If you’re one of the millions of young people who enjoyed this period of relative comfort, I’m sorry tell you that it’s coming to an end. If Madrid, London, or Mumbai didn’t wake you up, Paris should. In the last week, three major terrorist attacks—not just in France, but in Lebanon and against a Russian airliner in Egypt—have killed more than 400 people. ISIS has claimed responsibility for all three massacres. A year ago, you could have said that the terrorists who wanted to hit the West couldn’t pull it off, or that those who could pull it off it didn’t have the ambition. You can’t say that anymore.

It’s tempting to argue that Paris is just blowback, and that if France and other countries stop hitting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, ISIS will stop hitting back. But that doesn’t square with ISIS’s statement of responsibility for the deaths in Paris. The statement says the assailants were “targeting the capital of prostitution and obscenity.” It celebrates the carnage at “the Bataclan Conference Center, where hundreds of apostates had gathered in a profligate prostitution party.” It praises the killers for blowing themselves up “in the gatherings of the disbelievers.” The authors of this statement, and people who think like them, won’t leave you alone. They’re at war with your way of life.

If you grew up watching thousands of Americans die in Iraq, along with many thousands of Iraqis, it’s easy to say that the Iraq war was a mistake. But Iraq isn’t the only mistake you ought to consider. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who helped lead the Iraq invasion, points out that limited intervention and non-intervention have also turned out badly…