" I'm so sick of seeing the endless debate about "if you care about Paris you don't care about Beirut/Metrojet/now Nigeria" et cetera. The reality is this: Paris, like any American city, is in the first-world protected zone. Ever since WWII the overall consensus strategy on the part of everyone in the ruling elite of the global North, from the most far-right capitalist to the most left-wing Politb uro member, has been to export conflict from the North into all kinds of global peripheries. We EXPECT to see violence in Beirut because we put it there. Our security states protect us from the blowback of whatever neocolonialist policies we might care to pursue on those peripheries. So what if we fail at nation-building? We'll never have to "fight them over here," not really. ( The attached map , although badly out of date, expresses some of this concept.) So of course when there's a terrorist attack in a core northern city like Paris or New York
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51