Europe has a problem, and it isn't subtle anymore.

What began weeks ago in France as student demonstrations over declining public services, cost-of-living pressures, and a weak national economy has metastasized into something else entirely. Nearly 1,000 French police officers injured. Roughly 2,400 people arrested. The Federation of Trade and Retail says close to 3,000 stores were hit by vandalism and looting in Paris, Marseille, and beyond. France deployed 60,000 police and security personnel just to manage Saturday's unrest. Marseille banned demonstrations outright. Unions have now called for nationwide strikes on November 5, and multiple European governments are warning their own citizens to avoid crowds and exercise caution inside France. Caution. Inside France. That's where we are.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has placed the blame squarely on "ultra-left radical groups," accusing them of manufacturing "profound unrest" deliberately, ahead of France's presidential election. President Macron rejected his interior minister's offer to resign but conceded there were real "intelligence and foresight failings" inside his own government — an admission, buried in diplomatic language, that nobody saw this coming until it was already burning.

And it isn't staying inside France's borders. Belgium erupted the same weekend — masked demonstrators clashing with riot police in Brussels, an overturned car, tear gas, bicycles burning near Brussels-South station. Belgium's interior minister said flatly that "what is unfolding in Brussels is no longer........

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