&gt;I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments. I fear the Europe will split, or start a war with someone, or draconian security measures will be introduced by the government.<p>so... As an American who is old enough to very clearly remember America both before and after the 9&#x2F;11 attacks?  to the extent that America is like France, I can speak some to those fears.<p>We did several of those things.  We massively overreacted;   I mean, we didn&#x27;t split, but we did pick a war with a country who&#x27;s people kind of looked like the people who attacked us (and another war with a country we had some evidence that they had something to do with the attack)  - and yes, both wars were pretty costly in terms of money, geopolitical power and credibility,  commodity prices and world stability, but it didn&#x27;t break us, and it didn&#x27;t spill out into a major war between industrial powers.    It didn&#x27;t turn into Vietnam, or even something as bad as the CCCP&#x27;s experience in Afghanistan.  I&#x27;m not saying it was a good experience, just that it&#x27;s survivable, and not as life changing as you seem to think.   This isn&#x27;t a war of the 19th or 20th century between major powers.   This is a 21st century asymmetrical war, and while that&#x27;s still pretty bad for whoever ends up getting blamed for these attacks, it&#x27;s not the end for Europe.<p>Yes, the security measures were very costly.   Airplane travel is dramatically less convenient, which means more traffic.  Lots of lost productivity.  We&#x27;ve lost so many human-years standing in line, waiting to be groped... or driving instead of flying;  that has caused who knows how many extra deaths.  (re-reading this... while I logically stand by the idea that we&#x27;ve lost more to the security measures than to the original attacks... on an emotional level, I feel shame for saying so out loud.)   Personally, my perception is that this is slowly getting better with the pre-groping of the &#x27;tsa pre-check&#x27; or the straight up money check of the &quot;CLEAR&quot; program.     I mean, air travel is never again going to be as easy as it was when I was 19 during my lifetime, but it&#x27;s not as bad as it was when I was 22, let me tell you, and it&#x27;s getting better.<p>But... even at it&#x27;s worst?  This wasn&#x27;t world war two.   This wasn&#x27;t even the Crimean war, at least on my side of the conflict.      I mean, I don&#x27;t want to diminish the sacrifices of our soldiers, it&#x27;s not a job I would want to do, but being deployed in the wars we engaged in after 9&#x2F;11 was less dangerous than delivering pizzas, if you only count the chance of getting killed or maimed, rather than harder to quantify mental traumas associated with fighting a war (which personally, I find to be a much larger deterrent to becoming a soldier than the danger.   I was... just about at prime recruiting age on September 11th, 2001.<p>And for the rest of us?  Yeah, 9&#x2F;11 was a big deal.  A bigger deal than I understood it to be at the time.  A much bigger deal.  but... it wasn&#x27;t the end of life as we know it.<p>That was the weird thing about my 9&#x2F;11 experience.   So I had a dot-com job, and my boss was watching the news on a very early live-streaming website.   (I want to say it was CNN or something, but I don&#x27;t remember)    I was mildly annoyed with her for not working and instead subjecting me to, you know, video news.<p>My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours.  It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.