(FBI) and external (CIA) security services, and enacted the Patriot Act to enable effective surveillance of potential terrorists. The nation leveraged military force and local allies to end what at the time was the world's largest terrorist sanctuary, in Afghanistan, assembling a globe-spanning coalition to defeat Al Qaeda, and threatened war with Pakistan if its leader did not join the campaign.

Critics accused the United States of overreach with its "war on terror," including the invasion of Iraq, but that outcome was certainly preferable from the US perspective to further attacks on American cities.

By contrast, Europe barely has a grip on its terrorist problem. Rampant homegrown jihadism was not created without context. Rather, it germinated in the fertile soil of the conflict in Syria, which spawned the Islamic Stateterror group, ISIS and inspired the Paris and Brussels attacks. Thousands of young European men traveled to Syria to fight and have returned home, radicalized, to segregated ethnic enclaves in European capitals. Many more European Muslims have not fought on the ISIS front, but are mobilized, falling prey to the terrorist group's effective use of propaganda, including claims that it is defending its "caliphate" against morally debased Westerners and those of apostate Arab regimes. More recently, ISIS has enjoyed sanctuary in Libya, following a European-led intervention followed by retreat rather than prudential investments in nation-building.

Yet no European country is pushing for decisive action to address the conditions in the wider Middle East that export terrorism into the continent. France came the closest when it prepared to join the