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Last week we had a chance to watch Hillary Rodham Clinton respond in real time to a complex foreign-policy challenge. Six days after the Paris attacks, she gave a comprehensive anti-terrorism speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The speech was impressive. While other candidates are content to issue vague calls to get tough on terrorism, Clinton offered a multilayered but coherent framework, not only dealing with ISIS but putting that threat within the crosscutting conflicts that are inflaming the Middle East.
For example, instead of issuing a generic call to get tough on the terrorists, she pointed to the reality that ISIS will be toppled only if there is an uprising by fellow Sunnis. There has to be a Sunni Awakening against ISIS in 2016, like the Sunni Awakening that toppled al-Qaida in Iraq starting in 2007.
That will not happen while President Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria is spreading mayhem, terror and genocide. As long as they find themselves in the grips of a horrific civil war, even sensible Sunnis will feel they need ISIS as a counterpoint to the butchery coming out of Damascus.
Clinton therefore gestured to the reality that you can’t really deal with ISIS unless you are also willing to deal with Assad. Assad is not some secondary threat whom we can deal with after we’ve tamed the ISIS monster. Assad created the failed state and the power vacuum that ISIS was able to fill. Assad serves as chief recruiter for ISIS every time he drops a barrel bomb on a school or a market. Assad, as Clinton pointed out, has murdered even more Syrians than ISIS has.
Dealing with Assad and ISIS simultaneously throws you into the bitter and complex jockeying between Sunni and Shiite, between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It puts pressure on your Ukraine policy (Russian President Vladimir Putin will want concessions as a price for backing off his aggression in the Middle East). Everything is connected. That’s why the presidency is for grown-ups, not rank outsiders.
Some of Clinton’s specific prescriptions were a little too limited and Obamaesque for my taste (she didn’t even call for more U.S. Special Forces to improve the bombing campaigns, though she said she would be open to it). But she is thoughtful and instructive on both the big picture and the right way forward. She seems to understand that if we end up allying with Russia in a common fight against terrorism, we will end up preserving Assad, preserving ISIS and making everything worse.
Some Republicans have stained themselves with refugee xenophobia, but there’s a bigger story here: For a time, the Middle East was held together by Arab nation-states and a belief in Arab nationalisms. Recently Arab nationalisms have withered and Arab nation-states have begun to dissolve from their own decrepitude.
Along comes ISIS filling that vacuum and trying to destroy what’s left of Arab nations. ISIS dreams of a caliphate. It erases borders. It destroys order.
The Arab nation-states were not great. But the nation-state system did preserve a certain order. National identities and boundaries enabled Sunnis and Shiites to live together peaceably. If nations go away in the region we’ll get a sectarian war of all against all, radiating terrorism like we’ve never seen.
The grand strategy of U.S. policy in the Middle East, therefore, should be to do what we can to revive and reform Arab nations, to help them become functioning governing units.
That means confronting the forces that thrive in failed states. That begins with stepped-up military pressure on ISIS. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations proposes a campaign like the one that allowed the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban after 9/11 — a light footprint campaign using Special Operations forces and CIA paramilitaries to direct allied bombing in support of locals on the ground. Once life becomes a miserable grind for ISIS soldiers, recruiting will suffer.
But it also means going hard on Assad, creating no-fly zones for sanctuaries for Syrian refugees to limit his power, ratcheting up pressure on Iran and Russia to force his departure. And it also means supporting institutional reform, as Clinton said, throughout the Arab world, to revitalize nations as functioning units. Not an unsustainable stab at nation-building, but better governance from top to bottom.
Before Paris it was possible to argue that time was on our side, that we could sit back and let ISIS collapse under the weight of its own craziness. The Paris attacks refuted that. ISIS is becoming an ever-more-aggressive threat. The FBI already has more than 900 active Islamic State investigations ongoing. Lord knows what sort of biological or other weapons the group can get its hands on.
Candidate Clinton laid out a supple and sophisticated approach. The next president will have to provide the action.
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.
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