@niffiwan: Yes, the Battle of Britain and London Blitz
Maybe, but surely only insofar as clamping down weakens the country, causes internal strife, shapes their foreign policy, and so on. It's not like jihadist terrorists gain anything by some european country doing those things, as such. If basically everyone was on the political right and thus clamping down on <whatever the political right actually wants to clamp down on> was something about which there is no political division, then the terrorists wouldn't have achieved anything (except some fame that might attract recruits). Same thing if everyone collectively agreed to basically ignore what happened and to not enact any changes in policy because of it.
That comes with the terribly big assumption that all they want is for the West to clamp down on taking in refugees so that they'll have more victims to abuse. Which might certainly be a big part of it, but also it'd be pretty myopic to think that those guys don't have a massive axe to grind with the West anyway, regardless of refugees.
Besides, it's being left rather unclear what the political right supposedly wants done now that would sacrifice democracy and liberties and all that. Mostly it seems to have been, since forever, about restricting MENA immigration.
I had a great detailed reply written up to this at 2:30 AM when I was awake from the soreness after my dental surgery, and then my daughter started puking and I closed the browser. So this is the less great less detailed reply:
Islamic terrorists have attacked countries all over the globe; they have aimed for and received significant media attention in a few of the Western democracies in particular: the United States, France, and Great Britain. Why? Contrary to the rhetoric, the leadership of the whack-a-mole terrorist organizations have no illusions about "destroying" the West, nor do they intend to. Why focus on the Western democracies with the most damaging attacks? Easy:
1. Russia already essentially capitulated over Chechnya. Russian expansionism into Islamic areas is now quite low.
2. Eastern Europe can't get its own **** together, and it certainly doesn't care to either interfere with Islamic radicals, or take in ordinary Muslims.
3. Historically, the US, GB, and France have been responsible for the overwhelming majority of the Western interference in Islamic countries. They were also among the most willing to take in Muslim immigrants. Mounting terrorist attacks against these nations has already led to and is likely to increase the following chain of events that benefit Islamic extremists:
A. Hysterical media reaction to any attack.
B. Knee-jerk public reaction to the attack favoring a combination of increased "security state," consequently decreased civil liberties, and a measurable reduction in support for their Muslim populations.
C. Political reaction to the public reaction. This is how we get bad security laws, increased surveillance state, and expensive security apparatus.
D. Increased scrutiny of all immigrants and minority populations, and especially Muslim immigrants, making it more difficult for them to flee the extremists in their own countries, and generating hostility towards even those who have integrated in their new countries.
E. Public and political calls for reduced or abolished intervention (even in the face of human rights disasters and genocides; see most recently "Aleppo") by Western countries in areas controlled by Islamic extremists.
F. Propaganda by Islamic extremists showing the oppression of Muslims by the West, driving greater recruitment and opposition to Western influence in their core territories, and allowing a tighter grip of control by the extremists.
The fact remains, any American supporter of - for example - Trump's immigration plans regarding Muslims or "target countries" has a far greater risk of dying from a bullet fired out of a legal gun belonging to another adherent of that ideology in the United States than they have risk of even injury in a terrorist attack carried out under the banner of radical Islam. I don't dispute that terrorist attacks are reprehensible or that we should do our utmost to stop them, but collectively the West is beginning to lose perspective on this issue and it plays entirely into the hands of the people running the show on the other side. While NATO has been faffing about wringing its political hands about ISIS, Assad just finished crushing his majority populace again, reinvigorating a strategic Russia ally in the region and weakening NATO's interests.
So yeah, the political "right" needs to grow the **** up and go sit on its Cold War grandpa's knee and learn about some ****ing history, because the modern right is about ready to capitulate and allow 60 years of relative global stability to crumble because they're either hiding under their beds, or pretending to hide under their beds to win political power. The Trump's, Le Pen's, Farange's, Wilders, Leitch's, etc of the world can **** right off back into the cowardly ignorant holes they crawled out of. Say what you will of George W Bush's idiocy, at least the man understood the basic precepts of recent history. I like Obama, but he has presided over a period of American withdrawal from the world stage and the world is NOT better off for it. Meanwhile, the remainder of NATO cannot go it without the United States.