T
hree days after ISIS’s mass-casualty assault on Paris, Barack Obama proclaimed that the U.S. policy he had authorized to defeat the terrorist organization was nonetheless working. “We have the right strategy,” he told reporters who had come with him to Turkey for the G-20 Summit, “and we’re gonna see it through.”  The international press was incredulous. The president seemed to be standing behind his claim, made the day before the attacks, that ISIS was “contained.” How could Obama still say that the fight was succeeding? Reporters fired back with a series of questions. An AFP correspondent set the tone: “One hundred and twenty-nine people were killed in Paris on Friday night,” he said. “ISIL claimed responsibility for the massacre, sending the message that they could now target civilians all over the world. The equation has clearly changed. Isn’t it time for your strategy to change?”

It was the thought on everyone’s mind—and it seemed to offend the leader of the free world. He became impatient, and assured one journalist after another he was correct. By the time CNN’s Jim Acosta asked bluntly, “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” Obama was in high dudgeon.

“If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan,” he said. “If they think that somehow their advisers are better than the chairman of my joint chiefs of staff and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate.”

Eighteen days later, on December 2, U.S. citizen Syed Farook and his Pakistani wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot up a party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. They killed 14 people, wounded 21 others, and were discovered to have built an arsenal of pipe bombs in their apartment. As information on the couple trickled in that Wednesday afternoon, Obama was giving an interview to CBS News about national security. “ISIL will not pose an existential threat to us. They are a dangerous organization like al-Qaeda was, but we have hardened our defenses,” he said. “The American people should feel confident that, you know, we are going to be able to defend ourselves and make sure that, you know, we have a good holiday and go about our lives.” Two days later, authorities discovered that Malik had pledged fealty to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

It is no longer in dispute that the president has been overtaken by events. While he alternately scolds and reassures, ISIS fights on, gaining power and claiming lives.

But Obama has not been blindsided; he has chosen policies that have emboldened ISIS and has rejected other options at every turn. In fact, his words in Turkey were patently false. Obama doesn’t need an introduction to those who would have done things differently; he knows them well. They include two of his secretaries of defense, his former under secretary of defense, his former secretary of state, his former head of the CIA, his former Army chief of staff, the last commanding general of forces in Iraq, his former ambassador to Syria, his former deputy national-security adviser, and, yes, even his former joint chiefs chairman—among others.

To the many officials, civilian and military, who have opposed Obama on strategy pertaining to Iraq, Syria, and ISIS, his remonstrance in Turkey was surely surreal. Posturing aside, Obama has rejected or marginalized virtually all dissent on these issues. And as a result of his persistent obstinacy, he has chosen poorly again and again, creating a linked set of escalating crises. They began with the misguided U.S. departure from Iraq. They continued with the meltdown of Syria and Obama’s persistently botched responses to it. And they have reached their apogee (so far) with the creation of more than 4 million refugees—the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our age—and ISIS’s establishment of an Islamic caliphate of increasing global reach.

Despite the president’s effort to frame his policies as coolly pragmatic, his decisions on Iraq, Syria, and ISIS fit a strict, even unbending, ideological pattern. His animating motivation has been to retract American power from the region and establish a new national consensus to ensure that the United States pursues a more humble foreign policy in the future.

This is a principled position, of a kind. It reflects a long-held belief in certain quarters that American military action in far-off lands and American meddling in those lands tend to do more harm than good, sowing dangerous resentment abroad.

But when a leader fails to balance this (or any) outlook against facts on the ground, principle becomes theology. And that is the situation in which the president now finds himself.

Obama’s inconsistencies have helped him evade traditional ideological labels. So perhaps it suffices to say he is foremost an anti-Bushist. His conception of America’s role in the world is most easily discerned in its opposition to that of his predecessor. He ran for president on a promise to end the war in Iraq—and when, as president, he told a Saudi Arabian news station, “all too often the United States starts by dictating,” he was talking about George W. Bush’s perceived “cowboy diplomacy.” When he told an audience in France that “America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive,” he was referring to Bush’s willingness to wage war without the support of the United Nations. And when in London he said, “With my election and the early decisions that we’ve made…you’re starting to see some restoration of America’s standing in the world,” he was touting his departure from Bush-era policy.

What Bush wrought he would undo. And he has undone much.

As conditions in the Middle East have deteriorated, the United States has progressively lost opportunities to act. The rush of events has now mooted many of the ideas Obama rejected. The actions that could have been taken to ensure that a functioning Iraq didn’t fall back into the hands of terrorists no longer apply now that ISIS controls massive sections of the country. The actions that could have contained the damage from a secular Syrian rebellion no longer have bearing on what has become an international war zone. And the actions that could have stopped a few hundred jihadists who crossed Iraq’s western border into Syria no longer matter, now that their number has grown to a few hundred thousand who have founded a state. Our viable options for defeating ISIS today are far more hazardous than the options we had only a few years ago, when we could have preempted its ascendance. But Obama has held fast—and in his effort to keep America out of the Middle East muck, he may well be ensuring an American reentry into a Middle East inferno.

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resident Obama’s first order of business was bringing the Iraq War to a close. That was his signature campaign promise, and one cannot fault him for trying to fulfill it. But ending the war in the way he did would prove to be a serious mistake. Whatever one thinks about the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraq that Obama chose to abandon had been all but pacified. In 2011, the final year U.S. troops were on the ground, there were 54 American deaths in Iraq, a wartime low. The country suffered sectarian tensions, but nothing like those that had led to civil war in 2006. Most crucial was this: Coalition actions had defeated ISIS’s brutal predecessor, Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Iraqi jihad had become a bad memory.

