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The Isis attack on a concert audience at the Crocus City Hall in a suburb of Moscow, which killed more than 140 people, has added further poison to an international political atmosphere already envenomed by wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

The murder of young concert goers by Isis gunmen, acting with the same savagery as their counterparts in Paris in 2015 and Manchester in 2017, ought to lead countries to show solidarity against a death-cult that targets them all. But Isis leaders will be gratified to see that the massacre has, on the contrary, exacerbated tensions between Moscow, the West and their allies. Each side blames the other for allowing the slaughter to take place through wilful negligence or secret complicity.

The US embassy in Moscow had alerted US citizens in Moscow on 7 March to avoid large gatherings, though its claim to inside knowledge of Isis plans sounds shaky since the warning only covered the next 48 hours. President Vladimir Putin hinted that the Isis gunmen were trying to escape to Ukraine, but produced no hard evidence for the accusation.

In most respects, the Crocus City Hall massacre was similar to many others carried out by al-Qaeda, Isis and other fundamentalist groups over the past quarter century. These very public atrocities are directed at inflicting maximum civilian casualties by carefully planned assault on a soft but high-profile target. Fear is amplified by videoing the violence before posting it online and, where possible, by choosing a media hub as the site of the action. Using limited resources Isis can give the impression of being a vast organisation, its tentacles spread though out the world, rather than a small and fragmented one.

But for “terrorism” – using the word to mean unlawful violence against civilians rather than as a term of abuse – to be truly effective requires a certain complicity on the part of governments on the receiving end of an outrage. The real danger is that governments over-react, exploiting popular calls for revenge to carry out foreign interventions or communal punishments in the name of safeguarding the homeland. This most famously happened after 9/11 when President George W Bush overthrew the Taliban and invaded Iraq, declaring that the US would hunt “the terrorists in every dark corner of the earth.” Saddam Hussein was accused of harbouring the al-Qaeda headquarters in Iraq, though it was situated in part of Iraqi Kurdistan outside his control.

After the Hamas raid on Israel on 7 October, President Joe Biden presciently warned Israelis not to make the same mistake as the US had done after 9/11. Curiously, he then jumped into the very trap that he had pointed out, by greenlighting unconditionally the Israeli destruction of Gaza.........

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