Twenty one years ago American historian Samuel Huntingdon famously argued that the world was heading towards a "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and the Christian democratic West.
Some critics dismissed his argument as a fumbling towards a new enemy now that the Cold War was over.
But he had a good student living in the caves of Afghanistan and on 9/11 Osama bin Laden proved Huntingdon's point.
Within days the United States had come out with a "you're either with us or with the terrorists" slogan, announced the War on Terror, and began invasion plans not only for Afghanistan but Iraq too.
From the perspective of many followers of Islam the WoT very quickly began to look more like a War on Muslims - the clash was underway.
Defence spending soared in the West. Spy agencies' budgets enjoyed a bonanza.
Rights preventing detention without trial were undermined, habeas corpus came under threat, America began using drones to conduct extrajudicial executions of alleged terrorist enemies (including of its own citizens) in Pakistan, the Yemen and Somalia.
The argument was, and remains, that al Qaeda and its franchise posed a strategic threat to American and European interests.
It did not, and is many decades from being in a position to do so.
Notwithstanding the mass killings in London on 7/7, the Madrid bombings and other atrocities, al Qaeda cannot cut fuel supplies, disrupt trade routes, and cripple economies.
That kind of war against the West could only conceivably be carried out by the Russian commonwealth, China, or both.
Indeed the WoT has exposed weaknesses in the West's combat potential and political structures that play into the hands of strategic rivals.
By the end of the noughties the war in Iraq was over. This year the Afghan campaign is due to end.
The WoT had gone out of fashion and the Clash of Civilizations caused by the Bush administration's overreaction to al Qaeda began to look like a tense standoff.
Then along came Islamic State. It's found a new way to cause overreaction - the televised beheading of Westerners.
Specifically, of those who had already risked their lives to expose the suffering of ordinary Muslims in Syria, who had in large part been abandoned by the West in the revolution against Bashar al Assad.
It's perfectly normal to feel a visceral rage at the murder of Alan Henning and his fellow hostages, to demand their killers and the structures behind them be annihilated.
But attack is precisely what IS wishes to provoke - to keep the Clash alive.
So far their tactic has had strategic effect. With no serious threat to the West, IS has provoked the US, and her allies into airstrikes across Iraq and Syria.
In Iraq they may hold IS back - but in Syria they are little more than punishment raids that have resulted in new recruits to IS and a reinforcement of Mr Assad's military standing.
They have reinvigorated the Clash of Civilizations without any prospect of success. That will only come when the two civilizations comprehend mutual respect - a very distant prospect.
Rudyard Kipling wrote: "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet".
It's often forgotten that he added: "But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
"When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the end of the earth!"
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