But few of those close to the fight thought these achievements would be self-sustaining. Top Defense Department officials and military brass spent two years arguing for a continued U.S. presence in Iraq to ensure that the country didn’t relapse. Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates, was one such official. He hoped to leave 16,000 troops behind to consolidate American gains. Gates’s successor, Leon Panetta, had the same concerns about abandoning Iraq and tried to make his case to Obama. As he later wrote:

My fear, as I voiced to the president and others, was that if the country split apart or slid back into the violence that we’d seen in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion, it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S. Iraq’s stability was not only in Iraq’s interest but also in ours. I privately and publicly advocated for a residual force that could provide training and security for Iraq’s military.

So had others. Lloyd Austin, the last commanding general of forces in Iraq (and future commander of United States Central Command) recommended a residual American force of 23,000. Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno had made similar arguments in 2009, suggesting the U.S. keep 30,000–35,000 troops in Iraq after 2011. These were hardly minority opinions. At a 2011 Senate Armed Service Committee hearing, Senator John McCain asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey whether any military commanders supported a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops. “No, Senator,” Dempsey responded. “None of us recommended that we completely withdraw from Iraq.” Their objections were to no avail.

Obama, certain in his purpose, would take his first step toward inadvertently facilitating a jihadist renaissance.

When it came time to negotiate an extension on the U.S. Status of Forces agreement with Iraq, Obama didn’t secure a deal to keep American troops in the country. The president has claimed that he simply came up against Iraqi intransigence. But as Panetta explains, “Privately, the various leadership factions in Iraq all confided that they wanted some U.S. forces to remain as a bulwark against sectarian violence.” In fact, they wanted it more than Obama. Panetta writes that “Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy did her best to press [our] position, which reflected not just my views but also those of the military commanders in the region and the joint chiefs. But the president’s team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated.”

In the end, continues Panetta, “those on our side viewed the White House as so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.”

Theology prevailed. In December 2010, Obama declared the war over. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” he said. But without the United States present to exercise its leverage over then–Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, things immediately deteriorated. Maliki, a Shiite, began systematically cracking down on the country’s Sunnis. The Sunnis in turn were thrown into the arms of a revitalized Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was fast exploiting the absence of American security. During this jihadist revival, militants freed one Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from a Mosul jail. He would go on to become the leader of ISIS. By 2011, Iraq’s radicals were already spreading into Syria and capitalizing on a civil war that had begun months earlier. All the warnings that had gone unheeded were proving correct. But even then, no one envisioned just how massive the new jihadist threat would become.

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nlike the Iraq War, the Syrian horror is entirely a creature of the Obama years. And here we have a much longer record of the ideas Obama rejected, the policies he chose, and the increasingly malignant repercussions of those choices.

One year into the Syrian civil war, dictator Bashar al-Assad had killed roughly 7,800 Syrians and the fighting had produced an estimated 35,000 refugees. The Obama administration had already called for Assad to step down, but had done nothing to make that happen. At the time, the central U.S. concerns were protecting Syrians from Assad’s onslaught and preventing the outbreak of a larger, destabilizing conflict. In March 2012, John McCain took to the Senate floor and made a half-hour speech calling for U.S.-led air strikes on Assad’s forces and the establishment of safe havens for Syrians under attack. McCain also appealed personally to Obama. “I told the president. I said, Bashar Assad is slaughtering people,” he later told PBS. “We are watching genocide take place, and it is eventually going to destabilize the entire region.”

At the time, McCain didn’t have much support. He was the first senator to call for U.S. force against Assad. And given his own defeat at Obama’s hands in the 2008 election and his growing unpopularity with the Republican base, he stood his ground alone. It is unquestionably true that American military action in the Middle East is and will always be risky and problematic. The region’s pathologies ensure a deluge of recriminations against the United States, even from those asking for our help. The pandemic combination of poor governance and sectarian tension increases the chance of clashes following a decisive American strike. And we rarely have a clear sense of friend and foe in lands where parties switch allegiances based on who seems most likely to outlast the latest calamity.

But if statecraft were informed solely by caution, the United States wouldn’t be standing today. There are always compelling reasons to steer clear of combat. A successful foreign policy means accounting for risk in determining what will secure the nation’s interests, not evading risk altogether. McCain’s warning about the coming destabilization was prescient; in any case, it’s hard to imagine that American action would have been worse than the path Obama chose.

After rejecting the first call to intervene in Syria, Obama stuck to inaction (or minimal action), no matter how bad the war got and no matter the nature of the threat it posed.

He chose inaction. The president who said he was “elected to end wars, not start them” wasn’t about to go into Syria after pulling out of Iraq. What’s more, European leaders had already dragged Obama against his will into an air campaign against Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi a year earlier. Post-Qaddafi Libya was now giving way to chaos, partly because of Obama’s refusal to follow through with further American action. Obama’s anti-Bushism had been compromised by providing air support to Libyan rebels. He wouldn’t see it nullified entirely by going into Syria as well.

But the president also had other reasons for not acting in Syria. He was already working toward détente with Iran. Obama knew that the Iranian leaders were Assad’s closest allies, and he feared American action against Syria would jeopardize his chance for achieving a nuclear deal with Tehran. This too fit his anti-Bushism. Bush had labeled Iran a member of the “Axis of Evil,” a trio of dangerous rogue states that also included North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Obama’s predecessor saw the leaders in Tehran as inflexible theocrats bent on the destruction of Israel and the West. For Bush, the only real solution to the Iran problem was eventual regime change, a toppling of the mullahs, and the establishment of Iranian democracy. Obama, by contrast, sought to treat the Iranians as reasonable actors capable of good-faith negotiations with the United States. With the Iraq War over, diplomacy with Iran became his foreign-policy priority, and his fear of displeasing the mullahs would continue to hamper his Syria policy. Assad and his allies in Tehran took the president’s measure early and, assured of the new American constraint, would escalate the civil war with impunity.

