Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

The sentence is engineered to do two things at once: widen the threat and justify coordination. De Vries doesn’t name targets or offer a cinematic nightmare; he opts for the bureaucrat’s most effective weapon, conditional inevitability. “Could be severely disrupted” is cautious enough to avoid panic-mongering, but vivid enough to make disruption feel like the baseline outcome. The real payload is “series of sectors,” a deliberately elastic phrase that invites listeners to supply their own anxieties: transport, energy, finance, telecoms, public health. Vagueness becomes a policy tool, because a threat that can plausibly touch everything is a threat that can validate almost any preventative measure.

The kicker is the EU-specific pressure point: “several member states simultaneously.” This is less about fear than about scale, the nightmare scenario for a union whose competencies are shared, disputed, and often slow. A multi-state attack isn’t just a security crisis; it’s a stress test for governance itself, a way to argue that national-only preparedness is structurally outdated. In that sense, the line is a pitch for deeper integration disguised as sober risk assessment.

Context matters: De Vries rose as the EU’s first counter-terrorism coordinator in the post-9/11, post-Madrid, post-London era, when “critical infrastructure” and “resilience” became the lingua franca of security policy. The subtext is clear: if the threat is networked, the response must be, too - information sharing, harmonized standards, centralized planning. The intent isn’t to dramatize terrorism; it’s to make cross-border authority feel like the only rational option.