Who says Donald Trump doesn’t keep his promises? On the campaign trail, the reality TV star pledged to “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State. And that’s what he has been doing since coming to office: In August, for example, the United States-led coalition dropped more than 5,000 bombs on ISIS positions, “the most of any month in the three-year campaign to defeat ISIS,” according to the U.S. Air Forces Central Command.

Bombing the shit out of ISIS has become Trump’s signature move. “What we’re doing is every time we are attacked from this point forward … we are hitting them 10 times harder,” the president told reporters on Friday, in the wake of the latest ISIS-inspired terror attack in New York City, vowing that the U.S. would “hit [ISIS] like you folks won’t believe.”

But here’s the problem: Trump may want to sound tough and strong yet his strategy — if you can even call a response based on bombs, bombs, and more bombs a “strategy” — only makes the United States a much bigger ISIS target and puts many more innocent American lives at risk.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider the federal criminal complaint against Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbek immigrant accused of using a truck to murder eight people in Manhattan last week on behalf of ISIS. He began planning the attack, it states, “approximately one year ago.” Saipov, the complaint continues, “was motivated to commit the attack after viewing a video in which [ISIS leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi … questioned what Muslims in the United States and elsewhere were doing to respond to the killing of Muslims in Iraq.”

Sound familiar? Well, Saipov isn’t of course the first Al Qaeda or ISIS attacker to refer to the deaths of Muslim civilians abroad as a motivating factor for murderous violence inside the United States. Faisal Shahzad, the Time Square bomber, told a federal judge in 2010 that he wanted to avenge U.S. drone strikes in his native Pakistan that “kill women, children, they kill everybody.”

The Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, in the words of a former colleague, “had been unhappy about U.S. foreign policy and had made several comments that the U.S. should not be in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Dzhokar Tsarnaev, one of the two Boston Marathon bombers, told interrogators, according to the Washington Post, that “the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack.” Eyewitnesses say the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen told the 911 dispatcher that he had attacked the Pulse nightclub in 2016 “because he wanted America to stop bombing” Afghanistan.

As Marc Sageman, a leading terrorism expert and former CIA case officer, once said to me: “At what point are you going to start listening to the perpetrators who tell you why they’re doing this?”

The political and pundit classes, however, don’t hear the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” or “drones”; they are too busy obsessing over the phrase “Allahu Akbar” or examining the length of an attacker’s beard. And so it remains one of the the biggest taboos of all: Citing the role that a belligerent U.S. foreign policy seems to play in provoking terror attacks against the United States.