The success of a small group of terrorists in essentially taking down the third most powerful military in the world on Friday is a milestone in the history of Islamic terrorism being celebrated by jihadists around the world.

More than 14 years ago, they succeeded in killing nearly 3,000 Americans in a plot carried out right under our noses. In those intervening years, billions of dollars were spent on creating and connecting massive databases between countries to share intelligence, new counterterrorism intelligence units were formed, tens of thousands of jihadists around the world were placed under surveillance, entire militaries were transformed to fight the new type of asymmetrical war, and government leaders vowed to wipe out the nest of terrorist vipers wherever they were.

Yet, the jihadists still succeeded in carrying out the single largest attack in Europe since World War II, slaughtering more than 120 innocent men, women and children. If there is any lesson that can be drawn, it is that the jihadists are now coming for us.

The highly coordinated attack on the French was an attack on the Dutch, British, Germans, Swedes, and the U.S. It was an attack on all Western liberal democracies based upon basic Judeo-Christian values.

It is the tragic result of a naïve misreading of the world by the current administration. The resulting chaos created by U.S. foreign policy represents a diplomatic and national security failure of unfathomable and horrific proportions.

In policies reflecting deeply flawed thinking, the Obama and his advisers believed from the very beginning that it should support Islamists represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, which created nearly all of the existing jihadi groups. The administration believed that the Arab Spring represented an opportunity to depose despots and replace them with democratic regimes.

It decided that secular autocrats represented the real enemy. The administration never considered the far more murderous evil that would follow. So in recent years the U.S. stood by or helped jihadists to depose Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, murder former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and wage a bloody civil war against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In recent weeks, they randomly stabbed Israelis on the street, bombed a civilian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and killed dozens and wounded hundreds in Beirut in signature attacks.

By leading from behind, U.S. policy emboldened the jihadists to create instability and ungovernable territory in the Middle East, which drove millions of refugees into Europe in a humanitarian crisis that provided cover for operatives to infiltrate the countries that welcomed them.

It has enabled them to create a genocidal caliphate in the Middle East from where they can more easily prepare and instigate attacks against the West, as we sadly witnessed on Friday.

Let’s state the obvious. The administration has operated under the misguided belief that jihadists can be contained. If we just treat them nicely and don’t identify them for what they are, they’ll leave us alone.

It explains why we still have not seen the manifesto from the young California college student with a reported ISIS flag, references to Allah and writings about beheadings who stabbed four people last week. Why would that matter? He was upset about his study group. Nothing to see here.

Nobody in law enforcement would dare to link it to jihadist ideology under the watchful eye of the administration. After all, these are the same folks who banned the words “radical Islam” from the halls of the White House -- any reference is nowhere to be found in the president’s statement on Paris and was avoided at all costs by former Secretary of State Clinton in Saturday’s Democratic debate -- scrubbed the FBI training manual of any text that might offend Muslims, and described Major Nidal Hasan’s 2009 massacre at Fort Hood as “workplace violence.”

For nearly two full weeks the administration blamed an innocent U.S. filmmaker as the cause of the murder of four Americans 7,000 miles away in Benghazi in 2012. They were dead wrong, and they knew it. Clinton documented the lie for posterity in her emails.

As much as the administration denies it, they hate us, they want to destroy us and they already have a significant presence in the U.S. It is only a matter of time before the Paris jihadists attempt to replicate their unparalleled success in the U.S.

The progressive left that blames America first, led by Obama and his secretaries of State, destroyed Libya, destroyed Syria, and destroyed Iraq. They failed to intervene in the genocide of religious minorities in the Middle East and stood by while Islamists destroyed the lives of thousands of women through sex slavery and human trafficking. They refused to grant asylum to tens of thousands of Christians being persecuted, tortured, and murdered throughout the Middle East. Don’t trust our word on this. Go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the ground and they will tell you horror stories that will drive you mad.

The U.S. is not immune. The cover of Muslim Brotherhood fronts like the Council for American-Islamic Relations has facilitated their arrival here in significant ways.

What will it take for the administration to realize that radical Islam is the cancer, and that the legitimacy it have provided to their front groups is crippling the U.S. from within?

Perhaps nothing will. The president who promised to end all wars has instead placed us at the epicenter of World War III.

Steven Emerson is the Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and Pete Hoekstra is the Senior Shillman Fellow at the Investigative Project on Terrorism.