Does The U.S. Have The Will To Confront And Defeat The Islamic State?

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Robert Kagan, Wall Street Journal: The Crisis of World Order

After Paris, Islamic State’s rise and Syria’s agony are shaking a weakened Europe—and the international system. Can the U.S. summon the resolve to respond?

For several years, President Barack Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East: First, there could be no return of U.S. ground troops in sizable numbers to the region; and second, undergirding the first, the U.S. has no interests in the region great enough to justify such a renewed commitment. The crises in the Middle East could be kept localized. There might be bloodshed and violence—even mass killing, in Syria and Libya and elsewhere, and some instability in Iraq—but the fighting, and its consequences, could be contained. The core elements of the world order would not be affected, and America’s own interests would not be directly threatened so long as good intelligence and well-placed drone strikes prevented terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Even Islamic State could be “degraded” and “contained” over time.

These assumptions could have been right—other conflicts in the Middle East have remained local—but they have proven to be wrong. The combined crises of Syria, Iraq and Islamic State have not been contained. Islamic State itself has proven both durable and capable, as the attacks in Paris showed. The Syrian conflict, with its exodus of refugees, is destabilizing Lebanon and Jordan and has put added pressure on Turkey’s already tenuous democracy. It has exacerbated the acute conflict between Sunnis and Shiites across the region.

WNU Editor: Robert Kagan's analysis on what has been the consequence of President Obama's foreign policy is well articulated ,,,, but his solutions and recommendations are hard (if not impossible) for me to accept .... i.e. deploying 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Syria to create a safe haven and to defeat ISIS.