Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

“Terrorists always have the advantage of surprise” is a cold statement dressed up as common sense, and that’s exactly why it lands. As a politician, Gijs de Vries isn’t reaching for poetry; he’s making a strategic argument that also functions as political insulation. If surprise is “always” on the other side, then perfect prevention becomes structurally impossible. The line lowers the public’s expectation of omniscience from the state while simultaneously justifying broader powers, budgets, and coordination in the name of reducing an asymmetry that can’t be eliminated.

The subtext is a critique of how democracies are judged after attacks: the public wants certainty, zero risk, and villains pre-identified. De Vries reframes terrorism as a battlefield where the attacker chooses the time, place, and method, while defenders have to be right every day, everywhere. That “always” is doing heavy lifting. It pushes the reader toward a mindset of chronic vigilance, and it subtly shifts the policy conversation from “Why didn’t you stop it?” to “How do we build resilience and response capacity when prevention will never be total?”

Context matters: European counterterrorism in the post-9/11 era (and later after Madrid and London) was shaped by the tension between open societies and security architectures. De Vries, associated with EU-level counterterrorism work, speaks from inside that machinery. The sentence is less a warning than a framework: accept the inherent asymmetry, then redesign institutions around speed, intelligence sharing, and public preparedness without promising the impossible.