The New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans represents a part of a larger, ongoing threat. Too many of our elites across America and Europe refuse to take it seriously.

Each terror attack comes as a surprise. Each is reported with great focus on the immediate disaster — and no serious attempt at context.

This pattern of only focusing on the present has unfortunately marked American thinking and policy for the 23 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

It is painful to remember, but the United States also lost 4,419 young men and women while failing to transform Iraq. We lost another 2,459 Americans failing to liberate and modernize Afghanistan. 

The number of terrorist attacks on other civilized nations around the world are beyond current counting.

The New Orleans attack, which killed 15 and wounded 35, was reminiscent of earlier truck attacks. Reuters pulled together a list of recent attacks and their costs in innocent lives.

• A 19-ton truck at Nice killed 86 and wounded 434 on July 14, 2016. 
• The December 2016 attack at the Christmas Market at Berlin killed 11. 
• The March 2017 attack at London claimed four lives and wounded dozens of people. 
• The August 2017 attack at Barcelona killed 13. 
• The October 2017 New York City attack killed eight and wounded scores. 

These are just a few of the horrendous examples of Islamist radicals using vehicles to kill people. 

These attacks alone have killed 122 people. They represent a new side of the Islamist war against Western civilization.

The New Orleans attack is a shocking reminder that there are people in the world who hate our country and values — and regard killing us as a moral duty. 

The great failure after the 9/11 attacks by 19 terrorists was the establishment’s refusal to take the radical Islamist threat seriously.

President George W. Bush initially responded to the shock of attacks at New York City, the Pentagon, and the failed effort to attack the White House or the Capitol with the right language. In the 2002 State of the Union, President Bush outlined the threat and our response: 

“States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger…. We’ll be deliberate; yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

Sadly, the timidity and moral equivalency bias of the elites pushed back and undermined Mr. Bush’s initially correct statement of the problem.

The American national security system had no idea how to wage a successful war against a transnational movement determined to kill us and end our civilization.

The American legal system had no answer to the dilemma of foreign mortal enemies who would seek shelter in laws meant to protect our citizens. Twenty-three years after September 11, 2001, we are still negotiating about the treatment of those found guilty of plotting the death of thousands of Americans. It seems we have lost the will to defend ourselves. 

Compare this with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s insistence that German spies captured in America be given the death sentence as rapidly as possible. Six were executed, and two got long prison sentences for having cooperated in turning in their accomplices.

The American military, State Department, and intelligence services have no doctrine for hunting down and destroying idea-based, fanatical movements. They have no doctrine for occupying countries and profoundly changing their culture.

America and our allies must eradicate this worldwide threat.