Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 546

Terror and Migrants Threaten Global Supply Chains

A U.S. withdrawal from the task of promoting world stability not only results in war and unspeakable suffering, as in Syria, but it also degrades the performance of the global economy. The threat of terror is, of course, very bad for local economies: It discourages tourism and keeps people away from crowded restaurants and sporting events. But its effects are also global, according to the 115,000-member Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS). CIPS tells the FT, “the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East and the reintroduction of border controls in Europe is disrupting supply chains and raising costs for business.” CIPS values the added costs in the billions, saying that the effects are multiplied in an economy already hit by unstable commodities prices and Russian aggression.

Officials in Washington should not only see fighting terrorism abroad as a protection against attacks at home. Terrorists are also a threat to the global economy, the stability of which is a necessary ingredient for American companies and American world order. By letting ISIS establish a presence in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. has perhaps cost an already-fragile global economy billions of dollars. Isolationism and American withdrawal from the world is a mistake.

It’s Still World War IV

It is unpleasant to explain to our children not only that we are at war, but that they will be, too. At a time when adult behavior is in short supply on our college campuses, however, it is particularly important to deliver some unpleasant truths to the kids, among them that our real-life enemies—who really do want to kill us and destroy our civilization—do not come straight from the pages of their storybooks. Western leaders have managed to avoid both truths for 14 years. And counting.

Less than two months after the September 11 attacks, I framed the conflict as “World War IV” in a Wall Street Journal article. The main point:

The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map. The analogy with the Cold War does, however, suggest some key features of that conflict: that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.

I took a good deal of abuse for that coinage, and for criticizing efforts to talk about our Islamist enemies as if they were the “the real-world equivalents of J. K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort, Tolkien’s Sauron, or C. S. Lewis’ White Witch,” that is, nameless evildoers who do evil for the sake of doing evil. Yet leaders from Jeremy Corbyn to Barack Obama continue to express that piety, and it keeps us from coming to grips with what we are up against.

The French, having been hit a second time, and harder, by the Islamists are now quite open in calling this war. And so it is. Mere criminals act for the sake of illicit gain or out of dumb sadism. The Islamic State does have its heists and extortion, but while it is certainly sadistic, it is not stupid—it is purposive and very intelligent. They are brave people, those murderers and suicide bombers; they are well organized and trained; they have a real, political end in view, even if we think it is mad. So were Mao’s purposes, after all, and Western leaders still smile ingratiatingly at his portrait when they go to China.Our leaders fool themselves and try to fool us when they claim that the Islamists are “contained”, let alone “losing.” On the contrary: When European writers and journalists censor themselves, when politicians bend over backwards to denounce “Islamophobia” and de facto concede control of some parts of their cities to those who reject Western rights and laws, the Islamists win.One of the Administration’s greatest failures over the last seven years is its persistent underestimation of the enemy (“on the verge of strategic defeat”, “the Jayvee team”, “contained”, and as ever “on the wrong side of history”), to the point of failing to take them seriously. When al-Qaeda hit the Benghazi consulate, the White House may have sincerely believed that this was a spontaneous mob unhappy about a six-month-old trailer to a movie that was never made. The profound strategic stupidity implicit in that claim is actually more damning than the alternative thesis that senior officials simply lied to avoid domestic political embarrassment. But the Administration is hardly alone. The British Home Secretary—a Conservative, of course—declared on Monday, “The [Paris] attacks have nothing to do with Islam.” Rubbish. They most certainly do—a vicious, apocalyptic, and thankfully minority element of Islam, to be sure, but Islam nonetheless.Contrary to what the President and his team have claimed, the enemy is doing just fine, thank you. The Syrian civil war is providing the training ground for thousands of recruits to the jihadi cause; the refugee camps with hundreds of thousands of displaced, abused, and traumatized children offer an unlimited pool for replacements in years to come. Western civilization cannot quite bring itself to commit to the hard fact of war, preferring useless gestures of sympathy—first it was “je suis Charlie” and now it is illuminating buildings in the French colors. Sweet, to be sure, but sweet does not win wars.What will it take to fight this war? Begin with endurance: this war will probably go on for the rest of my life, and well into my children’s. That is an unpleasant reality, but there it is. Politicians will have to explain just how high the stakes are. The President may be right in the narrowest sense when he says that the Islamic State is not an “existential threat”, but its actions can derange our politics and cause chaos in parts of the world that we care a great deal about. If they ever acquire weapons of mass destruction (which they would like to do), they can and will kill thousands and tens of thousands rather than tens and hundreds.We will have to understand the ideology, or rather ideologies of our enemies. The Islamic State may be an outgrowth of al-Qaeda but it differs in its tactics, the specific grisliness of its methods, its willingness to kill other Muslims, and its overall strategic concept. Until government officials can discuss these matters openly we will be doomed to a strategy that consists chiefly of therapeutic bombing, which will temporary relieve the itch, but leave the wounds suppurating.Finally, we need to stop the circumlocutions. The “violent extremists” are in fact Islamists. We do not intend to “bring them to justice” or “take them off the battlefield”, but rather capture or kill them. Although it is true one cannot kill one’s way out of an insurgency, we are going to have to a kill a great many people—thousands, not hundreds—before we break the back of the Islamic State and kindred movements. To that end we need a long-range plan not to “contain” but to crush them. It seems fairly evident that the Administration lacks such a plan, but if it exists it is plainly failing.It will be a long, bloody, and costly process; what is at stake is not simply our way of life in the sense of rock concerts and alcohol in restaurants, but the more fundamental rights of freedom of speech and religion, the equality of women, and, most essentially, the freedom from fear and freedom to think.My critics were wrong. It was World War IV in 2001. It is World War IV today. And quite possibly it will be World War IV for more tomorrows than either they or I will see. If our children or our children’s children are not to say the same, we must start by telling them the truth.

