In his book Modern Tyrants, Daniel Chirot observed that understanding what happened in the past will not help us predict the tragedies of the future; but it may prepare us better than simply pretending that we have evolved too far to repeat the nightmares of the past. Hannah Arendt has written about the “banality of evil” that leads to atrocities like the Holocaust. At the end of the 20th century the world witnessed ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Darfur and Rwanda. In September 2014, the head of the UN commission investigating the Syrian civil war told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that the Assad regime’s sieges and attacks in Syrias civil war had killed over 190,000 people and destabilized the region. Then, in 2015 there was the persecution of Christians, Jews and Muslims by ISIS. The Paris attacks in 2015 signaled the beginning of violent attacks in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States which continue to the present. Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars, has said that the international community needs to design a political/military response to evil regimes that recognizes their true character. It must learn to respond to aggression and massacre in a timely and forceful way, something we have not yet learned. With the fall of the ISIS caliphate there is a shift in the political dynamics in the Middle East. Once again, Al Qaida is emerging as a viable force with thousands of fighters in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. The ISIS menace continues beyond the sleeper cells in Europe to lone wolves. In December 2019, a Saudi Air Force pilot carried out a terrorist attack at a U.S. Navy installation at Pensacola, Florida. The pilot was in fact an Al Qaida operative. What in your opinion is the critical first step the international community must take to design a political/military response to this two-pronged threat?