But what I have just described is not a Republican sound bite. Rather, it is the current counterterrorism posture of France. Since the attacks in Paris last November, the socialist government of President Francois Hollande has placed his country under a state of emergency. France’s national guard has been deployed to protect sensitive religious sites and other “soft targets.” The country of Voltaire, Diderot and Camus is in 2016 the police state that critics warn Cruz or Trump would bring about if given the chance.

Just listen to Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister. Earlier this month, I asked him at a speech at George Washington University how many French citizens his government was now tracking. He responded, “We are monitoring several thousand people, individuals, not all of them are necessarily terrorists.”

He went on to explain that his ministry is working with allied intelligence services and universities to spot trends among young people who self-radicalize. He pointed to a recent case where a high school student in Marseilles with no prior connections to terrorist groups attempted to murder a teacher. “The difficulty of counterterrorism today is less the difficulty of the intelligence we have, but the difficulty of analysis,” he said. “When we have a low signal attached to an individual, that person doesn’t seem to be involved in terrorism, it doesn’t mean that person is not dangerous.”