After rejecting the first call to intervene in Syria, Obama stuck to inaction (or minimal action), no matter how bad the war got and no matter the nature of the threat it posed. As he stood pat, that threat changed. When McCain had called for helping the rebels, they were mostly secular Syrians trying to unseat a merciless dictator. The best hope among them was the Free Syrian Army, a non-radical group founded by military defectors seeking to oust Assad and replace his regime with a democratic one. They openly beseeched Washington for help, but Obama’s anti-Bush doctrine left them to fend for themselves.

Around the same time as McCain’s Senate speech, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times that the U.S. would begin providing “nonlethal assistance, like communications equipment and medical supplies, directly to opposition groups inside Syria.” Another administration official claimed that the U.S. had already begun sending supplies to the Free Syrian Army. But “nonlethal” ultimately meant ineffective. Supplies were meager, slow in coming, and would occasionally be seized by radical groups. Yet the administration would continue to tout such assistance, announcing new “boosts” in aid every year, even as the policy continued to fail. So while the United States stuck to fruitless gestures, the rebels increasingly looked to others who were providing them with tangible support. Those others turned out to be radical Sunni groups, such as al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra front, and ISIS. These trained jihadists were better organized than their non-radical counterparts and some enjoyed lavish funding from Gulf Arab states. The more Obama refused aggressive action, the greater the Islamist hold on the rebels.

As the anti-Assad rebellion morphed into a jihadist call to arms, Washington’s array of policy options narrowed, but they didn’t disappear. A new plan of action came from within the Obama administration in the summer of 2012. Then-director of the CIA, David Petraeus, proposed vetting and arming Syrian rebels covertly from bases inside Jordan. The covert element, he hoped, would allay White House concerns about being seen to meddle in Syrian affairs. Unlike McCain’s early proposition, this plan enjoyed significant support in the administration, from Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, and Samantha Power, who had been handpicked by Obama to head up a new “Atrocities Prevention Board.”

But the president vetoed the Petraeus plan, saying it would draw the United States into the conflict without decisively tipping the scales in favor of the rebels. His concerns here were not unwarranted, but they shouldn’t have been dispositive. A year and a half into the Syrian civil war, Obama didn’t accept that American inaction was itself a meaningful choice. Like action, inaction has real consequences. It gives both our allies and enemies a sense of our priorities, enabling them to recalibrate their plans accordingly. American inaction on Syria ensured that the country’s toxic trends would continue to gain momentum. For Assad, it meant he could wage war with impunity; for the rebels, it meant American help wasn’t coming; and for the jihadists among them, it meant an opportunity to recruit more of their dejected fellow Sunnis.

As things stood in the summer of 2012, the civil-war death toll was around 17,000 and there were more than 150,000 Syrian refugees.

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n August 20, Obama held a press conference in the White House that was supposed to center on health care. Asked about Syria, the president gave an ad-libbed answer that would alter the course of history and take the administration on a bizarre foreign-policy detour. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” he said. “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” Presidential aides were reportedly baffled by Obama’s response, as it didn’t resemble anything they’d heard him say in private. But for all his practiced reticence, Obama had now accidentally warned Assad, on record, that America might intervene if chemical weapons came into play. He had also given the rebels hope. Unplanned or not, this became an opportunity for the United States to get on the right side of the war and thus deprive jihadists of the power they wielded in Syria as the best bet for toppling Assad.

A year later, on August 21, 2013, Assad called Obama’s bluff. The dictator launched a sarin nerve-gas attack in the suburbs of Damascus, killing 1,429 civilians—426 of whom were children. The Obama administration, on the hook to act, announced reprisals. At a press conference in London, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to keep the anti-Bush doctrine together. He described the “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort” the administration had in mind.  But, in the end, “unbelievably small” wasn’t small enough for the president. Just days before the planned strike on Syria, Obama found himself too uncertain to give the order. After beginning a speech by saying he had the right as president to act against Syria on his own orders, he declared he was putting it up for a vote in Congress (then in recess).

This decision, it should be noted, went against the majority of Obama’s advisers, who feared the president would be severely weakened by a “no” vote. On the day Congress returned, Kerry gave a press conference and managed to extricate the administration from its dilemma just as accidentally as it had stumbled into it. Kerry said, rhetorically, that Assad could avoid a U.S. strike if he gave up “every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week, without delay. But he isn’t about to [do that].” That afternoon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, picking up on Kerry’s comment, announced that Assad had accepted a Russian offer to hand over his chemical stockpile. Thereupon, the administration killed its plans for a strike on Syria.

Under the Russian arrangement, some but not all of Assad’s chemical weapons were shipped out of the country. He has since gone on to use chlorine gas. The plan, however, was a thorough success for the Kremlin, establishing Russia as a massive player in the conflict. At the time, the administration bragged that it had successfully made Syria Moscow’s problem. But Russian President Vladimir Putin would use his new leverage to expand his influence in Syria, eventually bringing Russia fully into the war on Assad’s side, prolonging the dictator’s reign, and further precluding American policy options. For Assad’s part, he was now legitimized as a cooperative partner in disarmament.

As ISIS began redrawing the map of the Middle East, Obama still saw no compelling case for U.S. action and fell back on anti-Bush insinuations to defend his policy.

Finally, jihadists inside Syria used the American retreat as a recruiting tool among Sunnis who needed little more convincing that Washington would do nothing to help them. The radicals went into overdrive. And although the Obama administration began arming rebels in lieu of striking Assad, it was much too little and far too late. On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a communiqué denouncing the American-affiliated Free Syrian Army. ISIS, by now the strongest jihadist group in Syria, then declared war on what was left of the FSA, fighting it into irrelevance. Once again, Obama’s inaction had become a boon to America’s enemies.

At this point, more than 100,000 had been killed in the civil war and almost 2 million Syrians had been made refugees.

