&gt;The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because &quot;that&#x27;s what they want.&quot;...<p>I agree the article spends a lot of time implying what we shouldn&#x27;t do and not much time at all saying what might make for effective policies, but it&#x27;s hardly advocating Islamising Europe either.<p>I took two things away from the article. One is that the kind of pretty much deliberate social and economic marginalization of Muslim minorities in France is a terrible mistake. You can have a pluralistic egalitarian society without insisting that everyone has to dress, talk and behave exactly like white western Europeans all the time. Having an Imperial legacy and historic connections with extensive regions of the wider world isn&#x27;t compatible with being culturally allergic to anyone who looks or acts foreign. We in Europe need to build strong cultural bridges connecting us to the Muslim minorities in our midst that are now also Europeans and deserve respect and support. I may take flak for this, because it turns my stomach to imply that France has any responsibility for the recent attacks, but frankly the French state is not doing it&#x27;s job.<p>The second lesson is regarding our foreign policy in the Middle East. Keeping out of Syria and letting whatever happens just happen hasn&#x27;t worked. The result has been a breeding ground for radicalization and chaos that has exacerbated the situation in Iraq, and lead to the biggest Refugee crisis Europe has seen since WW2. The Iraq war was awful and the political pressure to withdraw and &#x27;bring the troops home&#x27; intense, but doing so was a horrible mistake. Once you&#x27;re in, you&#x27;re in for better or worse. We can&#x27;t wash our hands of these conflicts and expect that the resulting mess will stay put and not affect us.<p>As a corollary, I think that our consistent policy that none of the borders in the Middle east are up for negotiation is a mistake. If the Sunni, Shia and Kurd regions of Iraq want to be separate states, they should have the freedom to do so. Trying to insist that the Sunni minority had to stay welded to a larger hostile Shia population was just asking for unending trouble. Partition isn&#x27;t always the right answer, but in some situations it needs to be an option.