French diplomats often lecture Washington on counterterrorism, yet Paris has spent decades cutting cynical deals with the world’s worst terrorists. This long policy of weakness is not a recent failure of sociology or assimilation. Instead, a deeply entrenched bureaucratic calculus has long prioritized immediate domestic peace over global security.

In August 1982, Abu Nidal’s faction slaughtered six people at Paris’s Jo Goldenberg restaurant. Rather than hunting down the perpetrators, French domestic intelligence chose capitulation over justice. Notes from the former director of the French domestic intelligence agency DST, Yves Bonnet, revealed a secret 1984-1985 nonaggression pact. Paris eased criminal pursuit, while Abu Nidal promised to spare French soil from future bloodshed. A January 1985 diplomatic document confirmed that France welcomed the terrorist group’s terms “with the greatest interest.” This foundational compromise remains the French security state’s permanent operating system because Paris routinely tolerates radical networks that export holy war abroad, trading long-term Western stability for temporary safety at home.