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y the start of 2014, ISIS wasn’t merely the strongest of Syria’s jihadist groups; it had become the strongest party among all the country’s rebels. The organization had recently taken control of the city of Raqqa, which became a beacon for foreign fighters pouring into Syria to join ISIS. Yet the president showed little concern, remarking to the New Yorker’s David Remnick in January that “the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a J.V. team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” That same month, the J.V. jihadists crossed back into Iraq and, with American troops withdrawn on Obama’s promise, seized Fallujah.

As ISIS began redrawing the map of the Middle East, Obama still saw no compelling case for U.S. action and fell back on anti-Bush insinuations to defend his policy. “A strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naive and unsustainable,” he told a West Point audience in May. A month later, ISIS captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq.

That August, the world was gripped by televised images of desperate men, women, and children trapped on Sinjar mountain in northwestern Iraq. Advancing ISIS forces had surrounded tens of thousands of Yazidis, a Kurdish minority, and were waiting for them below. If the prey came down the mountain they would be slaughtered; if they didn’t, they would die of dehydration. Finally, the United States stepped up. With the world watching, Obama called for air strikes on the ISIS militants and saved the Yazidis from certain death. It was his first bold move against ISIS, and it was a success. Yet he was quick to follow up this show of strength with a disclaimer, saying the United States had no intention of “being the Iraqi air force.” His heroic act was a one-off.

Even as Iraq succumbed to carnage, things in Syria got worse. In June, ISIS declared a new Islamist caliphate and made Raqqa its capital. The organization had also become a rolling wave of sadism, enslaving and killing (sometimes by crucifixion) all who dared stand in its path. In July, the group took over a Syrian army base, beheaded 75 Syrian soldiers, and displayed their heads and bodies in the street. This was merely one of a string of ISIS beheadings that year. In August, ISIS released a video depicting the beheading of the journalist James Foley, the organization’s first American victim.

At this point, the Syrian death toll had risen to 191,000. Refugees numbered 3 million.

One American official could take no more. In May, Robert Ford, the U.S. Ambassador to Syria, stepped down from his post, disgusted with the failure to stop either ISIS or Assad. “I was no longer in a position where I felt I could defend the American policy,” he later said. “We have been unable to address either the root causes of the conflict in terms of the fighting on the ground and the balance on the ground, and we have a growing extremism threat.” Ford had long pushed for giving greater support to the moderate rebels. His was just another dismissed voice of dissent.

In September, with the parade of horrors too great to ignore, Obama expanded the effort to fight ISIS. He called for American air strikes in Syria and announced that the U.S. would begin training and arming moderate Syrian rebels—two years after dismissing David Petraeus’s plan to do so and one year after the Free Syrian Army had ceased to be a viable fighting force. Additionally, Obama would deploy 475 military advisers to Iraq, now that the country was overrun with ISIS militants.

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n the 15 months since Obama called for greater action, it has become clear that the United States has still failed to adopt a winning strategy. ISIS has continued to make gains and export terror. Last May, it seized the Iraqi city of Ramadi. The same month, the group took over the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, killing locals door-to-door and destroying some of the most precious artifacts of multiple civilizations. Obama now says that ISIS is losing territory, but while updated color-coded maps tell different stories on different days, the general trend has been toward expansion. ISIS has also gained significant territory in Libya, Yemen, and South Asia.

Beyond its land claims, ISIS can now boast of a series of successful terrorist attacks. In October, the group killed 102 people in a suicide bombing at the Ankara central train station. That same month, ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, Metrojet flight 9268, killing 224 people over the Sinai. On November 12, two ISIS operatives blew themselves up in a Shia suburb of Lebanon, killing about 40 Lebanese. Then came the coordinated attacks in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting.

The strategy that Obama calls a success is, in reality, a combination of half measures and outdated ideas. Our air campaign in Syria has averaged a mere seven strikes a day. Almost 75 percent of planned U.S. bombing runs on ISIS never drop their payloads owing either to insufficient ground intelligence or overly strict rules of engagement. And Obama’s plan to train moderate Syrian rebels has already been retired because there were so few left willing to work with the United States that the program produced only four or five fighters (at a cost of $42 million).

Consider those sad facts in light of the enemy. Whatever language one wishes to use, ISIS now bears an inescapable resemblance to a state. It has established a set of laws and a means of enforcing them on a population of millions. It boasts a capital, designated provinces, and outlying governorates. Between collecting taxes, extorting money, seizing banks, ransoming kidnap victims, and selling oil, ISIS takes in billions of dollars annually. It has training outposts throughout the Middle East and, as we found out on November 13, organized operatives in the West. None of these achievements have taken a serious hit since the president claimed in 2014 he was stepping up the fight.

Last September, Gen. John Allen, the man Obama had picked to lead the coalition fight against ISIS, stepped down from his post. In announcing his exit, Allen cited his wife’s health problems. But it did not go unnoticed that his repeated calls for increased U.S. action had also long been ignored by the White House. Allen wanted to deploy tactical air-control teams in Iraq and establish a safe zone in Syria. Even Obama’s so-called ISIS czar, however, had been unable to persuade the president.

After the Paris attacks, the U.S. increased air strikes, instituted a more permissive targeting policy, and announced that “a specialized expeditionary targeting force” will help Iraqis and Kurds in raids against ISIS. But such measures are mostly cosmetic attempts to dress up a stale policy. They aren’t turning the tide, and they won’t do so any time soon.

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bama’s repeated delays have precluded many formerly viable policy options. The rebel-training program is one example. No-fly zones over Syria are another. This plan, rebuffed years ago by the president, is no longer a possibility because of Russia’s new air campaign over the country.

