The organized slaughter of civilians perpetrated by ISIS in Paris is an unequivocal act of war against France—a fact clearly recognized by President Hollande in his address to the nation in the wake of the attack. And it is also an act of war against all of us from the collective West, whether in Europe, America, or Australia. Once again, the West has been attacked by fanatical proponents of an ideology that is committed to a destruction of our value system, our way of life, and ultimately our states and societies. This is not just about a cultural battle space of ideas—the Islamist supremacists have already laid claim to territory, whether directly in the so-called Islamic state in the Middle East, or indirectly in Europe and America, where fear now delimits what we do, where we go, and how we live. During the past decade and a half, they have invaded our countries repeatedly (we choose to call it “terrorist acts”), forcing us to change how we live in our own homes. No amount of political posturing to the contrary will change that simple reality; just look around at our fellow citizens lined up in socked feet at the airport, waiting meekly to be screened and patted down. We have been under assault for close to a decade and a half and have adapted to self-defense measures at home and abroad, and yet through it all we have never made a total commitment to destroy our enemy, public declarations notwithstanding. What has been so resoundingly called by our leaders a “war on terror” has frequently been more crisis management than a campaign aimed at achieving victory.
We are at war—a war which has been declared on us all by a determined Islamist supremacist enemy of the West. Our response thus far has generally been a confusing, borderline condescending modernizing and mentoring of the adversary rather than an unrelenting fight. We have already wasted several trillion dollars and countless lives on various state-building projects (“if they only recognize the benefits of democracy, if they could only see the economic opportunity, if they only…”), on limited counterinsurgency campaigns driven by COIN theories (for “hearts and minds,” as if we seriously thought a PRT or local investment projects could stand up to the other side’s terror and ideological appeal), and on a few massive missteps like the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The time has come to mobilize our societies for the reality of what is facing us. This means that in the Middle East we need an on-the-ground campaign, and soon, against ISIS—one that will not just stop it but shatter it through a series of unequivocal defeats. The West and its regional allies need to break with the myth of the invincibility of the holy warriors, and air strikes and a handful of special operators will not do it.
It is also time to stop the flood of migrants entering Europe each day, and time for the European Union to collectively rethink how to manage those who have already arrived. Europe’s leaders must weigh compassion against the imperative of national security, and the risks today are simply too high for the EU to allow for the current de facto open door policy to continue. While there are without a doubt many who are refugees fleeing for their lives, we simply do not know how many jihadis are infiltrating Europe in their midst. If the preliminary reports from Paris are true, at least one of the suicide attackers came from Syria via Serbia in the current flood. We need to work with Turkey, Jordan, and others in the region to prevent them from travelling to Europe until they have been processed in place, and to return those who pose a risk. We are in an emergency and must act accordingly. Democratic constitutions are not suicide pacts, and the imperative to defend the state and its citizens must take priority. The European Union needs to seal its external borders forthwith and place the highest priority on processing those already on the continent and deporting those who are economic migrants or who pose a risk.
The final component of our long-term response has to be the hardening of our own ideological resolve to resist. We as a culture have increasingly failed to transmit to younger generations—and to reaffirm to the public at large—the core values of Western civilization. In Europe, postmodernism has deconstructed the sense of consensus and solidarity around freedom as a fundamental value, not just a means to a lifestyle or a consumer choice. An intellectually disarmed society whose educational centers and media shun a direct affirmation of our core civilizational tenets will not provide the necessary societal and national glue to keep us focused, able, and willing to take on this long battle.
It is not true that Western ideas will simply prevail because they represent what all mankind craves. The idea of freedom needs to be reaffirmed by every successive generation in the West. Democracies are precious experiments, fundamentally dependent on viable societal and national links, on shared identities and shared notions that freedom and sacrifice are interconnected, and that privilege requires service. Democratic societies need to be nurtured and their values passed from generation to generation, with national histories retaining their ability to inspire rather than becoming narratives that tend only to lament the dark aspects of our heritage.
With each attack, notwithstanding the deeply moving displays of solidarity across the world, the freedom of the peoples of the West has been reduced once more by the application of horror aimed at inducing fear. Today after the horrors perpetrated in Paris, the response has been once again resounding reaffirmation that we will go on living, that the killers will not make us live in fear or change our ways, that freedom is non-negotiable. Yet heightened anxiety is palpable not just among Parisians, but also elsewhere on the continent and in the United States. It is time for this equation to be reversed. It is time for our enemies to start fearing us.