On Monday, Tony Blair addressed a military think tank in London and stated that the West should continue to intervene in countries under threat from Islamist extremism. According to the former PM, who led Britain as it joined the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, an isolationist policy would serve no purpose because:
Islamism, both the ideology and the violence, is a first-order security threat and, unchecked, it will come to us even if centred far from us… Its defeat will come ultimately through confronting both the violence and the ideology, by a combination of hard and soft power.
His declaration was along the lines of the one he made in October 2015 at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City. Then Blair said that the West would be unable to vanquish Islamist terrorism if it doesn’t first intervene to eradicate the ideology. ‘The reality is that in parts of the Muslim community a discourse has grown up which is profoundly hostile to peaceful co-existence,’ he warned.
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