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He may be a character from history’s funhouse, sent to remind us that contingency’s reign is great, but his origins are to be found in the conjoined histories of the West and the rest. More recently, Gaddafi’s border police and coast guard, trained and assisted by the EU, have been greatly valued by the ‘good Europeans’ for helping keep out the Africans. Liberal war’s last service is to locate the source of violence in the natives, on the backward peoples of the non-European world, not on the Westerners who exploit, invade, occupy and bomb. If we go by official rhetoric, the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently has to do with religious and ethnic prejudice among the peoples there, who irrationally keep killing one another as well as Western soldiers kindly sent to modernise them. The great cost of liberal war is clarity.

War is not a morality tale, but a violent mutual embrace. Serious thinking begins with acceptance that we in the West are now combatants, and ethical responsibility requires seeing beyond the seductions of liberalism.

The underlying assumption behind all of these policies is that U.S. pressure—you know, what Pompeo likes to call “swagger”—will eventually force acknowledged adversaries to do whatever it is the United States demands of them, and that other states won’t find ways to evade, obstruct, divert, dilute, hedge, hinder, or otherwise negate what Washington is trying to do. It assumes we are still dwelling in the unipolar moment and that all that matters is the will to use the power at America’s disposal.

this approach denies that there are any real trade-offs between any of these objectives

it is not hard to understand why hawks think they can get away with this approach to foreign policy, at least in the short term. Despite many recent missteps, the United States is still very powerful. Its active assistance is still something that some other states want, and its “focused enmity” is something no state can completely ignore. The United States is still a vast and valuable market, the dollar remains the world’s main reserve currency, and the ability to cut other states or financial institutions off from the infrastructure of global finance gives Washington unusual leverage. Many U.S. allies are accustomed to deferring to Washington and are understandably reluctant to do anything that might encourage the United States to withdraw support. Trump and company can also count on the support of authoritarian soul mates in the European right (including the present rulers in Poland and Hungary), as well as America’s morally compromised allies in the Middle East

there are even more potent reasons why this bullying approach has produced no major foreign-policy successes so far and is unlikely to yield significant success in the future. First of all, even much weaker states are loath to succumb to blackmail, for one very good reason: Once you’ve shown you can be coerced, there may be no end to subsequent demands. Moreover, when the United States insists on complete capitulation (i.e., by calling for total North Korean disarmament or regime change in Iran), it gives the target state zero incentive to comply. And given Trump’s amply demonstrated dishonesty and fickle approach to diplomacy, why would any foreign leader believe any assurances he (or Pompeo) might give? Put all this together, and you have a perfect recipe for “no deal.”

Should Iran eventually restart its nuclear weapons program—which has been in abeyance for more than a decade—the rest of the world is not going to suddenly line up behind the United States and support more forceful action. Why? Because everyone knows that it was the United States—not Iran—that killed the deal, and there won’t be a ton of sympathy for America when it starts bleating about Iran’s response. America’s Middle East clients will no doubt be happy if Washington decides to fight another war on their behalf, but don’t count on a lot of help from them or from anyone else

other states are starting to develop workarounds designed to limit U.S. leverage, most notably by designing financial arrangements outside the network of institutions that Washington has been using to coerce allies and adversaries into compliance. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman recently wrote in FP, “instead of leading states and businesses to minimize contact with the targets of U.S. sanctions,”  the Trump administration’s strong-arm tactics “may lead states and businesses to minimize their contact with the U.S.-led global financial system and to start to construct their own workarounds. Over time, those workarounds might even begin to accumulate into an effective alternative system.”

being a bully encourages adversaries to join forces out of their own self-interest, while giving potential allies more reason to keep their distance. It is no accident that Russia and China continue to move closer together—even though they are not natural allies, and a smarter U.S. approach could give Moscow reasons to distance itself from Beijing—and America’s same bullying impulses are going to push states like Iran even closer to them. Bolton and those of his ilk will probably come up with some trite new moniker for this group—“Axis of Evil” and “Troika of Tyranny” are taken, so perhaps “Triad of Troublemakers” or “Coalition of Chaos”—ignoring the fact that their own policies have helped push these powers together.

a real-world test of two competing visions of contemporary geopolitics. One version sees U.S. power as essentially undiminished and believes that a combination of material capabilities, favorable geography, and entrenched institutional capabilities will allow it to pursue an ambitious and revisionist foreign policy at little cost and with a high probability of success. The second version—to which I subscribe—sees the United States as very powerful and in a privileged position (for various reasons) but also believes there are limits to U.S. power and that it is necessary to set priorities, minimize trade-offs when possible, and collaborate with others on many issues. It also assumes that others cannot be browbeaten into abject capitulation and that effective and durable international agreements require a degree of mutual compromise, even with adversaries

The S.D.F. offers a remarkable vision to counter ISIS’s draconian rule — local councils, farmers’ cooperatives, and committees that promote the rights of oppressed minority groups. In the village of Jinwar, a female-controlled town, the S.D.F. has built a commune for women and their children, both Kurdish and Arab, seeking to escape oppressive families and realize a community without patriarchy. According to the constitution of the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the S.D.F.-linked ruling authority in the region, a post-ISIS Syria will be “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.” In order to realize this vision, part of the S.D.F.’s mandate is not just to govern, but also to annihilate ISIS. Several soldiers and S.D.F. spokesmen told me that the war against ISIS isn’t over — its aim now, with the support of the U.S., is to destroy sleeper cells and root out the ideology.

If we portray certain enemies solely as existential threats, we sweep over the political conflicts unfolding in places like Iraq and Syria, and the political violence wrought upon these communities, even by those who claim to be fighting a just war.

If our enemy is everywhere, we will seek allies in even the most oppressive of regimes (like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to hunt down “terrorists,” no matter if they are gun-wielding militants or political dissidents who believe that the current state of affairs does not serve them.