OPEC Can’t Come Up with a Plan

When oil ministers from OPEC’s twelve member countries meet in Vienna next month for their biannual summit, they’ll do so without a concrete long-term plan to discuss. As Bloomberg reports, the cartel’s board of governors was unable to hash out a draft strategy at its latest meeting, which will in effect limit what ministers can map out when they convene in two and a half weeks:

Governors of the 12-member group couldn’t agree on the final draft of the plan at a meeting in Vienna earlier this month, the delegates said. The governors disagreed on clauses suggested by some members, including about curtailing output, setting production quotas and finding ways to maximize OPEC profit, according to the delegates.

OPEC ministers are to meet on Dec. 4 to assess the oil market and the group’s output policy. Venezuela and Algeria are among OPEC states most affected by the slump in oil price and have long urged fellow members to curb production and support prices. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, led the group to switch its strategy in November 2014 to focus on pressuring competitors such as U.S. shale producers and reclaiming market share.

Riyadh has pushed heavily for a do-nothing strategy in the face of plunging crude prices over the past 17 months or so, opting to compete for market share rather than set a price floor by constricting supply. The Saudis can afford to do that—for now—because of their enormous sovereign wealth fund, but OPEC’s poorer petrostate members aren’t as well prepared to weather this storm. Venezuela and Algeria have been the most outspoken in their disapproval of the cartel’s current tack, in large part because both countries require oil prices in excess of $100 per barrel just to balance their budgets.

By advocating inaction, the Saudis are hoping to cede the mantle of global swing producer to higher-cost suppliers (read: U.S. frackers), but that’s not sitting well with all of its members. The longer this bearish market persists, the more tension we’re going to see within the cartel. And remember: New supplies of Iranian crude are set to come online as soon as Western sanctions are lifted.

The DNC Doubles Down

The Democratic National Committee has just released its final “Victory Task Force” report—the party’s post-mortem on its 2014 midterm drubbing—and the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza is not impressed:

That long-awaited document — all 18 pages of it! — hit the Internet on Tuesday and, boy, is it underwhelming. If you are looking for the Democratic version of the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” the 100-plus page Republican autopsy report issued after the 2012 election, this ain’t it. The Republican autopsy was deeply critical of the GOP and its positioning with voters. The Democratic version is largely a celebration of Democratic principles. Whereas the GOP autopsy suggested that the party totally reconsider its position on immigration reform for example, the thrust of the Democratic one is that the party should do a better job of coordinating its message. Um, no duh.

