“It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” Winston Churchill said of Russia in a radio broadcast in October 1939. To forecast its future course he added, “perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Today, however, rational self-interest has proven a poor guide to understanding the war waged against the West that so deeply troubles us. The motive force that drives the players, the policies of the players, and the religion that inspires them have all proven altogether immune to the standard calculus of self-interest.

Even several decades into the irregular war waged by the jihadi world against the West, this new Sphinx still transfixes us to the point of making our societies unable to answer the fateful question upon which hinges their fate. Many explanations are proffered, and some do shed light upon the matter, but the nature of modern and contemporary jihad often remains shrouded in darkness: The analyses offered, regrettably, are frequently monocausal and often fit their author's particular agenda more than the facts of the matter. Many cogent approaches have yielded enlightening results but they have made little headway toward informing policy makers and public opinion, both engulfed in confusion.

The expressions “war on terror” or “terrorism” have been justly criticized; they err gravely by focusing upon the tool and do not even properly capture the essence of terror as a continuation of politics, of terror as a system of power: By drawing attention to the terrorist act, they remove it from context, history, and etiology.