RUTHFULLY YOURS

We are living through a momentous phase in the twilight struggle against the Islamic State. In the past year or so, the jihadist outfit has been an increasingly assertive presence in Syria’s hinterland, deploying a band of “holy warriors” to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. Once more, an armed rebellion has blossomed there against the U.S.-led coalition, and, unless put down in short order, it promises to bring about an Islamic State resurgence.

The gathering of jihadist forces and the corresponding explosion of violence could prove potent enough to engulf Syria and consolidate another state with no law but God’s — a supposed kingdom of heaven on earth. This year, the pace of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets have been U.S. garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Kurdish-led troops who worked with the U.S. to defeat ISIS five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counterterrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates who have languished in jail since the SDF and the U.S.-led coalition swept away the final remnant of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate at Baghuz in March 2019.

Since shattering the Islamic State, the U.S. has maintained a small military footprint in Syria and Iraq to keep the peace. U.S. warplanes carry out air strikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces that conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos conduct missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. This year, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations, while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of activity mirrors that of 2023, when the U.S. carried out four strikes against the Islamic State.

Bolstering the tepid military campaign in Syria and Iraq is a necessary precondition to staving off the ISIS resurgence. Two distinct but mutually reinforcing attitudes stand in the way. Unless both are discarded by policymakers, ISIS will rise from the ashes and potentially reclaim a territorial safe haven that allows it to wreak mayhem and subvert the regional order.

The first mentality is characterized by a detached defeatism that regards ISIS as an inescapable, though not a formidable, threat. This was the regnant view throughout the West when the black flag of the Islamic State made its first appearance a decade ago. In a 2014 interview with the New Yorker, then-president Barack Obama pronounced the theocratic gang to be no more than a “JV squad” (compared with the varsity squad, al-Qaeda) that had limited capacity to create a totalitarian Islamic empire. After ISIS seized Mosul and conquered fully a third of Iraq in addition to bulldozing its border with Syria, this delusion was cast aside and American airpower was mobilized in the summer of 2014 to pulverize the caliphate. But aloofness remained the defining feature of U.S. policy in this protracted conflict. Even if ISIS’s strength had formerly been underestimated, conventional wisdom held that little could be done to quell its influence across the Middle East. It would remain a permanent menace.

The second prevalent view of ISIS is the polar opposite of defeatism: triumphalism. Ever since U.S. forces killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, in a raid in Syria in 2019, Donald Trump has claimed that his administration defeated the Islamic State. But this has been vastly overstated. Even that momentous raid was possible only because Trump reversed course: After initially ordering the withdrawal of all 2,000 troops in Syria in 2018, he decided to leave a contingent of troops in place to collect intelligence and conduct missions. Trump’s cheerleading conveys his view that America has only a fleeting role in — rather than an abiding commitment to — containing jihadist terror. While pretending to be the father of a great victory, Trump has shown no more interest than his predecessor did in the mayhem unleashed by ISIS.

These rival perspectives, defeatism and triumphalism, posit that ISIS can be safely ignored or at least easily contained while only the bare minimum of force is mustered against it. Once upon a time, analysts believed that such benign neglect would doom ISIS, which would, they predicted, burn itself out on the embers of its radical theology and pornographic violence. Alas, this confident prediction was not borne out by events. Instead, the Islamic State went from strength to strength until its territory approached the size of the United Kingdom. Such an expansive entity had to be eliminated by brute force. The robust use of military might against its marauders revealed that, although they are a powerful and dynamic movement, the jihadist enterprise is scarcely invincible.

It was once feared that patient and persistent military action would lead to a regional conflagration. Ironically, it now seems obvious that the failure to marshal sufficient armed force is having a similar effect. Indeed, the growing aversion to aggressive military action against this treacherous foe is throwing off the regional equilibrium, to the detriment of the U.S. position in the War on Terror. The ingrained bias of the foreign-policy establishment against “forever wars” inhibits the United States from suppressing the jihadist menace in sensible ways. A more calibrated approach would temper public expectations by promising to avoid strategic calamity on the one hand and, on the other, prohibitively expensive measures. It is only by accepting the indefinite nature of the war against jihadist terrorism that America can sustain the commitment necessary to combat the severest manifestations of the threat and assist local forces to create the conditions for eventually overcoming it.

To date, this grinding conflict offers three main lessons to candid observers: First, underestimating adversaries is a losing proposition; second, military power is a vital tool to protect civilians and local allies against our common enemies; third, important battlefield victories can be squandered by precipitous scuttles. The Biden administration compounded these errors in Afghanistan by gratuitously allowing the Taliban to regain power and al-Qaeda to return to its Afghan sanctuaries. With the benefit of hindsight, the lessons are abundantly clear. This makes the widespread ignorance or denial of them baffling — further proof of what Winston Churchill called “the confirmed unteachability of mankind.”

