The Trump administration has significantly weakened the Islamic State. But Trump and his officials should stop saying that the ISIS caliphate is “100 percent defeated.”
It is stupid and strategically dangerous to say so.
Put simply, such claims are just not true. Yes, in territorial terms, ISIS is a pale shadow of its former self. Yes, Trump deserves credit here. Enabling the U.S. military use more force, more often, more quickly, and in more places, Trump sped up the group’s losses from the tempo under former President Barack Obama.
But to say ISIS’ caliphate is 100 percent defeated is to make the same illegitimate choice the Obama administration made in relation to al Qaeda just before the 2012 presidential election. Namely, it is the choice of selling a political victory over accepting the reality of an ongoing threat.
The threat of ISIS is ongoing. In the terms of definitions that matter, the ISIS caliphate is also alive. Just as we couldn’t body count our way to defeating the Vietcong, we cannot, ultimately, defeat ISIS by taking its territory. ISIS is a fused political-theological idea far more than it is a territorial-defined force. While retaking ISIS territory weakens the group and its idea of an ordained struggle to purify the Earth, the caliphate idea lives on in the Salafi-Jihadists and Imams who promote it.
Territory or not, the idea of ISIS lives on in Internet sermons, propaganda, and madrasas, and in small gatherings of men and women in rooms around the world who find value in what ISIS offers: a cause.
This is exactly why ISIS has been able to recruit so many western citizens and use them to threaten their own countries. That is why the group has now orientated toward the long-term viability of its idea. ISIS leaders intend to use that idea to generate new followers who take new actions and eventually reconstitute its physical caliphate.
This isn’t a theoretical concern. It’s already happened. Consider Iraq in 2013, where then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki decided to embrace Iranian sectarianism in the error of Obama’s withdrawal of U.S. forces. The consequence of Maliki’s idiocy was a disenfranchising of Iraqi Sunnis at the hands of Shia death squads, and ISIS’ rise in the melding of ideas to anger.
What did we get a couple of years later? We got the ISIS caliphate, and attacks across the globe.
This is not to say that Trump has made a grievous error. While his current language is poorly chosen, Trump’s actions remain credible. The U.S. has rightly retained a force presence in eastern Syria, and the military and intelligence services remain free to chase down the enemy. But that won’t be enough to ensure ISIS’ continuing decline. Diplomatic action with moderate Muslims also matters here, as does continued U.S. influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
Absent that broader attention, ISIS will rise again.
