Threats at the Olympics Clarify Challenges Facing the West

Much of the media attention during the first week of the Olympics revolved around the utterly offensive, reprehensible anti-Christian display put on during the opening ceremonies.  While some have sought to downplay it, the truth is that this bigotry represents a true threat to the Western world, a threat which was compounded by the multiple attacks on France’s critical infrastructure last week and the other national security threats surrounding the Olympics.  These threats, around an event meant to bring the world together in fair competition, should be a wake-up call to the West.

Just hours before the opening ceremonies began, arsonists sabotaged France’s high-speed rail network in a series of “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted” attacks.  French police have since arrested an “ultra-left activist” and are exploring whether “ultra left” movements are responsible.  Days later, saboteurs followed the rail attacks up by targeting fiber optic cables across France, causing major outages.  French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has suggested that far-left activists could have been responsible for the attacks as well.  For several weeks now, French police have also recorded an increase in attempts by pro-Russian groups to disrupt the Games, with an agent for Russia’s intelligence service (FSB) being arrested in Paris and charged with “intelligence with a foreign power with a view to incite hostilities in France” just last week.  And finally, the latent threat of radical Islamic terror persists, as French intelligence services have identified a dozen leaders of the Islamic State group in Turkey and Syria capable of activating terrorist sleeper cells in France. 

These threats – far-left radicalism in domestic politics and academia, radical Islamic terror, and even Russian interference – spring from different sources yet share a common motivation: opposition and hostility toward everything that Western civilization represents.  This threat is hitting France hard right now because of the Olympics, but it can be seen across Europe and the United States.  In Berlin, the German government recently shut down Islamic Center Hamburg due to its ties with Iran and Hezbollah and its promotion of radical Islamism.  Russian interference has been identified as a major threat to Moldova’s elections later this year, and Russian agencies routinely spread the Kremlin’s propaganda everywhere they can across Europe.  Here at home, the unfettered flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border has greatly increased the risk of terror attacks inside our country, while anti-American, pro-Hamas protestors recently defaced monuments in our nation’s capital.  In their own way, each of these threats works to undermine and disrupt democracy and civility across the West.

The unfortunate truth is that Western weakness has encouraged these threats.  When we allow our enemies abroad to grow strong, when we let them disrupt peace and freedom elsewhere, the threats to our own nations increase drastically. We spent years trying to appease the radical regime in Iran and its proxies across the Middle East, and now the threat posed by its radical ideology has metastasized and spread all over the world – and it continues to threaten President Trump on the campaign trail.  Both Europe and the United States failed to deter Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and now hundreds of thousands are dead, and the threat posed by Russian aggression threatens to spread beyond Ukraine.  We have allowed far-left ideologies to corrupt our commitment to upholding law and order at home, and in so doing we have created a space in which radical, lawless groups can grow stronger – a development that has been encouraged even more by our allowance of unfettered, destabilizing immigration.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to facing and overcoming these threats.  First, we must abandon the weakness that has too often characterized our foreign policy, particularly in the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris years.  We must aggressively deter, together, shared threats, from Moscow to Tehran to Beijing.  That means increasing our individual defense spending, deepening our economic and security cooperation, and keeping foreign threats and spyware out of our domestic infrastructure.  We should finally admit that massive, unfettered immigration is a destabilizing force that puts our nations at risk, and we should take concrete steps to limit it by finishing the border wall and enforcing Remain in Mexico policies.  We should condemn, not encourage, the kind of political extremism that leads to violence and terror attacks. 

Finally, the West must recognize that our principles, our very way of life, is noble and worth preserving.  No civilization in history has done more to advance human rights and defend human dignity than ours has.  Viewers of the opening ceremony’s ugliness rightly recognized it as such because it demeaned the Christian faith and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which our civilization has sprung.  We must respond to it, and the attacks and threats that surround it, in equal measure: By committing to defend our civilization against those who wish to tear it down.