Larry Kudlow over at National Review Online is excoriating the president for not working to destroy ISIS and the Congress for not passing a declaration of war/authorization for the use of force.  We’ve had a similar piece in the last week appear in the Washington Post.

Kudlow focuses on the threat to the U.S. homeland.  The Washington Post focuses on the humanitarian crisis and threat to world order.  Neither piece engages the issue of what comes after ISIS.

It is true that two combat brigades supported by air and non-combat units could effectively route ISIS as a force and eliminate ISIS as a government (and it is a government).  The crucial question is what do you do then?  There is no appetite for another decade-long venture in military occupation and state building.  Neither Turkey nor Jordan, the only stable and responsible local powers are in the mood to annex Eastern Syria and Western Iraq.  Iraq is in total disarray.  Syria is in no position to reassert control over the region.  So at best you’ve ventured into what amounts to a punitive expedition like the ones that the British during Empire used to make in Afghanistan (cf. Winston Churchill’s account of one in My Early Life: A Roving Commission).  You replace a brutal Islamist totalitarian porto-state with anarchy characterized by a Hobbesian war of all against all, further humanitarian crisis, and achieved no policy goals.

The desired outcome is: the dismemberment of Iraq and Syria into four states: a Kurdish homeland in a belt from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean north of Ras Shamra, a belt of Sunni control from central Syria to western Iraq, and a southern Shia core, perhaps in some sort of federal union (optional), along with a Alawite rump state of Syria on the Syrian coast.  None of this will ever come to fruition.  The Turks will never tolerate the creation of a Kurdish homeland on its border, because its one restive Kurdish minority would want to amalgamate with that state.  The current Shiite Iraqi government would never surrender the oil-producing regions.  The international community is too invested in the current states’ borders and the Westphalian states system to support this outcome.

So what do we do?  Precisely what we have been doing, a posture of off-shore balancing to keep all sides fighting without a decisive victory in order to (a) discomfit Iran by frustrating its bid for regional hegemony, (b) keep Russia’s focus on its Syrian intervention so that it is unable to sow further trouble in the Baltic, and (c) use the refugee crisis to drive Europe into a more responsible global posture (increased defense spending, policing its external borders, relaxation of Stability Pact limits due to the emergency).  That last will take tremendous diplomatic skill and re-engagement with Europe, which I doubt the current administration’s foreign policy team is capable of, given its pertinacious focus on China’s rise to the exclusion of all else.

It is true that the bungling and incompetent foreign policy staff of the current administration missed its change to shape events at the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, but now, the current strategy is the best of possible options.