwart.

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

Based on what we now know, the meeting had all the hallmarks of an overture by Russian intelligence to the campaign, and it is utterly damning that Trump Jr. took the meeting, brought in Manafort and Kushner to the meeting, and none of them reported the events immediately to the FBI nor to U.S. authorities until very recently.