Another concern is that we may have been working from faulty intelligence. The Pentagon’s inspector general is now examining the claims of more than 50 intelligence analysts who came forward in September, charging that their superiors had forced them to alter reports that didn’t portray ISIS as definitively losing. While we await the results of the investigation, we can only wonder who in the chain of command may have been responsible for vetting intelligence for good news. But if the claim is true, it certainly fits in with the culture of the Obama administration.

The White House has refused to see the problem for what it is. It has become clear that Assad and ISIS are complimentary parts of the same nightmare. They are perversely dependent on each other for survival: While ISIS thrives, Assad can play the role of Syria’s “good cop,” effectively offering a choice to those looking on: Do you want me or the apocalyptic army of decapitating slave traders? It’s a role he has exploited to great advantage, and it’s in his interest to keep ISIS in play so long as the world falls for the ploy. At the same time, ISIS can be destroyed only if Assad is taken out of power. So long as Assad is killing Syrians—and he’s killed far more than ISIS has—Sunnis won’t make ISIS their number-one target. The truth is that the United States needs to destroy ISIS and push to depose Assad simultaneously. But with John Kerry attempting to bring Assad and Syrian opposition parties into more talks about “power sharing,” we’re a long way off from getting the policy right. Obama, for his part, has contented himself with berating Americans who are wary of taking in an infinitesimal fraction of the refugees his own policies helped displace. “They are scared of three-year-old orphans,” Obama chided. “That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

All these issues, however, are but manifestations of the larger encumbering reality: Barack Obama’s theological opposition to exercising effective American power abroad. The president’s inflexibility on that point has nurtured the rise of ISIS and tied our hands in the fight against it. But, with so few prudent options left, his stubbornness may have made a larger conflict with ISIS inevitable, either during the remainder of his term or after it. If so, Obama will have worked for eight years to avert a fate his very actions have summoned.

Today, the president still dismisses significant “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria as a nonstarter. On December 6, Obama spoke from the Oval Office, saying, “We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria.” He then added this bizarre coda: “That’s what groups like ISIL want. They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield.” ISIS wants to engage the United States in a war in order to lose? And we should therefore resist the fight? This is theology outweighing logic.

Perhaps in this period of post-Bush America, however, a ground war against ISIS really is out of the question. But we should be clear about something. ISIS controls vast swaths of land, out in the open. In adopting the structure of a state, the group has given up some measure of the asymmetrical advantage enjoyed by terrorists who traditionally “melt away” into the shadows after an attack; ISIS, in short, can be targeted and defeated like a state. If an American commander in chief cannot even countenance deploying ground soldiers and Marines to defeat a state comprising the worst terrorist threat we’ve ever faced, then we might have finally forfeited our last defense against evil. We are in the final year of a presidency that unwittingly midwifed a monster.

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n October 2015, the American novelist Jonathan Franzen gave a talk in London in which he expressed pleasure that Jeremy Corbyn had just been elected leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party. To his evident surprise, Franzen’s endorsement was met with only scattered applause and then an embarrassed silence.

Most of Franzen’s audience were the same sort of people likely to attend a Franzen talk in New York: Upper-middle-class bien pensant Guardian readers who revile the name Thatcher the way a New York Times home-delivery subscriber reviles the name Reagan. For them, as for most Labour members of Parliament, the elevation of Jeremy Corbyn offers little to celebrate. Indeed, it looks a lot like a disaster—a bizarre and potentially devastating epilogue to the shocking rout of the Labour Party at the May 2015 general election.

Franzen probably imagined Corbyn to be a kind of British Bernie Sanders, a supposedly lovable old coot-crank leftie willing to speak truth to power—and so assumed that any British metropolitan liberal audience would be packed with his fans. In fact, for all the obvious parallels between the two men, Corbyn is a very different kind of politician working in a very different system and for very different goals. Sanders may call himself a socialist, but he is relatively mainstream next to Corbyn, an oddball and an extremist even in the eyes of many British socialists.

It may seem extraordinary that a party most observers and pollsters were sure would be brought back to power in 2015—and that has long enjoyed the unofficial support of the UK’s media, marketing, and arts establishments—now looks to be on the verge of disintegration. But even if no one a year ago could have predicted the takeover of the party by an uncharismatic extreme-left backbencher with a fondness for terrorists and anti-Semites, the Labour Party might well be collapsing due to economic and social changes that have exposed its own glaring internal contradictions.

The first stage of Labour’s meltdown was its unexpected defeat at the general election in May 2015. The experts and the polls had all predicted a hung Parliament and the formation of a coalition government led by Labour’s then-leader, Ed Milliband. But Labour lost 26 seats, was wiped out by nationalists in its former heartland of Scotland, and won less than 30 percent of the popular vote. The Liberal Democrats, the third party with whom Milliband had hoped to form a coalition, did far worse. Meanwhile the populist, anti-EU, anti-mass immigration, UK Independence Party (UKIP) won only one seat in the House of Commons but scored votes from some 3 million people—and took many more voters from Labour than from the Tories.

Milliband’s complacency about and ignorance of the concerns of ordinary working-class people played a major role in the defeat. So did his failure to contest the charge that Labour’s spendthrift ways under Tony Blair had made the 2008 financial crisis and recession much worse. Perhaps even more devastating was the widespread fear in England that Milliband would make a deal with Scottish nationalists that would require concessions such as getting rid of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. He had promised that he would never do this, but much of the public seemed to doubt the word of a man so ambitious to be prime minister that he had stabbed his own brother in the back. (David Milliband was set to take over the leadership of the party in 2010 when his younger brother, Ed, decided to challenge him from the left with the help of the party’s trade unionists.)

