The Europeans have — it's not news — tended to be snooty about the Americans. Especially the French, but the attitude is ingrained even in the "special relationship" with the United Kingdom.

In interviews with intelligence service people, mostly retired, for a project for the Reuters Institute, I often heard that senior British officers had thought the phrase "War on Terror" to be a stupid one, and that they never used it. It was not a war, they believed. The struggle was not "existential." It was a serious challenge from serious militants: hard, vicious but finite.

It's different now. Francois Hollande, the president of France, has said that the slaughter in Paris on Nov. 13 was "an act of war." Pope Francis, at a commemoration service for the 100,000 Italian soldiers killed in World War I (his grandfather was one of the soldiers who survived) said that "one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction."