Success Quote by Gijs de Vries

It’s the kind of line that tries to win twice: first by declaring victory, then by quietly redefining what victory means. Gijs de Vries, speaking as a security-minded European politician, frames al Qaida’s strategic aim not as body counts but as political aftershocks: the hope that spectacular violence would detonate regimes, scramble borders, and radicalize publics into upheaval. By spotlighting “revolutions” rather than “attacks,” he shifts the scoreboard from the immediate horror to the longer game of legitimacy and governance.

The subtext is reassurance with an edge. “Failed” signals competence and resilience: our institutions held, societies didn’t snap, the state remains the adult in the room. “Arguably” is doing diplomatic heavy lifting, leaving room for competing analyses while still landing the punch. It also preempts a common post-9/11 anxiety: that the terrorist’s true power is narrative, that the spectacle forces democratic states into self-sabotage. De Vries is effectively arguing the opposite - that the desired cascade (panic, mass rebellion, systemic breakdown) didn’t materialize.

Context matters: mid-2000s Europe was balancing counterterror policy with civil liberties, immigration politics, and wars framed as part of a “Global War on Terror.” By emphasizing failed revolutionary provocation, de Vries implicitly warns against overreaction. If the enemy’s ambition is to polarize and destabilize, the most dangerous mistake is to supply the instability ourselves. The sentence is less a celebration than a policy nudge: treat terrorism as a security threat, not a revolutionary spark worth dignifying.