In the old industrial heartlands of the North and Midlands, Labour seemed at last to be paying a price for policies on immigration and social issues anathematic to many in the old British working class. As a workers’ party as well as a socialist party, and one that draws on a Methodist as well as a Marxist tradition, Labour has always had to accommodate some relatively conservative, traditional, and even reactionary social and political attitudes prevalent among the working classes (among them affection for the monarchy). Today the cultural divisions within the party between middle-class activists, chattering-class liberals, ethnic minority leaders, and the old working class can no longer be papered over.

With the ascension of Tony Blair to the leadership of the party in 1994, Labour began to pursue certain policies practically designed to alienate and drive out traditional working-class Labour voters and replace them not only with ordinary Britons who had grown tired of the nearly two-decade rule of the Tories but also with upper-middle-class opinion leaders attracted to multiculturalism and other fashionable enthusiasms.

Corbyn is a bitter enemy of U.S. “imperialism,” a longtime champion of Third World revolutionary movements, and a sympathizer with any regime or organization, no matter how brutal or tyrannical, that claims to be battling American and Western hegemony.

One can even make a kind of quasi-Marxian argument that as the Labour Party has become more bourgeois over the decades, the more it has engaged in what amounts to conscious or unconscious class warfare against the working class it is supposed to represent. One of the first blows it struck was the abolition of the “grammar schools” (selective high schools similar to those of New York City) on the grounds that they were a manifestation of “elitism,” even though these schools gave millions of bright working-class children a chance to go to top universities. Then there was “slum clearance,” which resulted in the breakup and dispersal of strong working-class communities as residents were rehoused in high-rise tower blocks that might have been designed to encourage social breakdown and predation by teenage criminals. But the ultimate act of Labour anti-proletarianism came after the Party was recovering from the defection of working-class voters to Thatcherism and its gospel of opportunity and aspiration. This was the opening of the UK’s borders to mass immigration on an unprecedented scale by Tony Blair’s New Labour. Arguably this represented an attempt to break the indigenous working class both economically and culturally; inevitably, it was accompanied by a demonization of the unhappy indigenous working class as xenophobic and racist.

In the 2015 general election, many classic working-class Labour voters apparently couldn’t bring themselves to betray their tribe and vote Tory—but were comfortable voting for UKIP. This proved disastrous for Labour, which had once been able to count on the support of some two-thirds of working-class voters. But these cultural changes made it impossible for Labour to hold on to its old base in the same numbers. And its new base—the “ethnic” (read: Muslim) vote, a unionized public sector that is no longer expanding, and the middle-class liberals and leftists who populate the creative industries and the universities—is simply not large enough.

Labour should have won the election in 2015; it lost because of its own internal contradictions. Out of the recriminations and chaos that followed the defeat, there emerged Jeremy Corbyn.

T
o understand who Corbyn is and what he stands for, it helps to be familiar with the fictional character Dave Spart, a signature creation of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Spart is a parody of a left-wing activist with a beard and staring eyes and a predilection for hyperbole, clueless self-pity, and Marxist jargon, which spews forth from his column, “The Alternative Eye.” (He’s like a far-left version of Ed Anger, the fictional right-wing lunatic whose column graced the pages of the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid for decades.) A typical Spart column starts with a line like “The right-wing press have utterly, totally, and predictably unleashed a barrage of sickening hypocrisy and deliberate smears against the activities of a totally peaceful group of anarchists, i.e., myself and my colleagues.”

The column has given birth to the term spartist—which is used in the UK to refer to a type of humorless person or argument from the extreme left. There are thousands of real-life spartists to be found in the lesser reaches of academia, in Britain’s much-reduced trade-union movement, and in the public sector. For such activists, demonstrations and protests are a kind of super hobby, almost a way of life.

The 66-year-old Corbyn is the Ur-spartist. He has always preferred marches and protests and speeches to more practical forms of politics. He was a member of Parliament for 32 years without ever holding any sort of post that would have moved him from the backbenches of the House of Commons to the front. During those three-plus decades, he has voted against his own party more than 500 times. Corbyn only escaped being “deselected” by Tony Blair—the process by which a person in Parliament can be removed from standing for his seat by his own party—because he was deemed harmless.

Many of Corbyn’s obsessions concern foreign policy. He is a bitter enemy of U.S. “imperialism,” a longtime champion of Third World revolutionary movements, and a sympathizer with any regime or organization, no matter how brutal or tyrannical, that claims to be battling American and Western hegemony. Corbyn was first elected to Parliament in 1983, and many of his critics in the Labour Party say he has never modified the views he picked up from his friends in the Trotskyite left as a young activist.

This is not entirely true, because Corbyn, like so much of the British left, has adapted to the post–Cold War world by embracing new enemies of the West and its values—in particular, those whom Christopher Hitchens labeled “Islamofascists.”

One of the qualities that sets spartists like Corbyn apart from their American counterparts is an almost erotic attraction to Islamism. They are fascinated rather than repelled by its call to violent jihad against the West. This is more than anti-Americanism or a desire to win support in Britain’s ghettoized Muslim communities. It is the newest expression of the cultural and national self-loathing that is such a strong characteristic of much progressive opinion in Anglo-Saxon countries—and which underlies much of the multiculturalist ideology that governs this body of opinion.

Many on the British left today have an astonishing ability to overlook, excuse, or even celebrate reactionary and atavistic beliefs and practices ranging from the murder of blaspheming authors to female genital mutilation. Corbyn has long been at the forefront of this tendency, not least in his capacity as longtime chair of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition. STWC is a pressure group that was founded to oppose not the war in Iraq but the war in Afghanistan. It was set up on September 21, 2001, by the Socialist Workers’ Party, with the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain as junior partners. STWC supported the “legitimate struggle” of the Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led coalition; declines to condemn Russian intervention in Syria and Ukraine; actively opposed the efforts of democrats, liberals, and civil-society activists against the Hussein, Assad, Gaddafi, and Iranian regimes; and has a soft spot for the Taliban.