If a war is a “good war,” or merely conceived of as a necessary one, it matters little why a terrorist group gained support, or how we may be inadvertently contributing to the group’s appeal. Yet, while the current approach to terrorism has been wildly successful in building a cottage industry of extremism and deradicalization experts, it has failed to rid the world of terrorists.

Massacres of Iraqi civilians, deaths of Afghan civilians by airstrikes, and indiscriminate detention and torture and rape have all happened at the hands of state security forces, including those allied with the U.S.

The Manichean framework helps absolve the West of its role and its responsibility in ending an endless conflict. “Terrorism” has become so synonymous with horrific violence that most Americans are likely unaware that the vast majority of civilian deaths in global conflicts today are caused by states, not non-state actors.

As with other battles against evil, the “killers and fanatics” necessitated the dropping of bombs, an operation that Obama’s successor continued.

a core argument for the war depended on the idea that terrorism was, in essence, a form of religious violence

What the Bush administration argued, and what the media accepted, was that terrorism is not a mere tactic, but a full-blown ideology — what Bush called “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” including “fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” In practice, this means non-state armed groups not allied with the U.S. should be understood as terrorist organizations — no matter if, like the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, they have little else in common

By and large, the media accepted the Bush administration’s framing. By 2006, public criticism of the handling of the Iraq War was mounting, but even then, few questioned the legitimacy of the war itself. In a 2009 study of media coverage after 9/11, two scholars from the University of Texas found that journalists “helped brand the policy, [then] labeled the frame as public opinion,” ultimately contributing to the acceptance of that frame as a “fact of life,” and a “larger narrative of struggle and heroism.” Journalists did not treat the War on Terror as a policy decision made by the Bush administration, but as the natural and inevitable order of things. 

The political scientist Austin Doctor recently conducted a study of sexual assault by 143 rebel groups around the world, from 1989 to 2011, and separately applied the results of his analysis to ISIS.  He found a correlation between the presence of foreign fighters and increased incidence of sexual violence, which suggests that the Islamic State functioned much like other rebel groups — that ISIS is not so singular as it may seem.

mainstream media coverage of ISIS receives almost no scrutiny. But many other publications and reporters have operated on the same flawed assumptions and premises as Caliphate, ones that animated the West’s understanding of the Middle East long before ISIS gained its first foothold

the issue here isn’t just the violence — after all, Assad has also relished the torture, starvation, and murder of his citizens. Since 2011, his regime has used chemical weapons repeatedly, more than three hundred times according to one study. The critical difference is that while Assad depends on the international system for legitimacy (Russia and Iran are key supporters, and Syria remains part of the global financial system), ISIS rejects it. While Assad would prefer that the world looks away, ISIS practically begs us to stare. It aims to demoralize Western audiences, while projecting to potential recruits its vision of a new world order

In parts of the Caliphate, ISIS did promise a different model, at least nominally. In one piece of propaganda, the group declared, “The people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no difference between the rich and the poor and the strong and the weak. The holder of a right has redress, and the grievance of an injured party will be answered.” In appealing to residents and new recruits, ISIS touched upon something familiar: the desire for justice, equality, and law and order in a world that has manifestly failed to deliver any. Women, too, found opportunities under ISIS. In Fallujah, they used the regime’s justice system to secure divorces, which had been more difficult under the Iraqi government.

civilians were likely to stay in ISIS-controlled territory because, among various reasons, the “quality of governance,” including “availability of electricity, cleanliness of streets, and crime rates,” was better compared to services provided by the Iraqi government

“All the locals here wonder why the U.S. coalition never came to rescue them from Assad’s machine guns, but run to fight ISIS when it took a few pieces of land,” one rebel told the Guardian. 

the current global order has left many people behind

decades of imperialism, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Russia and Iran’s interventions, have irrevocably transformed communities in the Middle East. Similarly, though ISIS opposes the Saudi government, the Salafi-Jihadi underpinnings of the group could not have gained traction without the Kingdom’s years of effort of exporting and standardizing a particular form of Islam across the Middle East. 

devoid of any political context, terms like “radicalization” and “ideology” lose meaning

how ISIS appeared in the public imagination: as a movement beyond human understanding. The only sensible answer to so inscrutable and atavistic an adversary was total war.

This frenzied interest in the U.S.’s darkly powerful new enemy lured some journalists and analysts to focus on the group full-time. It emerged as a distinct topic from the Syrian civil war, whose crowded theater was becoming difficult to explain, or the Iraq War, now a nearly-adolescent 11 years old. Soon, writers covering ISIS, what Wired called “the world’s most important beat,” developed a signature flourish, describing it not just as a terrorist organization, but as an almost supernatural threat. “It is not clear,” argued a New York Review of Books piece in 2015, “whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.”

Stories of the group’s atrocities emerged in quick succession, echoing the parade of violence ISIS was proudly broadcasting on its own channels: public executions, conscription of child soldiers, disappearances and murders of thousands, Yazidi girls sold into slavery.

by narrowly focusing on the savagery of ISIS fighters, we miss the deeper and more important story of how ISIS grew into a political force, and of how it moved not just the hearts and minds, but the physical bodies, of tens of thousands

the core issue with Caliphate isn’t just that a lying source may have misled overeager journalists. Rather, the controversy, and indeed even the proposition that a “terrorism editor” would have resolved the problem, points to a deeper flaw in the way media has long covered extremism: divorced from the local and historical contexts that have fueled its rise

After a decade of the War on Terror and chaos in the Middle East, ISIS seemed to be the ultimate testament to an enduring clash of civilizations. It is not that surprising that ISIS itself encouraged this fantastical narrative — but it is striking that our media took their word for it.