True, statistics alone cannot convey terrorism’s unique resonance. It combines the wrong-place-wrong-time randomness of a natural disaster with the precision of a hate crime. It can reach influential, and otherwise seemingly invulnerable, communities, like marathon runners in Boston, or bankers in Lower Manhattan. Meanwhile, bathtub manufacturers do not spend their days plotting more effective death traps. And it will always be easier to incite fear of foreigners than of our neighbors.

Whatever the explanation, our intense focus on terrorism has helped spawn a veritable counterterrorism industrial complex, made up of new government agencies, private firms and an army of well-funded experts, who keep the issue atop the national agenda.

As a result, without much empirical rationale, concern about terrorism is rising: Today, 80 percent of Americans reportedly consider terrorism a “critical threat,” compared with less than 60 percent citing North Korea, which may soon be able to strike the United States territory with a nuclear missile.

Little surprise, then, that both major parties compete in rhetorical one-upmanship to demonstrate toughness on terrorism and govern accordingly. We watched this dynamic play out over several years serving in senior national security positions at the White House and State Department, in an administration that came to office concerned about the overemphasis on terrorism.

We saw firsthand how parallel policy-making processes, one for counterterrorism and another for everything else, often made conflicting recommendations — for example, over whether to strike terrorist targets in a given country or forego military action that could undermine the host government. We saw the degree to which policy arguments couched in the language of counterterrorism carried inordinate weight. As a consequence, advocates in our internal conversations cast their arguments in counterterrorism terms.

For example, on Syria, those who favored increasing support to groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad argued he was a magnet for terrorists who would flock to Syria so long as he remained in power. Those dubious of such support pointed to troubling ties between those same opposition groups and Al Qaeda. On Iraq, those reluctant to condition American support for Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government on its willingness to wield power more inclusively cited the imperative to support its fight against the Islamic State. Others argued its governance style drove Iraqi Sunnis into the jihadists’ arms.

Reasonable minds can debate the result of these decisions. But arguments on all sides often became substitutes for more vexing discussions of America’s role in the world, its responsibility (or not) to intervene, and the importance (or not) of defending human rights. Claiming to have found the better way to fight terrorism became the surest way to win the debate.