He avoided anything truly embarrassing or catastrophic (although I’m sure the Israelis chuckled when Trump arrived in Israel and announced that he had just gotten back from the Middle East). And when you add in all of the strain that the White House was under in the weeks prior to this trip, Trump’s advisers can pat themselves on the back for having pulled off a trip without major incident. We should be clear, though -- one reason the trip came off fairly well is that Trump started by visiting two countries, Israel and Saudi Arabia, that were eager and even desperate to please him. And although Trump’s rather harsh tone and cringe-worthy personal interactions at the NATO summit may not qualify as gaffes -- they simply reflected his true self -- they do mean that Trump undoubtedly missed an opportunity to really establish himself as the leader of the Atlantic alliance.

"ISIS will go down fighting, of course, and do enormous amounts of harm in its death throes," Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, two U.S. defense analysts, wrote in a recent assessment of how the extremist group will be defeated.

The U.S. may need to keep as many as 20,000 troops and other military personnel in Iraq, even after the Islamic State is driven out, to stabilize the country, the former head of the Pentagon’s policy shop said Thursday. A postwar force of between 4,000 to 8,000 American troops “is probably sufficient” to help local security forces ensure security in Iraq as ISIS faces defeat in its final stronghold in Mosul, Eric Edelman, the Pentagon’s top policy official during the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview. The U.S. forces would likely be deployed as advisers, not combat troops, to support Iraq’s police and military forces, he said. “We are dealing with an an ISIS that is severely, severely weakened” after nearly two years of constant war against U.S.-backed Iraqi and Kurdish forces, said Mr. Edelman, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a Washington-based defense think tank.

Barring some catastrophic policy blunder by the United States, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, will eventually be defeated. The US-led international coalition that has assembled to fight the most formidable terrorist organization of modern times overmatches ISIS on every relevant dimension – manpower, lethality, financial resources, global reach. As such, the defeat of ISIS, at least in its current form, is only a matter of time. But the group’s defeat will not resolve all of the questions that have been raised by its emergence. Looking forward, US policymakers will have to decide what to do next in America’s ongoing ‘global war on terror’

 “A world is collapsing before our eyes,” wrote Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United States, upon learning of Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016. Many American internationalists probably felt just the same way. For roughly four generations prior to Trump’s victory, the United States had pursued a robust and engaged internationalism supported by a bipartisan political consensus. In November 2016, however, American voters elected a candidate who condemned many aspects of that internationalist tradition in harsh and unapologetic tones. The country that had spent decades erecting an international order based on free trade, multilateral cooperation, a global alliance network, and the promotion of democratic values had now chosen as its leader a man who voiced skepticism — if not outright hostility — toward nearly all the key components of this ambitious American project. In the wake of the election, there was thus a pervasive sense of despair among many foreign leaders—and no less, among members of the American foreign policy establishment. “The U.S. is, for now, out of the world order business,” Robert Kagan wrote. After more than 70 years, American internationalism was pronounced politically dead.

Lastly, all the funding in the world cannot compensate for poor foreign policy choices. As Hal Brands has argued, Trump’s conduct of foreign policy to date has been a blend of incoherence and incompetence. This does not augur well for the future.