It’s worth recalling that many observers greeted the emergence of the Islamic State as if it were a new enemy. And its control of its own fledgling nation-state — based in Raqqa, with a new constitution based on sharia and a new currency — did indeed set it apart from its predecessors. But ISIS was anything but new. As Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan illustrated in their searching study ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, “the United States has been at war with ISIS for the better part of a decade under its various incarnations,” which include al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). By 2010, AQI was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told the U.S. Congress in 2013. The period during which it looked as if a stable Iraq might be possible after the U.S. troop surge and the subsequent “Anbar awakening” had routed AQI was tragically brief.

It is no exaggeration to say that two events brought the enemy back to life. First, as revolution swept the Arab world, Bashar al-Assad incited catastrophic civil strife by crushing pro-democracy protests across Syria. The country promptly fractured along sectarian and ideological lines, becoming a theater for warring militias and armies. In this maelstrom, the Syrian revolt devolved into a clash between the Assad regime and psychopathic jihadist forces. Meanwhile, after the Obama administration withdrew U.S. forces and diplomatic heft from Iraq, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reverted to the cruder instruments of sectarian rule. The corrupting effect of majority-Shiite tyranny hollowed out the Iraqi army, which ceded territory to a considerably smaller force of Sunni “holy warriors” fighting under the ISIS banner.

The consequences of this regional disorder are still being felt. Except for the hasty reintroduction of U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to disrupt and degrade the Islamic State, there has been little appetite in Washington to reassert strength and resolve in a way that would lead to ISIS’s lasting defeat. And so successive administrations have reluctantly availed themselves of air strikes and Special Forces raids but lacked a cohesive strategy to stop another retrenchment of what is the most violent and largest jihadist force in modern memory. (Consider: On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda commanded an army of 400. Fifteen years later, ISIS had mobilized some 40,000 people to travel to Syria and Iraq from a dizzying array of countries around the world.)

The conditions that birthed ISIS — the civil war in Syria and an overtly sectarian regime in Baghdad, both of which inflamed Sunni grievances — have been left to fester as part of America’s wider malign neglect of the Muslim Middle East in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in a demonstration of classic balance-of-power theory, the lack of a dominant hegemon has spawned a violent competition for power. Armed groups have seized the weakness of the current state system as an opportunity to impose adjustments through force. In Iraq, the failure to check Iran and its Shiite proxies has allowed a variety of Sunni gangs to present themselves as defenders of last resort to an embattled Sunni minority. In Syria, the failure of Western powers to depose Assad and establish a modicum of order has given much of Syrian territory over to brigands of the worst kind.

Ever since the Syrian revolt began at the end of what was ludicrously termed the “Arab Spring,” there has been a strong case for ushering the bloodstained Assad regime from power and establishing a new provisional government backed by American power and Western aid. In August 2011, President Obama embraced that goal when he vowed that Assad must “step aside,” but he did not arm the Free Syrian Army or launch strikes to neutralize Assad’s air force. This policy of abstention continued even after Damascus targeted civilian populations with chemical weapons in direct violation of Obama’s “red line” against their use.

A more assertive policy of the sort favored by Obama’s national-security team at the time could still do some good. It would entail dispatching a small contingent of U.S. ground troops — proposals commonly range from 20,000 to 30,000 — to carve out and defend an enclave that would be free of the writ of both the Assad regime and the Islamic State. This belated measure would provide a protective canopy for would-be refugees while serving as a base for offensive operations against jihadists. Such a limited military mission could be sufficient to uproot ISIS from the haven it has maintained and ensure that its grisly theocratic project does not get back up off the ground.

Admittedly, such an approach looks more impractical in an era when the tightening constraints on Pax Americana are narrowing the range of options available for U.S. strategy in the War on Terror. What’s more, neither major political party gives much respect to the mantle of global leadership, preferring to offload our quasi-imperial burdens in the lands of Islam. But the governing class ought to consider how much more force will be required — and in more adverse conditions — if ISIS is permitted to reconstitute its statelet and begins to orchestrate a new campaign of global terror. If Western powers have no stomach for regime change in Damascus, the least they could do is pull Syria back from the brink of a renewed civil war while remaining vigilant against the most formidable Sunni jihadist gang on earth. Otherwise, the ideological prestige of theocratic violence that is settling on parts of the Middle East might beget a terrifying proliferation of jihad.

The scourge of holy war is an old story. But one shudders to think of what new calamities it may have in store if passivity remains the defining feature of Western statecraft. It is always difficult to imagine the grave dangers arising in far-off lands, especially when the West has grown accustomed to living with a wide margin of safety. But if history is any guide, a policy of reduced responsibility in the face of an implacable enemy will narrow that margin of safety dramatically. And perhaps even suddenly.