Cillizza is right. The document reveals a party with full confidence in its platform, convinced that it can start to win if only Americans were hearing its message. “The 2014 midterms made it abundantly clear that…Americans overwhelmingly support the issues and values that the Democratic Party fights for”, the Victory Task Force declares, rather remarkably. However, it continues, “our down-ballot candidates were not connecting with voters and lacked some fundamental infrastructure and support to convey their message.” According to DNC higher-ups, in other words, the principal reason that the party is now weaker (by some measures) than it has been at any time since the New Deal is that it lacks an effective infrastructure to field candidates and broadcast its arguments more loudly. Nothing that can’t be fixed by more fundraising.

The only concrete policy change the document addresses is redistricting. This is appropriate, as the 2010 Republican-drawn Congressional districts certainly have contributed to Republican state-level and Congressional dominance. The problem is that the report doesn’t give any remotely plausible proposals for how Democrats might actually recover state legislatures in 2020 and gerrymander them in their own favor.In any case, redistricting is not the root of the Democrats’ woes, as convenient as this idea may be for the party’s elites. The party’s fundamental challenge in races for Congress and state legislature is that it has created a coalition of voters that are, to paraphrase Thomas Edsall, inefficiently distributed. Single women, Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, college-educated young people, and other Democratic voting blocs are clustered in urban areas around the country, meaning that many of their votes are “wasted” in landslide local races. This coalition has proven quite effective at delivering the Democrats the White House, but it has been disastrous down the ticket. Based on the report, the Democrats’ working theory seems to be that if they double down on their increasingly assertive liberalism and spend more money, the base will be fired up, the voters will show up, and the party will prevail. There is no need to think about constructing a broader coalition or appealing to more working class whites and independents, as Bill Clinton did in the 1990s and as the Biden shadow campaign was suggesting it might be able to do.It’s impossible to say whether the strategy articulated in the Victory Task Force report—that is, the 2010, 2012, and 2014 strategy, except more so—will be effective in 2016 and beyond. But we do wonder whether the Democrats are overconfident in the popularity of their current policy agenda and the durability of the coalition they have constructed.

The Next Eurofudge?

On Monday, the Telegraph had reported that France was planning to ask for a temporary suspension of Schengen at this coming Friday’s emergency meeting of EU ministers. A day later, reports emerged that France was backing off that extreme position, and would instead ask for a strengthening of the Schengen zone’s external borders. Now, the Guardian has got wind of the specifics of what the French have in mind:

A three-page list of demands […] calls for the rapid adoption of measures retaining passenger information on everyone travelling by air within the EU, a battery of new curbs on firearms sales and trading, a clampdown on and monitoring of cash transactions and other means of non-electronic payment, and greater intelligence-sharing across the EU.

 

It’s important to remember that Hollande had already asked for a strengthening of Schengen’s external borders after the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier this year, and was greeted with grumbles from European leaders who were not yet ready to act—or bear the financial costs. Maybe this time will be different.Yet even if France were to get everything it asked for, the security challenges presented by Schengen as it now stands would not be solved—not by a long shot. Schengen facilitates Europe’s interconnectedness, but a consequence of that interconnectedness is that any individuals who are a security concern remain a threat to all member states. Better intelligence-sharing would help, but the absence of border controls makes it much harder for police and intelligence services to track suspects. Likewise, guns bought in the arms markets of Belgium can be brought across the border to France without checks (as, in this case, they seem to have been). The proposed curbs on arms sales don’t really address the larger problem.This time probably won’t be different, however, and France probably won’t get everything it asks for. If recent history is anything to go on, we should instead expect more fudging and spinning: Eurocrats truly excel at one thing only, and that is kicking cans down the road.

Cyprus “Closer Than Ever” to Reunification?

Amid all the bad news coming out of Europe these days, here’s something much more welcome: A top Turkish official is saying Cyprus is getting close to reunification. Reuters:

The island’s Greek and Turkish communities have lived apart since 1974, when Turkey invaded the north after a brief Greek-inspired coup. The seeds of partition were sown soon after independence from Britain in 1960.

