I'd find this pleasant to believe, and I've been a longstanding critic of US foreign policy, but:
Terrorism isn't a big problem, it should be a long way down the list of problems the US needs to think about. It's interesting to speculate on what would make a difference to it, but it would be crazy to make it more than a very small influence on foreign policy.
Terrorists are already a long way from the moral consensus, which is one reason they're so rare.
It seems incredibly implausible to me that they're taking their moral lead from the US in any case.
And of course while killing people is bad all other things being equal, almost everyone already believes that; what they believe is that it's defensible in the pursuit of some other good (such as saving lives elsewhere) which I also believe.
Terrorists usually aren't a long way from the moral consensus of their community. If you take polls asking people what they think of the US the answers radically changed in the last ten years in the middle east.
In Iran the Western ideals of democracy work enough to destabilize the government a bit. Our values actually work. They are something that people can believe in and draw meaning from.
In this video, Julian Savulescu from the Uehiro centre for Practical Ethics argues that human beings are "Unfit for the future" - that radical technological advance, liberal democracy and human nature will combine to make the 21st century the century of global catastropes, perpetrated by terrorists and psychopaths, with tools such as engineered viruses. He goes on to argue that enhanced intelligence and a reduced urge to violence and defection in large commons problems could be achieved using science, and may be a way out for humanity.
Skip to 1:30 to avoid the tedious introduction
Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - PART 1 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.
Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - PART 2 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.
Well, I have already said something rather like this. Perhaps this really is a good idea, more important, even, than coding a friendly AI? AI timelines where super-smart AI doesn't get invented until 2060+ would leave enough room for human intelligence enhancement to happen and have an effect. When I collected some SIAI volunteers' opinions on this, most thought that there was a very significant chance that super-smart AI will arrive sooner than that, though.
A large portion of the video consists of pointing out the very strong scientific case that our behavior is a result of the way our brains are structured, and that this means that changes in our behavior are the result of changes in the way our brains are wired.