Virtually all the Sunday papers carried the European terrorist attacks on page one. The ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and Nice in 2016 changed the way the European governments responded to the growing Muslim population and dealt with the thousands of immigrants from North Africa and refugees from the Middle East. The crackdowns were unpopular but, faced with a choice between order and chaos, most law-abiding people preferred to give up some of their freedoms for internal security. The news reporting varied along predictable lines, but most of the papers hinted similar attacks were headed towards the United States and raised rhetorical questions about the government's readiness to thwart such attacks. US military bases and Westerners continued to be targeted and attacked overseas, but so far the incredible investment in surveillance, intelligence sharing and border security prevented large scale attacks such as 9/11 within the United States.
The ISIS march to Bagdad in the summer of 2014 renewed fears about the implosion of the Middle East, and the United States was fiercely divided when it came to putting boots on the ground. Ground that was already saturated with American blood for what now appeared to be a senseless cause. The United States stubbornly clung to the proposition that what the people of Iraq needed most was democracy, the type born in the US which worked imperfectly to begin with. To think people actually believed our brand of democracy could be exported and made to work in a country that had only known a strong man and remained divided by longstanding tribal loyalties remained a pipe dream.
Until the summer of 2017 and the recent Veterans Day attacks, most of the incidents in the United States were limited to homemade bombs like those used in the Boston Marathon or Orlando with scores of people killed and injured by a single shooter. Anger jumped off a number of papers' editorial pages where the US Government, particularly DHS, was skewered for its delay in solving the Veterans Day attacks. There were no real conclusions about what group was responsible. The level of fear gripping the country rose measurably every day.