Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

Vulnerability is doing heavy political work here. By opening with "We remain vulnerable", Gijs de Vries isn’t confessing weakness so much as disciplining expectations: the public’s, the media’s, and especially the security state’s. The line is a preemptive rebuttal to the post-attack ritual in which leaders are demanded to promise absolute protection, then punished for failing at a standard no democracy can meet without becoming something else.

"There is no such thing as 100 percent security" sounds like plain realism, but the subtext is an argument about trade-offs. De Vries is implicitly warning that the chase for total safety can justify endless surveillance, emergency laws that never expire, and political incentives to perform toughness over building resilience. The phrase "against terrorism" matters, too: terrorism is designed to make ordinary life feel permeable, to weaponize uncertainty. The statement refuses to grant terrorists the power of setting the terms of governance. If the goal of terror is to force states into overreaction, insisting on the impossibility of perfect security becomes a form of strategic restraint.

Contextually, de Vries is speaking from within the European post-9/11, post-Madrid, post-London era, when EU institutions were trying to coordinate counterterrorism without collapsing into a permanent state of exception. The intent is sober calibration: acknowledge risk, normalize it, and shift the metric of success from "nothing ever happens" to "society holds when something does."