“We are cautiously optimistic. We think we are closer than we have ever been before,” Emine Colak, foreign minister in the internationally unrecognized administration in the north, told Reuters in an interview.

“We don’t think the Cyprus problem has got easy – it hasn’t but we think we have a window of opportunity,” Colak said. “It is possible and it is desirable to get to at least the major part of the negotiations and the agreed text by May 2016.”

Turkey sees ending this conflict as an aid in its bid to join the European Union, but the question is whether the Turkish Cypriots will yield enough to satisfy the Greek Cypriots. Past agreements have failed because the Greeks were unhappy with the amount of control Turkey would still exercise over a unified country. It therefore gives pause that this latest report doesn’t quote any Greek officials.

But still, any talk of a reunified Cyprus is a ray of sunshine in a world that often seems only to be getting darker.

The Pension Problem Is Worse Than You Think

It’s not just stagnating cities in states like California or Illinois that are running into pension troubles. The pension vise is now tightening around Houston too, an oil-rich metropolis that has been enjoying rapid job growth for years. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Houston is weathering a prolonged plunge in oil prices, but the city may have an even bigger problem: its pensions.

Though economic growth has only slowed, not stalled, in Texas’ largest city, its finances are showing what several investors and analysts describe as warning signs.Those include a rapidly growing gap in funding its retirement plans for public workers and a limit on its revenue-raising capabilities imposed by a voter-approved cap on property taxes.The $3.2 billion pension-funding gap is threatening Houston’s Aa2 credit rating from Moody’s Investors Service, hurting demand for its debt and emerging as an issue in the city’s mayoral race.

Houston’s experience is a cautionary tale. The city counted on oil money and didn’t manage its finances well when times were good, and, like many cities, built its pension promises on overly optimistic projections for future growth. Pensions are in trouble in states and municipalities all over the country because while politicians have strong incentives to over-promise in the short-term, they have little incentive to plan for future slowdowns. And if Houston can’t create sustainable pension systems, despite its impressive economic fundamentals, what hope is there for Chicago?

The WSJ story also highlights the many divisions and conflicts that will flare up in the coming years as a pension reckoning approaches. Houston residents are “reluctant to support any tax increases” even as the pension woes “have contributed to reductions in hiring of police officers and spending on pothole repairs, which have become issues in the mayoral race.” This type of tradeoff is part of what we call the blue civil war. Various interests (in particular, the people who produce public services and the people who consume them) will be pitted against each other as the unsustainability of the blue model of governance, present in both Republican and Democratic states, becomes more and more clear.

China Hits Uighurs in Xinjiang

Chinese security forces have killed 17 suspected Uighur “militants” in Xinjiang, in response to a knife attack on a coal mine in September that left 50 Han Chinese dead.  reports on the deaths, which come after Beijing asked the international community for help in fighting what it described as a terrorist threat in its own restive west:

Radio Free Asia, citing Xinjiang police, said the 17 killed were all suspects in the attack, including three men believed to have been the ringleaders and their family members.

Repeated calls to the Xinjiang government seeking comment went unanswered.“I heard from colleagues who participated in the operation that the military blew up the cave where the suspects were hiding,” the report quoted Xinjiang police officer Ghalip Memethe as saying.“That is why we were able to kill all of them with zero victims [from our side]. Seventeen corpses were gathered after the explosion.”

Reports indicated that security forces blew up a cave where the militants were hiding, and that several women and children numbered among them.

These deaths come amidst China’s ongoing attempt to control Xinjiang and the Uighur Muslims who live there. In making that attempt, officials have taken the counterproductive tack of passing laws that penalize the practice of Islam for all Muslims in the area, whether radical or not (for example, banning Ramadan). Indiscriminate persecution of that type isn’t likely to keep radicalism contained, but rather to fuel it. The news that women and children were in the cave will likely have the same result. This ham-fisted approach in Xinjiang—of a piece in some ways with Beijing’s crackdown on Christians in Wenzhou and Xi’s purge—is not likely to end well.

