Yesterday afternoon, two members of the National Guard were shot in the head near Farragut West metro station in Washington, D.C, just a few blocks away from the White House. Both soldiers were left critically injured—they were initially reported as having died—and the attacker was subsequently shot by responding troops and law enforcement.

The suspect has been named as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He arrived in the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome—an evacuation and resettlement programme for Afghans linked to the U.S. mission, following the chaotic American withdrawal that year—and overstayed his visa. He applied for asylum in 2024, and was granted refugee status this year. A relative told NBC News that Lakanwal had served in the Afghan army for 10 years alongside U.S. Special Forces. So far, he is believed to have acted alone and is not cooperating with the investigation. As such, any possible motive remains a mystery. Nonetheless, the FBI are currently treating this as an act of terrorism. 

In the words of U.S. president Donald Trump himself: “This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror. It was a crime against our entire nation. It was a crime against humanity.” During that same address, Trump vowed to investigate all Afghan refugees who entered the country under the Biden administration. “Nobody knew who was coming in,” he said. “We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country. If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them.” The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has also announced that it will immediately and indefinitely stop “the processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals.”

It is telling that this sort of response to a similar attack would be almost unthinkable in Europe. Trump’s first reaction was to assume this was a terror attack, to pause all new visa applications, and to look at any Afghans who had recently arrived. The identity of the suspect was not hidden until the last possible moment, nor were the public asked to not “look back in anger.” Trump did not immediately wring his hands with concern over how this might cause a backlash against law-abiding Afghans or Muslims—though Shawn VanDiver, president of Afghan advocacy group AfghanEvac, made the now routine request that people do not “demonise the Afghan community for the deranged choice” the suspect made. As far as the administration went, however, the first priority was safety. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Trump has since asked him to add 500 more troops to the nation’s capital.

This is, of course, exactly how a government should respond to a potential terror attack against two members of the country’s military. Compare this to the very wet responses of Europe’s governments when faced with similar situations. Rather than safety, the priority is maintaining community cohesion. When Axel Rudakubana, the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan migrants, slaughtered three young girls at a dance class last summer, the British state’s first reaction was to attempt to suppress his identity—an act that stoked tensions more than it calmed them, as rumours swirled online and culminated in a series of violent, nationwide riots. Similarly, in the aftermath of an attack on a Manchester synagogue last month, we saw the same tendency to mitigate fallout against Muslims. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood stressed in the House of Commons that the government’s “posture at religious sites is one of maximum vigilance. That applies to the Jewish community, and it also applies to British Muslims.” She also emphasised that “violence directed at any community—be they Jewish or Muslim, and of all faiths or none—is an attack on our entire country.” This message is fine in and of itself, but why choose this moment in particular to remind people that Muslims can also face discrimination? Why did Mahmood feel the need to draw national attention away from the Jewish community in the wake of an antisemitic attack that left two people dead? The answer is that ever-elusive community cohesion.  

In cases where the perpetrator is an immigrant, there is certainly never any reckoning with mass migration as a concept. When a failed Syrian asylum seeker knifed three people to death and wounded many more at a ‘Festival of Diversity’ in Solingen, Germany, in August 2024, Olaf Scholz’s government floated some marginal changes to weapons law and EU asylum rules. But there was no serious attempt to question the policies and logic that brought the attacker to Germany in the first place, and that failed to deport him once his asylum claim was rejected. And this year, after an Afghan national who should already have left the country stabbed a toddler and others in a park in Aschaffenburg, ministers once again talked about “zero tolerance” and speeding up removals of dangerous individuals—all while insisting that Germany would remain a “country of immigration.”

No wonder, then, that attacks like these continue to happen. Until European governments start prioritising public safety and start taking a hard look at the immigration and asylum systems themselves, nothing will change. Even when people are killed, the focus remains fixed on massaging community tensions and maintaining the myth of multiculturalism. Meanwhile, the hard questions remain unanswered. 

Trump’s response to the Washington D.C. shooting will no doubt be denounced as populist or even racist in all the expected circles. But he is right to recognise that the state’s primary responsibility lies in keeping its citizens safe, over defending open borders or slavishly protecting the feelings of various minorities. European leaders can sneer at that all they like. What they cannot do is pretend that their own approach has kept their streets safe. In the end, governments must choose whether they stand with their people or with an ideology. Washington has at least remembered which side it is supposed to be on.

Lauren Smith is a London-based columnist for europeanconservative.com