Corbyn’s career-long anti-militarism goes well beyond the enthusiasm for unilateral nuclear disarmament that was widespread in and so damaging to the Labour Party in the 1980s, and which he still advocates today. He has called for the United Kingdom to leave NATO, argued against the admission to the alliance of Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, and more recently blamed the Ukrainian crisis on NATO provocation. In 2012, he apparently endorsed the scrapping of Britain’s armed forces in the manner of Costa Rica (which has a police force but no military).

As so often with the anti-Western left, however, Corbyn’s dislike of violence and military solutions mostly applies only to America and its allies. His pacifism—and his progressive beliefs in general—tend to evaporate when he considers a particular corner of the Middle East.

Indeed, Corbyn is an enthusiastic backer of some of the most violent, oppressive, and bigoted regimes and movements in the world. Only three weeks after an IRA bombing at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984 came close to killing Prime Minister Thatcher and wiping out her entire cabinet, Corbyn invited IRA leader Gerry Adams and two convicted terrorist bombers to the House of Commons. Neil Kinnock, then the leader of Labour and himself very much a man of the left, was appalled.

Corbyn is also an ardent supporter of the Chavistas who have wrecked Venezuela and thrown dissidents in prison. It goes almost without saying that he sees no evil in the Castro-family dictatorship in Cuba, and for a progressive he seems oddly untroubled by the reactionary attitudes of Vladimir Putin’s repressive, militarist kleptocracy in Russia.

Then we come to his relationship with Palestinian extremists and terrorists. A longtime patron of Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, Corbyn described it as his “honor and pleasure” to host “our friends” from Hamas and Hezbollah in the House of Commons. If that weren’t enough, he also invited Raed Salah to tea at the House of Commons, even though the Palestinian activist whom Corbyn called “an honored citizen…who represents his people very well” has promoted the blood libel that Jews drink the blood of non-Jewish children. These events prompted a condemnation by Sadiq Khan MP, the Labour candidate for London’s mayoralty and a Muslim of Pakistani origin, who said that Corbyn’s support for Arab extremists could fuel anti-Semitic attacks in the UK.

That was no unrepresentative error. As Britain’s Jewish Chronicle also pointed out this year, Corbyn attended meetings of a pro-Palestinian organization called Deir Yassin Remembered. The group is run by the notorious Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. He is also a public supporter of the Reverend Stephen Sizer, a Church of England vicar notorious for promoting material on social media suggesting 9/11 was a Jewish plot.

Corbyn’s defense has been to say that he meets a lot of people who are concerned about the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean he agrees with their views. The obvious flaw of this dishonest argument is that Corbyn doesn’t make a habit of meeting either pro-Zionists or the Arab dissidents or Muslim liberals who are fighting against tyranny, terrorism, misogyny, and cruelty. And it was all too telling when, in an effort to clear the air, Corbyn addressed the Labour Friends of Israel without ever using the word Israel. It may not be the case that Corbyn himself is an anti-Semite—of course he denies being one—but he is certainly comfortable spending lots of quality time with them.

How could such a person become the leader of one of the world’s most august political parties? It took a set of peculiar circumstances. In the first place, he only received the requisite number of nominations from his fellow MPs to make it possible for him to stand for leader after the resignation of Ed Milliband because some foolish centrists thought his inclusion in the contest would “broaden the debate” and make it more interesting. They had not thought through the implications of a new election system that Milliband had put in place. An experiment in direct democracy, the new system shifted power from the MPs to the members in the country.

The party’s membership had shrunk over the years (as has that of the Tory Party), and so to boost its numbers, Milliband and his people decided to shift to a system in which new members could obtain a temporary membership in the party and take part in the vote for only £3 ($5). More than 100,000 did so. They included thousands of hard-left radicals who regard the Labour Party as a pro-capitalist sell-out. (They also included some Tories, encouraged by columnists like the Telegraph’s Toby Young, who urged his readers to vote for Corbyn in order to make Labour unelectable.) The result was a landslide for Corbyn.

Labour’s leadership was outplayed. The failure was in part generational. There is hardly anyone left in Labour who took part in or even remembers the bitter internal struggle in the late ’40s to find and exclude Communist and pro-Soviet infiltrators—one of the last great Labour anti-Communists, Denis Healey, died this October. (This was so successful that the British Trotskyite movement largely abandoned any attempt to gain power in Westminster, choosing instead to focus on infiltrating the education system in order to change the entire culture.) By the time Corbyn took over, most of Labour’s “modernizers”—those who had participated in the takeover of the party leadership by Tony Blair and his rival and successor Gordon Brown—had never encountered real Stalinists or Trotskyists and lacked the fortitude and ruthless skill to do battle with them.

Unfortunately for the centrists and modernizers, many of Corbyn’s people received their political education in extreme-left political circles, so brutal internal politics and fondness for purges and excommunications are (as Eliza Doolittle said) “mother’s milk” to them. For example: Corbyn’s right-hand men, John McDonnell and Ken Livingstone, were closely linked to a Trotskyite group called the Workers Revolutionary Party. The WRP was a deeply sinister political cult that included among its promoters not only the radical actors Vanessa and Corin Redgrave but also the directors of Britain’s National Theatre. Its creepy leader Gerry Healy was notorious for beating and raping female members of his party and took money from Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.

Corbyn’s own front bench has been on the verge of rebellion. And any notion that he would moderate his views quickly dissipated once he began recruiting his team.

Most people in British politics, and especially most British liberals, had fallen prey to the comforting delusion that the far left had disappeared—or that what remained of it was simply a grumpy element of Labour’s base rather than a devoted and deadly enemy of the center-left looking for an opportunity to go to war. As Nick Cohen, the author of What’s Left: How the Left Lost Its Way, has pointed out, this complacent assumption enabled the centrists to act as if they had no enemies to the left. Now they know otherwise.