Shale Makes US a Global Green Leader

An oil lobbyist group might not be the first place you’d go to for sensible climate policy advocacy, but that’s exactly what’s coming out of the American Petroleum Institute (API), which recently touted America’s transition away from coal towards cleaner-burning natural gas as an important, cost-effective green transition. The FT reports:

The US should be a “model” for countries seeking to tackle climate change because of the way it has reduced carbon dioxide emissions through increased use of natural gas, the American Petroleum Institute has said. […]

US energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas, dropped 10 per cent from 2007 to 2013. […]Research presented by the API showed that in the 25 US states with the highest rate of carbon dioxide emissions from their power generation, switching completely out of coal-fired generation and into gas would more than meet their targets for reductions set under the Clean Power Plan.

This is something we’ve known for a long time, and even for green zealots it should be easy to grasp. Coal emits twice as much carbon as, and much more localized pollutants than, natural gas when burned, so to the extent that gas displaces coal for power generation, it’s an eco-friendly process. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. is currently flooded with natural gas, and prices are therefore extraordinarily cheap. The shale boom, then, has given a price incentive to an environmentally-friendly energy shift, something the green movement, for all of its moaning and fear mongering, has failed to produce.

The U.S. has made more progress in diversifying away from coal than any other G-7 nation, according to a recent report, and that achievement hasn’t come thanks to wind or solar, but because of shale gas. The rest of the world has had trouble developing shale in the way America has, but there’s clearly an ecological imperative to frack, just as there is an economical and strategic one.

Back to Basics

At times like these, in the immediate aftermath of a convulsive and repulsive terrorist attack like that of this past Friday evening in Paris, it is a good idea to repair to basics. Doing so helps one to calm down, which is essential because, as Elena Bonner once observed, “fear gives bad advice.” It also forces us to balance the urge to “do something” with the need to think first about what is both wise and possible to do. I am content to let others “sound the tocsin,” blame and admonish far and wide, and adopt Churchillian-toned aspirational language. Let me now then merely think a bit on paper about a few basics, and do so in view of an audience in hopes that it might help others to get a grip as well.

