President Obama’s message about the danger that the Islamic State poses hasn’t changed much since the terrorist group began rampaging across Iraq and Syria in 2014. Nor has his strategy for countering the radical Sunni militants shifted.
But how frequently he discusses them and his plan for defeating them has changed dramatically since he addressed the nation in a rare prime-time appearance Dec. 6 after a radicalized Muslim couple rampaged a work holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., Dec. 2, killing 14.
Obama has made four more public announcements on the subject and held a year-end press conference in which he fielded questions on the topic since the mass shooting. Since Islamic State terrorists killed 130 Parisians Nov. 13, he has had to publicly opine about the terrorist organization he refers to as “ISIL” exponentially more than before it successfully attacked in the West.
Obama has adjusted his rhetoric since dismissing the Islamic marauders as a “JV” team in 2014, and even more so since that early December Oval Office address in which he was panned for being tone deaf.
“As a father to two young daughters who are the most precious part of my life, I know that we see ourselves with friends and coworkers at a holiday party like the one in San Bernardino,” Obama said then, trying to convey that he grasps how anxious Americans are now. “I know we see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris. And I know that after so much war, many Americans are asking whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure.”
In a National Public Radio interview that aired on Dec. 21, he was more blunt.
“But they can hurt us; and they can hurt our people and our families,” he said. “And so I understand why people are worried.”
After months of saying the coalition wants to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group, he said “we are hitting ISIL harder than ever” when addressing reporters from the Pentagon on Dec. 14.
“I see no change in the continuity” of his message, said terrorism expert Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University. “Obama is a threat minimizer when it comes to terrorism — the opposite of a terrorism alarmist.”
However, since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Abrahms said there is a perceptible shift in how Obama talks about the Islamic State.
“I think there is more urgency — [more] recognition that Americans are really worried,” he said. “I think Paris was a real wake-up call” for Obama about how panicked Americans truly are.
Obama acknowledged in the NPR interview that he hasn’t done enough to reassure Americans that his administration is on top of the terrorist threat.
“I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t … on a regular basis … described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” he conceded.
“And so part of our goal here is to make sure that people are informed about all the actions that we’re taking,” Obama said.
Arie Kruglanski, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland who has written about the Islamic State, agrees that the real change is Obama’s tone and frequency, not substance.
He is trying to calm the fears of people who candidates such as “Donald Trump are taking advantage of,” Kruglanski said.
Obama is “trying to minimize the danger” posed by the Islamic State and “put it in perspective,” he said. He has been “resisting the temptation” to sound the alarm but was criticized for being “unresponsive to the [public’s] anxiety and fears.”
In the NPR interview, Obama maintained the confidence he has vocalized all along that the Islamic State will be defeated.
[T]his is not an organization that can destroy the United States,” he said in the interview that was taped Dec. 17. “This is not a huge industrial power that can pose great risks to us institutionally or in a systematic way.”
Obama also hasn’t altered his belief that the Islamic State’s most harmful weapons are propaganda and fear.
“The most damage they can do, though, is if they start changing how we live and what our values are,” he said, following the same logic he used after the Paris attacks.
In a press conference held in Turkey during the G-20 summit just three days later, Obama urged Americans and Europeans alike to not overreact by slamming the door on Syrian refugees or discriminating against Muslims.
“[T]he values that we’re fighting against ISIL for are precisely that we don’t discriminate against people because of their faith,” he said. “We don’t kill people because they’re different than us. That’s what separates us from them. And if we want to be successful at defeating ISIL, that’s a good place to start … not promoting that kind of ideology, that kind of attitude.”
