In just over a year, France has been transformed from the center of European sophistication and culture into the front lines in a new war against radicalism. One year ago, Islamist terrorists slaughtered police and the editors of a satirical magazine. That attack was immediately followed by an assault on a kosher supermarket, where another radicalized Islamist gunman murdered four Jewish hostages. In June of 2015, an improvised bomb exploded outside a factory in Lyon, where investigators later found an ISIS flag and the terrorist organization’s gruesome calling card, a severed head. Two months later, an Islamist terrorist opened fire on passengers traveling by train from Amsterdam to Paris with an assault rifle. A coordinated series of attacks in November took the lives of 132 Parisian civilians and sparked a wave of anxiety across Europe as fears of a follow-up attack paralyzed the continent. Today, a man wearing a fake suicide belt and armed with a knife ran screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ into a Parisian police station where he was shot to death.

France isn’t alone in this fight. The streets of Brussels of decadence into a war zone on multiple occasions over the course of the last two years; Belgium has sacrificed its residents’ freedom, canceled public events, and forced civilians indoors for extended periods in order to combat the terror threat. In November, two civilians were killed and five others injured when a radicalized Islamic gunman opened fire on an event celebrating free, provocative speech in Denmark. Three British citizens were stabbed in December in an attack linked to the Islamic State, an assault that echoed the murder and attempted beheading of the British Fusilier Lee Rigby on the streets of London.

Europe is thoroughly terrorized. What’s worse, Europeans are being told by their elected leaders that they are to empathize with and welcome their attackers.

As Jonathan Tobin has observed, the crisis in Europe touched off by a flood of refugees has evolved a disturbing feature that could only be characterized as a clash of competing civilizational views. A New Year’s Day event in the German city of Cologne was marred by something new – mass, coordinated gang violence and sexual assault. The elite response to this gang violence, precipitated the shock associated with former Middle Eastern residents coping with an emersion into an alien and comparatively permissive culture, has been to lecture Europeans about their provocative behaviors. Cologne’s mayor advised young women who find themselves surrounded by aggravated men to maintain “arm’s length” distance from her would-be attackers.

The suspected attackers, meanwhile, who have yet to be publicly identified, have displayed a galling sense of entitlement – one that has only been encouraged by European authorities. Police reports published in two German newspapers indicate that recent Syrian refugees were involved in this assault and that they are utterly unrepentant. “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow,” one allegedly said while ripping up his residence permit right in front of inquiring police. “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly,” remarked another. “Mrs. Merkel invited me.” These are the individuals who are flooding a continent that already suffers from un-and-under-employment rates far higher than they are in the United States. Europe now faces the prospect of millions of men and women populating camps, outnumbering the native populations of towns and cities in which they are resettled, and who are openly resentful of the cultures into which they are expected to assimilate.

Where will this elite contempt for European culture, its values, and its residents and citizens lead the continent? Ultimately, an insular and paranoid place that is not familiar to most living Americans. A terrorized people who find their hospitality unappreciated and whose leaders are openly contemptuous of them won’t long endure those insults. If America is gripped by a rising tide of protectionist, even nativist, populism, the kind of backlash against egalitarian internationalism that is in store for Europe is one that should frighten anyone with even a mild appreciation of 20th Century history.

None of this is occurring in a vacuum. These are the wages of non-interventionism. The West hoped to avoid engaging in the conflicts that arose from the Arab Spring, and they were woefully underprepared to handle those in which they did involve themselves. The conflict in Syria was allowed to metastasize until even now, and it has become the source of millions of refugees, Islamist terrorism, and the worst humanitarian crisis this century. Western forces intervened in North Africa with the explicit intention of avoiding regime change, and, as a result, they were ill-prepared to guide Libya toward a stable transitional government when the regime fell. Out of chaos and nightmarish adversity, hundreds of thousands of both well-meaning and dangerous individuals descended on a naïve West.

It is perhaps already too late to prevent the transformation Europe will soon undergo. American conservatives who may be tempted to believe that the continent will abandon its comfortable embrace of permissiveness and social-welfare will find the New Europe is by no means warmly democratic or friendly toward Washington. An ethnically conscious Europe is as likely to look eastward as it is across the Atlantic. The resulting tribalism and communalism on the continent will likely result in the devolution of the European Union and the ascension of lamentably familiar nationalist leaders. By seeking to avoid the costs associated with foreign wars in the Middle East, Europe has incurred a greater expense than anyone could have imagined.