Perhaps the best essay ever written on the kind of challenge before us today dates back more than forty years, to July 1975. That is when David Fromkin’s “The Strategy of Terrorism” appeared in Foreign Affairs, before perhaps most of the readers of these blogospheric words were born. Fromkin identified terrorism as a weapon of the weak, a trap of sorts designed to provoke stronger forces into acting on the basis of fear in counterproductive ways. Those counterproductive ways could take several forms: foolishly exaggerating a terrorist enemy’s power and legitimacy; doing things that betray one’s core values or alienate natural or objective allies; spending huge sums of public money to prevent tactics that terrorists have no intention of reusing; and more besides.One example Fromkin gave came from FLN tactics in Algeria in the mid-1950s. The French government at the time claimed that Algeria was not a colony but a department of France, and that all citizens enjoyed equal rights and respect. But when the FLN bombed a cinema, the police rounded up only Arabs, no French colonists, giving lie to the pretense. Alas, the French have a vaguely similar problem today, except now it is playing out in France proper, not Algeria.One does not have to go back so far in history to find other examples. Unfortunately, one of those examples involves the United States; its passage through history is far from over, and its very existence remains unrecognized by most. One of the legacies of the 9/11 attacks has been a bureaucratized paranoia that undermines the confidence and verve that have been integral to the vitality of American society throughout its history. The distorted formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the massive TSA bureaucracy are very expensive, and most of the money we spend year after year is spent by rote and mostly in vain. Somewhere Ayman al-Zawahiri is sucking oxygen, and he probably smiles regularly at the thought of how little al-Qaeda’s operations cost compared to how many billions of dollars we have spent ever since.Indeed, we have even let one nutcase of a man, Richard Reid, trick us into making harmless middle-aged men and women remove their shoes and belts before boarding an airplane for more than a decade. How many shoe bombs has TSA discovered and defused in all this time? None.We have also flooded our trains, subways and buses with omnipresent announcements to notice “something suspicious.” Every time we do such things to obvious excess, we betray our freedom and optimism and, by showing how easy it is to scare us, actually make us more alluring targets for future attack.Instead of questioning the growing shadow of the lumbering security state, amazingly, our salon intellectuals, media, and much of our political class prefer to wax indignant over intelligence and surveillance programs that have a track record of quiet success, and strain to shut them down…at least until we yo-yo ourselves back to prudence after the next attack. Thus the strategy of terrorism slowly succeeds.What has this to do with what happened on Friday evening and since? François Hollande’s statement that the Friday attack was “an act of war,” and France’s rapid retaliation by air against targets in Raqqa, did much to raise the status of the Islamic State from the desultory, hybrid proto-state it is to something grander that it is not—at least not yet. No doubt domestic politics affected Hollande’s choice of language, for he does not wish to cede political ground to Marine Le Pen, lest by a sin of omission he help to make her the next President of France—but still. If France is at war, every day that the Islamic State remains ensconced in its territory is a day that France has failed to win that war. But France cannot win a war in the Levant with airpower alone, and as it, along with the British, demonstrated in Libya in 2011, its airpower is less than massively impressive in any case.Similarly, suggestions that NATO invoke Article V, as it did at European behest after 9/11, shower ISIS with symbolic power it does not deserve and that it anyway should be denied. There is nothing wrong with solidarity and a good deal that is right with it, but it should be a quiet and stoic solidarity forged by effective deeds—of which there are a great many left to do among democratic allies—not a glitzy kind purchased by a spurt of elevated vocabulary words.As for French aerial attacks, no one can yet say (in public) with confidence what they destroyed. It is worth remembering, however, that the people of Raqqa, as well as of Mosul, are in a very tough spot. The vast majority are not pre-millenarian fanatics wishing to goad on the great global holy war of the end of days—quite possibly the aim of the small core of delusionists surrounding Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But neither are they eager to be repressed and killed in large numbers by a criminal Alawi regime in Damascus or by murderous Shi‘a militias directed via Baghdad from Tehran—or left to the abject chaos of having no governing order at all. Wayward French, American, and Russian bombs tend to force such people into putting up with the order of the status quo, no matter how heinous, as the lesser evil compared to no order at all. That translates into an objective advantage for the Islamic state.Semi-serious bombing by otherwise serious air forces also, of course, reinforces the Islamic State propaganda narrative that the infidels have declared war against Islam, and greatly aids its recruitment efforts. Very likely, the feckless American use of airpower since September 2014 has had exactly that result. What this means, it seems pretty obvious, is that if Western countries determine that deploying violence has a role in solving the ISIS problem, that violence must have a prominent Sunni Muslim component if it is to undermine the ISIS claim, and it must be a deployment meant not for signaling purposes or to tender wagers about escalation dominance, but to