RUTHFULLY YOURS

If ISIS is retreating in Mosul, it is rapidly advancing in Manchester. The Caliphate is winning its war in Europe. Six months ago in Britain, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the ultra-pacifist Labour party leader who blamed the “war on terror” for the recent attacks in Manchester and London, would have been unthinkable.

As the Caliphate razed to the ground everything in its path, Europe reacted as if that were just the result of regrettable manners that should not concern her. The Islamists, however, had other plans.

“Why, in August 2015, did ISIS need to blow up and destroy that temple of Baalshamin? Because it was a temple where pagans before Islam came to adore mendacious idols? No, it was because that monument was venerated by contemporary Westerners, whose culture includes an educated love for ‘historical monuments’ and a great curiosity for the beliefs of other people and other times. And Islamists want to show that Muslims have a culture that is different from ours, a culture that is unique to them”. — Paul Veyne, archeologist.

The Islamic State is crumbling — if too slowly. More than two years have passed since French President François Hollande promised, “We will bomb Raqqa”. Sooner or later, ISIS will probably be reduced to a small enclave with no territorial continuity, and its chief, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, will be eliminated. It would, nevertheless, be most dangerous to dismiss these three years as a short parenthesis: Nazism did not last as long: “just” 12 years in power and five at war with the rest of Europe. The physical and cultural consequences of the Nazi tyranny are, unfortunately, still visible in Europe. The same will be said of the Islamic State. Three years of terror and conquests are not bad in for a war between the Caliphate vs. everyone else.

ISIS will leave behind an unprecedented terrorist infrastructure (277 Europeans killed on European soil in two years). If ISIS is retreating in Mosul, it is rapidly advancing in Manchester. The Caliphate is winning its war in Europe. Six months ago in the Britain, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the ultra-pacifist Labour party leader who blamed the “war on terror” for the recent attacks in Manchester and London, would have been unthinkable. His success is clearly linked to the recent bloodshed in British streets.

In the West, ISIS has assailed parliaments in Ottawa, cafés in Copenhagen, beaches in Nice, social centers in San Bernardino, metros and airports in Brussels, music festivals in Manchester, theaters, sports stadiums, restaurants and kosher markets in Paris, churches in Rouen, Christmas markets in Berlin, malls in Stockholm. Not bad for a “JV team”, as Barack Obama called the Caliphate.

ISIS has been an unparalleled attraction for the umma, the world community of the Islamic faithful: about 30,000 Muslims around the world — 6,000 from Europe — have left their homes to fight under the deadly black flag of the Caliph. ISIS was able to build a global network of terror. Jihadist groups such as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis in Egypt, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Caucasus Emirate in Russia, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, along with others, have all pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Caliphate has also become the wealthiest terror group in history. Sebastian Gorka, a White House advisor on radical Islam, said: “The attacks of September 11, 2001, cost barely $500,000. ISIS makes that in six hours! Do you feel safe?”

ISIS has made evil viral. The world was stunned when ISIS submerged the Western imagination in the public executions of journalists, the massacres of captured troops, markets for sexual slavery, executions of gays, and public drownings, burning people alive and crucifixions. “Never before in history have terrorists had such easy access to the minds and eyeballs of millions”, wrote Brendan Koerner, noting that “ISIS is winning the social media war”. Often, evil works. A few weeks ago, in Paris, a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi was killed by a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar”. The case was barely covered by the mainstream press. Then several French intellectuals demand the authorities to denounce it as a case of anti-Semitism. ISIS’s threats are now so intense that even academic experts of Islam, such as Gilles Kepel, are under police protection.

In a few months, the Islamic State cleared the historic colonial border of Sykes-Picot, conquered half of Syria, destroyed entire cities of prices antiquities such as Palmyra, reached the periphery of Baghdad, and kicked out the Iraqi army, in which the United States had invested 25 billion dollars. That is why many counter-terrorism analysts are intelligently asking if “ISIS is winning”.

ISIS’s main legacy, however, is devastation — both cultural and human. ISIS has been successful in making a blank slate, a sort of Islamic “year zero,” in which, after an apocalypse, history will start again — supposedly virgin and pure. The Caliphate will leave behind a Middle East more and more Islamic, not only in the landscape, but also in demography. ISIS swept away entire non-Muslim communities that will never return. Many Christian and Yazidi towns within its orbit will remain permanently empty due to the slaughter, the exile and the disappearance of survivors. The Islamic State has been able to destroy the ancient Christian community of Mosul.

