Obama's ideas about "outreach" and "engagement", negotiating and trying to reach compromises with even the worst enemies, seemed a little naive and unrealistic from the beginning and, seen in retrospect, have not been successful. But let us be fair: unless such approaches were made (and rebuffed) there would have been for decades to come a stream of complaints about "missed opportunities", broadly similar to the opportunities allegedly missed during the Cold War on which some historians (and not only historians) continue to harp to this day.

Finally, the economic downturn of 2008/9 created an important change in the order of priorities: unemployment became the cardinal political issue and is likely to remain so for some time to come. It did not come as a surprise that in his State of the Union address in late January, Obama devoted only the last few minutes to foreign policy and to terrorism just a sentence or two. It is an understandable reaction for a politician with an eye on forthcoming elections. But ultimately, as a Washington commentator noted recently, Obama's presidency will be judged not by health reform but by national security.

This brief outline of the political context in which the policy towards terrorism developed during Obama's first year in office. There was and still is a great deal of confusion and I suspect that even a more clear-sighted president would not have been able to move too far ahead of public opinion. Why make sacrifices because of a danger which might or might not materialise at some future date? This, after all, is one of the well-known weaknesses of democratic societies — the Pearl Harbour syndrome. Only a major shock, a trauma, will act as a wake-up call, generate the awareness of threats and galvanise people into action. And sometimes more than one might be needed. It seems also to be true that in their private lives people will take out insurance policies and take precautions against all manner of unlikely events, whereas as a group they tend to ignore very real dangers.

After one year in office, Obama is a disillusioned man. Like all other presidents in recent memory, he came to power with the firm intention to deal first and foremost (and if possible exclusively) with domestic issues. Like all other presidents, he was largely prevented from doing so by an unquiet and meddlesome world. The issue at stake at present is how long his re-education will take and how far it will go, and this also refers of course to his advisers, admirers and many other like-minded people.

How much urgency is there? A great deal, according to those who have been studying the problem of WMD and who have had access to various sources of information. It could well be that in recent decades the danger of terrorism has been overstated. In the two World Wars, more people were killed and more material damage caused in certain weeks than in a decade of terrorist attacks. But even in the 1970s, experts noted that our societies were becoming more vulnerable as the result of the use of new weapons. The real issue at stake now is not the attacks of the past but the coming dangers. Mega-terrorism has not yet arrived — even 9/11 was a stage between traditional terrorism and the shape of things to come.

What is our state of preparedness? A number of bipartisan committees appointed by the US Congress have been dealing in recent years with these issues. So have books and scientific papers, such as the reports World at Risk (2008) and The Clock is Ticking (2009) and books by Graham Allison, Rolf Mowatt Larssen, Matthew Bunn and others. Their findings were summarised in one sentence in World at Risk:

Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.