intimidate, suffocate, and, yes, actually defeat the enemy.If basic number one is “don’t foolishly help the bad guys with their strategy of terrorism,” what is basic number two? It is that destroying a relatively weak enemy is easy compared to building a stable peace in its wake. Or, as P.J. O’Rourke once memorably put it, it’s one thing to burn down the shithouse, another to install plumbing.Alas, not even the prior destruction phase is all that easy, and how that might get done will shape the environment for any subsequent effort to put the region back together. (History tells us so: Messrs. Sykes and Picot could draw all the lines they liked on a map nearly a century ago, yet the arrival of General Allenby’s army the very next year and the exigencies of occupation and administration rendered those lines rapidly obsolete.) So even assuming that, somehow, a coalition can be assembled to defeat the Islamic State on the battlefield in the Levant, here exactly is where things would get very, very complicated. Let us count the ways.First, ISIS is a problem only because the Assad regime in Syria is the prior problem, and standing behind that murderous regime is Iran and Russia. ISIS arose from the U.S. shattering and subsequent premature abandonment of Iraq, two errors in sequence that produced one compound mess. But the fuel that fed ISIS most and allowed it to deepen and spread has been the Syrian civil war, in which the regime has killed upwards of 300,000 Sunni civilians, forced four million more to leave the country, and created unknown numbers of internally displaced persons. ISIS initially struggled, mostly in vain, to fill a vacuum and stop mass murder, because no one else would try—not other Sunni Arab states and not the United States. This must be acknowledged. We can call ISIS all the nasty names we like, and of course we’re not obligated to nominate it for the Nobel Peace Prize. But we cannot readily fix a problem whose origins we refuse to understand.This means that Iranian and Russian efforts to protect Assad in recent and ongoing multilateral diplomacy must not be allowed to succeed, because if they do ISIS cannot be undone. It will regenerate like a sliced up planaria in a high school biology lab. Rumors that the Obama Administration is slipping toward some kind of concession along those lines needs to be not true, because that would only ensure that the civil war would become even bloodier than it already is and produce still more refugees to strain Jordan, Turkey, and, of course, the European Union to their limits and beyond. A deal made largely on Russian terms will not stop the war, only reshape it.In the longer run, ISIS represents a nightmare for both Tehran and Moscow, to the extent that it survives to become the core node of radical Sunni sectarian power. But in the short, tactical run, ISIS works like a battering ram against dysfunctional Sunni Arab states in the throes of perduring institutional decay, and that works in favor of Iranian interests, if less clearly also Russian ones. Russia and Iran are trying to save the Assad regime, not attack ISIS, even if saving Assad strengthens ISIS politically. The U.S government has no business abetting such a scheme.Second, unfortunately, while the Russian and Iranian regimes are not potential effective partners in solving this problem, they are the ones right now with the most skin in the game. They have gone seriously if still ineffectually kinetic, while the U.S. administration has done the minimum necessarily to salve domestic pressures. This means that to gain the upper hand diplomatically and really stop the war, the U.S. government needs to torque the battlefield more decisively than Iran and Russia can do so.But how? Even if we acknowledge the analogy of the Islamic State today to Taliban Afghanistan in the late summer and autumn of 2001, we have no Northern Alliance to leverage U.S. airpower. Of course, maybe a mere 7,000–8,000 crack U.S. troops could do the job, as , but that seems an optimistic assessment and, in any event, this Administration is clearly not going to send them.Third, the most likely coalition partner for that purpose the United States will not undertake itself—indeed, the only country on Syria’s border with the requisite capacity and perhaps the will to use it—is Turkey. The good news is that the Turkish leadership understands far better than the U.S. leadership does that the Syrian regime is the core of the ISIS problem. The bad news is that in recent months getting rid of Assad has taken a back seat to what is perceived in Ankara as an even greater and more urgent problem: stemming the twinned burgeoning of Kurdish nationalism and battlefield prowess.This puts Turkish and U.S. interests at loggerheads for all practical purposes. The fact that the two governments worked out a deal a few months ago that allows the U.S. military to use Incirlik air base is passing strange, for it is based on no stable coincidence of key interests whatsoever. It is likely therefore to eventually deteriorate in acrimony, leaving U.S.-Turkish relations even worse for the wear. The Turks see ISIS as a highly dangerous but still useful last-ditch asset against Assad, and they see the Kurds as both a mortal political challenge within the Turkish Republic and as an agent weakening that last-ditch asset. Meanwhile, the Americans see the Kurds as the most effective and reliable ally available so far against ISIS.Under such circumstances, the idea of creating a no-fly zone on the Syrian side of the Turkish border is fraught with problems. It is certainly an on-ramp for a ground force that will quickly become necessary to protect it, and the Obama Administration has made it clear that it will not provide that ground force. If the Turks provide it, it will predictably end up being pointed against the Kurds. If the Obama Administration relents and supports a no-fly zone under such circumstances, that will amount de facto to the third or fourth U.S. betrayal of the Kurds in the past half-century, depending on how one counts the tragedies of the past.Fourth, if not the Turks, then the only other ground force that can fill the bill, in theory at least, would be some kind of Sunni mega-militia that bestrides the old border that divided Syria and Iraq—a sort of second coming of the Anbar Awakening, only larger. To train and support such a mega-militia would require a significant U.S.