In the first few years after September 11, 2001, Western statesmen and analysts spent more time thinking and arguing over how serious the literal threat of jihadi terrorism was, and what to do about it, than trying to understand what it was. It did not often occur that the ideological basis of jihadi militancy could be the greatest threat to Western societies, or that a powerful anti-Western ideology was a necessary precursor to the will to perpetrate acts of violence against innocent people.

This perception was perhaps justified at first by the urgency of the terrorist threat, given its sudden explosion from minor nuisance to spectacular debacle. And it was perhaps justified by an assumption, particularly in the United States, that we knew quite well what was behind the violence: This was no ideology deserving of the name, but just crazy, atavistic nihilism perpetrated by a tiny minority and used by a few cynical regimes for purposes of their own, all emanating from a frustrated part of the world that had failed to keep pace with modernity. We knew whom we were fighting: al-Qaeda, similarly constituted groups like Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia, and the states that supported them. At times Western leaders said so, clearly and simply.

Yet for all the seeming simplicity of the conflict, the fact that Western statesmen have never been able to get a handle on the vocabulary or the rhetoric of the conflict suggests that the matter isn’t so simple after all. One key reason is that, in much of Europe if not yet in America, the real problem is not external but internal—and, if one is even remotely wise, one talks about internal problems differently than one talks about external ones. Moreover, the attraction to jihadi violence is not just about charismatic Muslim entrepreneurs preying on marginalized immigrant communities; it’s also about the many living in the West who feel alienated from Western values and from modernity itself. And their alienation, in turn, is deepened partly because the cultural and political elites of those countries seem uncomfortable articulating the settled virtues of their own civilization. In other words, not only do many Western elites have trouble talking about who the “bad guys” are in this conflict, they have trouble defining and defending the “good guys” as well. Not only do many in the West seem not to understand our adversaries’ ideas; we rather too often seem not to understand, or believe in, our own.