Putin Forgot Islamic State Thinks He’s Part of the West

Three facts stand out as clear amid the lack of hard information about the perpetrators of Friday’s appalling terrorist attack on Russia, and all three shine a light on dangers inherent in the new multipolar world we now inhabit.

The first is that, before the attack, Vladimir Putin dismissed a US warning that it was coming, both in public and to his top security officers. He called the American intelligence that Islamists were planning an assault on a large Russian venue blackmail, aimed at destabilizing his country — a vague goal he did nothing to explain. There was a time not so long ago when Putin understood that Washington considered Islamist radicalism a shared threat, taken so seriously that it was ring-fenced from other disputes. He would have used the warning, even if he couldn’t prevent the attack.