-led force in theater—at a minimum something like 5,000-8,000 troops. Here the good news is that many of the Sunni Arabs on both sides of the border are (literally) cousins; one can at least imagine enough affinity (assabiya) among them to sustain effective cooperation. But turning a theoretical militia and an imagined affinity into a real military force that can fight and win is no cakewalk, to recall an embarrassing phrase from the past. And it would take time to make it happen, during which outrages like Paris could be expected to multiply.Fifth—and this is really the kicker—there is no way to compose a stable peace in the area within the old borders of the Levant. Let us assume for a moment that, somehow, Turks, Kurds, and a Sunni Arab mega-militia, with U.S.-led Western help in training, arming, logistics and intelligence, join together within the next year to overshadow the current Russian and Iranian effort and roll back, if not finally crush, the Islamic State. Assume further that other Western-supported anti-Assad forces prevent the Syrian regime from taking significant advantage of ISIS’s weakening. It is easy to pretend to be Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell, armed with a thick graphite harquebus and an otherwise blank map as they were in 1921, sketching out the borders of an independent Kurdistan composed of selected former Iraqi and Syrian territories, an Alawi-dominated rump Syria along the Mediterranean coast, a Sunni regional government spreading over the old Syrian-Iraqi border, and a rump Shi‘a Iraq centered on Baghdad and Basra. But who would agree to those new lines (and who would not)? Who would, enable, finance, support and enforce the new reality represented by that map?Maybe Russia and Iran would be satisfied to have preserved a rump Alawi Syria. Maybe, somehow, the Turks could be mollified and compensated in some way as to accept a Kurdish state, if it were skillfully shrouded in symbolic conditionalities and solemnly sworn limits. Maybe the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs would come up with the massive amounts of cash needed to finance stabilization and reconstruction in a newly drawn Levant. Maybe the Egyptians on behalf of the Arab League would lead an Arab force to police the peace until it stuck on its own, and maybe NATO would support that force.But for all these maybes to turn into a real postwar settlement, there would need to be a genuine leader—a great power with the resources, resolve, patience, reputation, and discernment to make it happen. That can only be the United States. But no one in his or her right mind thinks that can happen in the final year of the Obama Administration, and it is by no means clear that its successor would be any more willing to try—unless, of course, an American city (or two) suffers in future as Paris did this past Friday evening.So what does this very complicated if still basic analysis tell us? It tells us that even a massive and battlefield-successful use of force against ISIS in the absence of a viable route to a regional settlement is not in itself a strategy. It is only an instrument. A truly viable strategy is, most regrettably, hard to envision right now, even as the new status quo—defined by the sudden realization that the Islamic State has a “far enemy” option—is manifestly unacceptable.There is, at the least, a third basic: It is that things could get even worse. They always can.To see how, note that Israel has been dealing over the past month or so with a new kind of terrorism—terrorism not directed by any organization but a plague of anomic, one-off, lone-wolf stabbings and other forms of low-level but lethal violence. Compared to the terror of the first and second intifadas, the objective level of death and blood has been modest, but the level of anxiety it has produced is anything but modest. And that is because Israelis realize that the growth potential of this sort of terrorism is enormous, and that stopping it cannot depend on either deterring or cutting off the head of a leadership that is directing it.In the wake of 9/11, anti-terrorism experts in the United States and Europe feared exactly this sort of widely distributed, copycat, leaderless terrorism. With rare exceptions here and there, the problem never materialized, and to the limited extent it has, it has plagued Europe more than the United States. It could materialize in the near future, again far more likely in Europe than here.That concern should not lead Europeans to demonize asylum seekers, of course, for most of them are trying to escape the same purveyors of madness who attacked Paris on Friday. But it would be wildly imprudent to ignore the potential danger. From the forensics so far, every possible avenue of danger has been confirmed. French citizens as attackers? Check. Other European citizens as attackers—in this case Belgian nationals—using the Schengen Zone to advantage? Check. Returnees from jihad in Syria? Check. And a terrorist who disappeared into the flow of Europe-bound asylum seekers? Check.Clearly, then, it is not just the Levant that we in the United States need to be concerned about: the future of Europe is at stake as well, and that future needs to be understood as having, as always, a national security aspect for us. We need our democratic partners to be strong, stable, and cooperative in pursuit of common goals. So it is not only putting the Levant back together that confronts us, it is the simultaneous challenge of preventing Europe from falling apart. It doesn’t get any more basic than that.