A new study published in the weekly magazine Plos Medicine concluded that around 10,000 members of the ethnic and religious Yazidi minority were killed. The researchers estimated that 6,800 other Yazidis were kidnapped, with more than one third still missing.

“Christianity in Iraq is over”, said Canon Andrew White, the great Anglican vicar of Baghdad. ISIS succeeded, for the first time in 2000 years, in cancelling Christian communion in Nineveh. Professor Amal Marogy, a native of Iraq, said, at a conference at the Hudson Institute, that while infrastructure such as the Mosul Dam can be saved from ISIS, the eradication of the Christian presence in Iraq means “the end of a peaceful civilization”. There are commentators who are now noting that “ISIS wins when Christians leave the Middle East”.

The jihadist recently vandalized ancient Roman statues and artifacts at the Syrian archaeological site of al-Salhiye, known as Dura Europos. ISIS devastated the most famous capitals of ancient Mesopotamia, from Nimrud to Hatra. “This destruction is unprecedented in recent history”, according to Marina Gabriel, coordinator of the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives, an institute that tracks the destruction of Islamic State.

The Nimrud ziggurat, built almost 2900 years ago — the most spectacular sacred structure known in ancient Mesopotamia — does not exist anymore. ISIS terrorists devastated the Mosul Public Library, where 10,000 manuscripts were burned or stolen. ISIS also managed to erase of the entire Jewish history of Mosul, including the tombs of Jonah, Seth and Daniel. The Caliphate destroyed the first Assyrian city, Khorsabad. The greatest devastation, however, took place in Palmyra, the most important archaeological jewel of the Middle East. Palmyra delenda est. The Islamic State also eliminated thousands of years of Syrian and Iraqi history, pulverizing exquisite ancient treasures such as the temple of Bal.

As the Caliphate razed to the ground everything in its path, Europe reacted as if that were just the result of regrettable manners that should not concern her. The Islamists, however, had other plans. Professor Paul Veyne writes in his book on Palmyra:

“Why, in August 2015, did ISIS need to blow up and destroy that temple of Baalshamin? Because it was a temple where pagans before Islam came to adore mendacious idols? No, it was because that monument was venerated by contemporary Westerners, whose culture includes an educated love for ‘historical monuments’ and a great curiosity for the beliefs of other people and other times. And Islamists want to show that Muslims have a culture that is different from ours, a culture that is unique to them. They blew up that temple in Palmyra and have pillaged several archaeological sites in the Near East to show that they are different from us and that they don’t respect what Western culture admires”.

That is why, after Palmyra, the Islamic State attacked music halls and other Western symbols in Europe. The “JV team” might be losing ground, but so far it is winning the war of civilizations. Will the West be able not only to free Raqqa and Mosul, but also to reverse this cultural avalanche trying to crush it?

In a previous era, the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old American student, at the hands of the regime in North Korea likely would have been considered an act of war. On January 2, 2016, Warmbier was detained by regime officials, allegedly for attempting to steal a propaganda poster. Convicted of a “hostile act” against the state, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Upon his release into U.S. custody last week, regime officials said that he had been in a coma for nearly 15 months, and blamed a case of botulism. In reality, Warmbier was almost certainly tortured to death by the regime.

What happened to Otto Warmbier is what has been happening to North Korean citizens for more than 70 years, since Kim Il-sung transformed the new country into what it is today: a hermetically sealed prison state operated by a hereditary dictatorship that some scholars estimate has murdered around 1.5 million people in its network of concentration camps. Those not executed by the regime have fared little better: The country is beset by malnourishment and starvation (a famine in the mid 1990s killed half a million people); its GDP per capita is somewhere south of $1,000, putting North Korea behind Rwanda, Haiti, and Sierra Leone globally; and its shoddy infrastructure causes fires that can be seen from space.

None of these issues has ever been of much concern to the Kim regime, now in its third generation. Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather, is dedicated to building up North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Pyongyang has been alarmingly successful in pursuing that end. The regime has missiles that can reach Japan, and reportedly is not far from being able to strike the continental U.S. North Korea is also already exporting terror in less explosive ways. The regime is responsible for several devastating cyber attacks (recently, North Korean hackers paralyzed the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, as well as industries in 150 other countries), and Kim Jong-un successfully had an estranged member of the family assassinated in Kuala Lumpur in February, in broad daylight. Meanwhile, Pyongyang maintains friendly, mutually beneficial relationships with other terror-loving regimes, including Iran and Cuba.

