WASHINGTON — Americans want the Obama administration to get tougher with the ISIS following the carnage in Paris, but many of the measures now being proposed could actually make the threat worse, counter-terrorism experts said.

Republican presidential candidates, lawmakers and others are calling for deploying U.S. ground forces to the Middle East, using air power to create a Syria safe zone to train anti-ISIS fighters and barring Syrian refugees.

“There is no compelling reason to believe that anything we are doing will be sufficient,” Republican Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared on Tuesday in a speech in which he proposed intervention by a European and Arab ground force backed by 10,000 U.S. military advisers and trainers.

U.S. counter-terrorism experts, some of whom have dealt with Islamic radicalism for decades, cautioned that reducing the ISIS threat will be a long, complicated process – and that more mass casualty attacks in Europe and North America are likely in the meantime.

Moreover, they warned, some steps proposed in the wake of the Paris attacks, like deploying ground troops, risk backfiring by feeding the group’s apocalyptic narrative that it is defending Islam against an assault by the West and its authoritarian Arab allies.

“In circumstances like this, a lot of people lose their heads and call for the most draconian actions,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator in the Clinton and Obama administrations. “Terrorism is all about over-reaction, provoking an overreaction.”

President Obama’s incremental ISIS strategy, which relies on airstrikes and modest support to local ground forces in Iraq and Syria, has come under renewed criticism from Republican opponents, among others, after the Paris attacks.

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said on Tuesday Obama’s reliance on air power was not enough and called for an increased American troop presence on the ground in Iraq. The former Florida governor has been calling for more U.S. special operations forces to be embedded with Iraqi units to help identify enemy targets

Current and former counter-terrorism officials agreed that more can be done, including stepped-up airstrikes, better intelligence sharing, a more robust attack on Islamic State’s finances and larger U.S. special forces teams to assist Iraqi security forces and Syrian rebels.

Thomas Lynch, a former special assistant to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said France, Belgium and other European nations must also devote greater resources to their counter-terrorism and intelligence services.

They should implement legal changes giving those services more authority to holding terrorism suspects for interrogation longer than 24 hours and permitting more aggressive raids aimed at disrupting plots, said Lynch, now a research fellow at National Defense University.