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In this report, Hal Brands and Peter Feaver assess America's strategic options after ISIS by examining four politico-military strategies for counter-terrorism. They conclude that an enhanced version of the approach that the Obama administration took to defeating ISIS represents the best strategy for waging a dangerous conflict that is likely to endure for many years.
Brands and Feaver contended that different American policy choices could have thwarted the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. They reached this conclusion after considering a range of counter-factual scenarios, including alternatives to US disengagement from Iraq in 2010–11, robust early intervention in the Syrian civil war, and action against ISIS before its assault on western Iraq. They argued, however, that the Iraq invasion did not make the rise of ISIS inevitable; quite the contrary, they showed that different, but plausible decisions by the Obama administration could have profoundly reduced the ISIS threat before it emerged.
The U.S. is rapidly heading down the path of confrontation with a rogue-state adversary, a potential foe that has proved rational yet ruthless in pursuit of its interests, including the aggressive development of its nuclear program and associated military capabilities. The rogue state this description best fits, however, may not be North Korea, but Iran.
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush worried less about rallying the nation to action against the terrorist threat than about warning an enraged public that the campaign would not end anytime soon. The president referred to the emerging “global war on terror” as a generational struggle—one that would go on well past his own tenure and one that would lack an emotionally satisfying endpoint such as V-J Day or the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But that regional approach may be part of the delay, said Hal Brands, a professor at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Pakistanis can read the writing on the wall as well as anyone can,” Brands said. Without a commitment from the U.S. to maintain their presence in Afghanistan and keep India from increasing its influence there, Pakistan is “really not going to break in a fundamental way with their longstanding proxies there,” Brands said.
In addition, some US think-tanks have backed a continued US troop presence in Iraq. A report by the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments called for the presence of 5,000-20,000 US troops in Post-ISIS Iraq to ensure that another ISIS-like insurgency does not emerge.
This is the question Hal Brands (who blogs over at Shadow Government) and I tackled in a recent article for Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies: “Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable? Spoiler alert: We argue the Islamic State threat was not inevitable. We take considerable pains to show how different choices by Presidents George W. Bush and Obama would have likely headed off the Islamic State threat long before it reached its peak in late 2014. Nothing in our argument transfers blame for the toll from the terrorists, where it belongs, to American policymakers, who could have made different choices that would have stymied the terrorists more effectively. But weighing carefully where American policies fell short is a vital part of policy analysis and essential to doing better against whatever terrorist threats emerge after the Islamic State.