The fact that North Korea is now a nuclear-armed state is in no small part a consequence of nearly three decades of ill-conceived American and international policy. The last three administrations all hoped to engage the regime in constructive agreements, usually providing some form(s) of aid in exchange for promises to halt the construction of nuclear weapons. The theory was that the aid would help to facilitate economic and ultimately political liberalization.

It has not worked out that way, largely because the regime in Pyongyang is not a trustworthy partner. The Kim regime cheated on the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which it received aid in exchange for halting plutonium and uranium enrichment; in 2002, it unilaterally withdrew from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; the regime reneged on its part in an agreement hammered out by the Bush administration in 2007 after less than a year; and Kim Jong-un violated the terms of the 2012 Leap Day agreement after just six weeks by testing a long-range missile.

But it’s also been a case of inconsistent, and often incoherent, American policy. Given the fact that the North Korean economy is almost entirely administered by the regime, these agreements have frequently meant that the U.S. is simultaneously sanctioning and subsidizing Pyongyang, and irregular enforcement by the U.S. Treasury Department took much of the bite out of the sanctions side.

North Korea’s brazen murder of an American citizen is reason to reevaluate.

Last year, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, which mandated sanctions on entities that have contributed to North Korea’s nuclear program or are complicit in its human-rights abuses, and on the country’s mineral and metal trade (a key source of the regime’s hard currency). The Trump administration should expand on this foundation.

Start with the banks. Since 2007, the U.S. has allowed North Korean financial transactions to flow more or less unencumbered through the U.S. banking system. Because almost all transactions in U.S. dollars pass through U.S. banks, the Treasury Department could, if it wishes, effectively end North Korea’s access to the dollar system, by supplementing the sanctions on North Korean banks imposed by current law with secondary sanctions on any banks that transact with North Korea. When the U.S. did this from 2005 to 2007, banks around the world — including in China — froze or closed North Korean accounts rather than risk their access to the U.S. financial system. Secondary sanctions are crucial to squeezing the regime. Pyongyang’s power relies on a network of bad actors: China launders its money, Iran buys its weapons, Cambodia re-flags its ships (which are smuggling the weapons). The U.S. must be willing to enforce sanctions against these actors, too.

While the U.S. more aggressively goes after the assets of North Korea’s elites — currently, only about 200 North Korean entities have had their assets frozen, compared to about 400 in Cuba and more than 800 in Iran — it could also agitate to have North Korean banks kicked out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, reducing its access to the global financial infrastructure. In 2012, the U.S. successfully pressured SWIFT to expel Iran. Meanwhile, the U.S. should be pressuring Europe, as well as countries in Africa and Asia, to stop employing North Korean slave laborers. As many as 100,000 North Koreans have been sent abroad by the regime (guess who’s building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar?), and defectors report that the regime confiscates 90 percent of their wages when they return home.

On the diplomatic front, North Korea receives an undeserved imprimatur as a member of the United Nations; the Trump administration should work to expel it, as well as from its other international memberships (e.g., the ASEAN Regional Forum and the International Olympic Committee). The State Department should also restore its designation as a state sponsor of terror, removed by the Bush administration in 2008.

And militarily? There are no good military options when it comes to North Korea, it’s true; setting aside the threat of a nuclear response, the North could wreak havoc on some of its neighbors just with conventional arms. But the U.S. can still wield a big stick. The idea that North Korea will stand down if the U.S. reduces its activity around the Korean Peninsula has been decisively proven false, so the U.S. should not hesitate to flex its muscle. The U.S. and South Korea should continue with joint military exercises. Meanwhile, the White House should work to strengthen missile-defense capacities throughout the region. The decision by South Korea’s newly elected president Moon Jae-in to suspend further deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system pending an environmental-impact assessment may be a precursor to rejecting THAAD altogether; the White House should work with President Moon to make sure that does not happen. The administration should also be working to strengthen its relationship with Japan.

Finally, it should go without saying that the United States should be working from the inside to subvert the regime.

It is persistently remarked that North Korea will never change until China stops shielding it, and there’s truth to that. But the United States has leverage, nonetheless, and especially now. And China’s position may be wavering: There are reports that Beijing is considering distancing itself from Pyongyang, and a younger generation of leaders in the Communist party is not at all convinced that bolstering North Korea is, in the long run, worth the trouble. These are pressure points that the United States can exploit.

There is no such thing as a “manageable” nuclear North Korea; ultimately, the Kim family and its crime syndicate must go. The U.S. should recognize the murderous regime in Pyongyang for what it is, and respond accordingly.