The United States has spent trillions of dollars on counterterrorism, but without achieving results.

US troops in Syria. Photo: AFP

The document's author, Daniel Depetris, a researcher at Defense Priorities, notes that after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States increased spending on overseas operations, purchasing weapons to support foreign allies. But during this time, the terrorist threat only increased.

Military expert Ivan Konovalov argues that the ineffectiveness of US spending on counterterrorism is unsurprising.

"How can these expenditures be effective if the US, on one hand, spends money on counterterrorism, and on the other hand, creates new armed groups to serve their own purposes, and then these groups become terrorists? We have seen this in the example of the infamous IS organization. The Americans know that such a group has been formed and eventually transformed into a global evil force, and the whole world has to fight against it," Konovalov said.

And even the money that Americans, according to them, spend on the war on terrorism often strengthens the terrorists, he said.

"There's a case like this: in the Syrian war, the Americans spent about half a billion dollars training fighters supposedly of the 'moderate opposition'—and almost all of these rebels subsequently switched sides to the jihadists. This is an example of what happens when politicization is used for the purpose of fighting terrorists; in this case, fighting against the legitimate leadership of the Syrian government. And the majority of the US expenditure is for such purposes," Ivan Konovalov concluded.