Another reason for the seemingly irresistible rise of Corbyn and his comrades is what you might call Blair Derangement Syndrome. It is hard for Americans and other foreigners to understand what a toxic figure the former prime minister has become in his own country. Not only is he execrated in the UK more than George W. Bush is in the U.S., Blair is especially hated by his own party and on the left generally. It is a hatred that is unreasoning and fervid in almost exact proportion to the adoration he once enjoyed, and it feels like the kind of loathing that grows out of betrayed love. Those in the Labour Party who can’t stand Blair have accordingly rejected many if not all of the changes he wrought and the positions he took. And so, having eschewed Blairism, they were surprised when they lost two elections in a row to David Cameron—who, though a Tory, is basically Blair’s heir.

Blair is detested not because he has used his time after leaving office to pursue wealth and glamour and has become a kind of fixer for corrupt Central Asian tyrants and other unsavory characters. Rather, it is because he managed to win three general elections in a row by moving his party to the center. Those victories and 12 years in office forced the left to embrace the compromises of governance without having much to show for it. This, more than Blair’s enthusiasm for liberal interventionism or his role in the Iraq war or even his unwavering support of Israel during the 2008 Gaza war, drove the party first to select the more leftist of the two Milliband brothers and now hand the reins to Corbyn.

A
s I write, Corbyn has been Leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition (a position with no equivalent in the United States) for a mere 10 weeks—and those 10 weeks have been disastrous both in terms of the polls and party unity. Corbyn’s own front bench has been on the verge of rebellion. Before the vote on the UK’s joining the air campaign in Syria, some senior members apparently threatened to resign from their shadow cabinet positions unless Corbyn moderated his staunch opposition to any British military action against ISIS in Syria. (It worked: Rather than face open revolt, Corbyn allowed a free vote instead of a “whipped” one, and 66 Labour MPs proceeded to vote for air strikes). Any notion that Corbyn’s elevation would prompt him to moderate his views quickly dissipated once he began recruiting his team. His shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, is one of the only people in Parliament as extreme as he. While serving as a London councillor in the 1980s, McDonnell lambasted Neil Kinnock, the relatively hard-left Labour leader defeated by Margaret Thatcher, as a “scab.” A fervent supporter of the IRA during the Northern Ireland troubles, McDonnell endorsed “the ballot, the bullet, and the bomb” and once half-joked that any MP who refused to meet with the “provisionals” running the terror war against Great Britain should be “kneecapped” (the traditional provo punishment involving the shattering of someone’s knee with a shotgun blast). Recently he made the headlines by waving a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book at George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As Nick Cohen has written of Corbyn and his circle: “These are not decent, well-meaning men who want to take Labour back to its roots…they are genuine extremists from a foul tradition, which has never before played a significant role in Labour Party history.”

During Corbyn’s first week as leader, he refused to sing the national anthem at a service commemorating the Battle of Britain, presumably because as a diehard anti-monarchist, he disagrees with the lyric “God save our Queen.” Soon after he declared that as a staunch opponent of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, he would not push the button even if the country were attacked.

He expressed unease at the assassination by drone strike of the infamous British ISIS terrorist “Jihadi John.” Corbyn said it would have been “far better” had the beheader been arrested and tried in court. (He did not say how he envisaged Jihadi John ever being subject to arrest, let alone concede that such a thing could happen only due to military action against ISIS, which he opposes).

Corbyn’s reaction to the Paris attacks prompted fury from the right and despair in his own party. He seemed oddly unmoved and certainly not provoked to any sort of anger by the horror. Indeed, he lost his chance to score some easy points against Prime Minister Cameron’s posturing. Cameron, trying to play tough in the wake of military and policing cuts, announced that British security forces would now “shoot to kill” in the event of a terrorist attack in the UK—as if the normal procedure would be to shoot to wound. Any normal Labour leader of the last seven decades would have taken the prime minister to task for empty rhetoric while reminding the public of Labour’s traditional hard stance against terrorism in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Instead, Corbyn bleated that he was “not happy” with a shoot-to-kill policy. It was “quite dangerous,” he declared. “And I think can often be counterproductive.”

W
hile there is no question that Labour has suffered a titanic meltdown, and that Corbyn’s triumph may mean the end of Labour as we know it, it’s not yet clear whether Corbyn is truly as electorally toxic as the mainstream media and political class believe him to be. What some observers within Labour fear is that Corbyn could indeed become prime minister after having transformed the party into a very different organization and having shifted the balance of British politics far to the left.

They concede that there is little chance of Corbyn’s ever winning over the 2–3 million swing voters of “middle England” who have decided recent elections. But they worry that in a rerun of the leadership election, Corbyn might be able to recruit a million or more new, young voters who have no memory of the Cold War, let alone Labour’s failures in the 1970s, and who think that he is offering something fresh and new.

It might not only be naive young people who would vote for Corbyn despite his apparent lack of parliamentary or leadership skills. In Britain, there is a growing disdain for, and distrust of, slick professional politicians—and for good reason. It’s not hard to seem sincere or refreshingly possessed of genuine political convictions if you’re going up against someone like David Cameron, who even more than Tony Blair can exude cynicism, smugness, and a branding executive’s patronizing contempt for the public. The fact that Corbyn is relatively old and unglamorous might also play in his favor; the British public is tired of glib, photogenic, boyish men. Corbyn and McDonnell are “an authentic alternative to the focus-group-obsessed poll-driven policies of the Blair days,” Cohen writes—but it is an authenticity based in “authentic far-left prejudices and hypocrisies.” Those prejudices and hypocrisies could sound a death knell for Britain’s historic role in advancing the Western idea—an idea that is, in large measure, the most glorious handiwork of its sceptered isles.