How should the US tackle ISIS?

While the fight between the Islamic State and the forces arrayed against it rages in the Middle East, another brutal battle is brewing in the United States over who is winning the war. In the US these days, all issues – whatever and wherever – soon fall into the maw of the country’s polarized domestic politics.

Thus, the effort to contain and destroy the Islamic State has become yet another referendum on President Barack Obama’s stewardship of US foreign policy. Is he “tough” enough? Or, as some of his opponents have preferred to frame the issue, does he really love his country?

The puerile level of the domestic debate should mislead no one about the seriousness of the crisis. For now, the Islamic State’s main focus is the creation of its would-be caliphate and the frenetic and bloody effort to force all under its rule to live accordingly. But its ideology suggests far more ambitious projects, starting with war against nearby Shia populations, who, as apostates, must be slaughtered. There is no quarter in the Islamic State’s worldview; its interpretation of the Koran does not allow it.

The Islamic State may never achieve the global reach its leaders seek; indeed, it may ultimately control only the Syrian and Iraqi badlands. But its effect across the Arab world has been profound, especially among a younger generation that has lost hope and respect for the region’s secular authorities. Many young Muslims, including some in the West, have been highly susceptible to the Islamic State’s slick and effective propaganda.

A review of that propaganda recalls Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the 1920s: an announcement of a far more ambitious set of objectives than the group’s current circumstances would justify. Beyond subjugating those in the caliphate, exterminating the Shia, and gaining custodianship of Islam’s holy cities in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State ultimately embraces an apocalyptic vision, to be realized through a sectarian totalitarianism that embodies divine revelation – and thus envisions no compromise or competition.

Meanwhile, back in the frozen capital of the world’s remaining superpower, the political meat grinder has been readied. Obama’s draft authorization for use of military force (AUMF) – essentially a legal refresh of the last AUMF in 2002 – has turned into another opportunity to showcase disunity in the face of crisis. Obama’s opponents are delighting in picking apart the threads of the draft resolution in yet another effort to discredit his administration.

Wordsmithing a draft resolution, it can be argued, is what legislators are paid to do. But the actions by some in Congress go far beyond showing the required due diligence. It seems that they are considerably more concerned about Obama than about the Islamic State.

Obama has sought, with some success, to marshal a multinational coalition to confront the Islamic State; most important, he has induced cooperation from countries in the region that, afraid to speak and act clearly, had hoped that putting their heads in the sand would make the threat go away. To keep these countries on board, he has been at pains to show that extremism is a universal concern that transcends the Muslim world.

But Obama’s effort to universalize the problem of extremism has exposed him to the charge of relativizing the Islamic State – and thus ignoring its true nature – by claiming a moral equivalence between it and political extremism elsewhere in the world, including in the US. That is what has caused his detractors to question his patriotism, a political capital offense in many countries, and nowhere more so than in America.

Given that Obama will leave office in less than two years, the drone of unending criticism is excessive. But it is also dangerous. For the rest of the world, and for the Islamic State, it creates the impression that America is weak, divided, and unable to lead. For that, the blame falls not on the president, but on the entire US political system and its media enablers.

It used to be America’s economic staying power that the world questioned. After all, it was the US that first entered the terra incognita of the post-industrial era, in which manufactured goods were increasingly produced elsewhere, while employment and growth shifted to financial and other professional services.

But now the world worries – with considerable justification – about the American political system. The atmosphere has become so divisive that Congress, it seems, cannot even ensure continued financing for the Department of Homeland Security, let alone approve an AUMF.

The US prides itself on its diversity and on the strength that has derived from it. Today, however, diversity no longer yields unity – the e pluribus unum that graces America’s coins and banknotes. Unless that changes, the US will lack the strength needed to prevail over such singular threats as the Islamic State.

This article is published in collaboration with Project Syndicate. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Christopher R. Hill is currently Dean of the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and the author of Outpost.

Image:  A U.S. flag flies over the skyline of lower Manhattan in New York. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson.