deal with dangers that risk ripping the current European order apart at the seams, as another crisis threatened the European order of 1914.

The impressive mandarins who run the European Commission and other EU institutions have done much to make Europe economically competitive and improve public welfare. They have built the world's largest common market and trading economy, making the EU an economic superpower. Together with national leaders, they have ensured that most European citizens enjoy cradle-to-grave welfare and health benefits, the world's most generous. They have dramatically improved the lives of citizens through measures like the Schengen zone of visa-free travel and deregulation of airline markets to render affordable Mediterranean vacations for the masses.

It is now time for EU and elected national politicians to take the same zealous,systematic and enlightened approach to European security. The immense gains in public welfare produced by European integration are unsustainable if people feel threatened by the continuing risk of violent death in their home cities. Not only will terrorists corrode the spirit of liberalism and openness on which the European Union relies; predatory great powers will take advantage of European weakness to nibble away the continent's security perimeter, as Russia already has done effectively in Georgia and Ukraine and may yet do in the Baltic states. Meanwhile, to the east, China and other Asian giants are on the march, already eclipsing European states in national power and geopolitical ambition.

As Donald Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, has shown by disparaging the NATO alliance — and as Obama has done