Toughness. When it comes to a conflict between American interests and those of one or more opponents of those interests, it's the easy, slightly sexy, all-purpose answer. It plays well in the media. It's easy to sell in the court of public opinion. And it always works, regardless of the nature of the conflict or the opponent. Right?
Well, to borrow a phrase, two out of three ain't bad. It does play well in the media, and it will probably always be easy to sell in the court of public opinion. But, if we're willing to be taught by history, we know that all problems and conflicts are not created equal. If we learned nothing from Iraq, we should have learned that toughness means very little when the conflict is one between ideologies, rather than nation-states. Of course, a perusal of history would have kept our military out of Iraq in the first place. Because Iraq was never more than a collection of conflicting ideologies masquerading (for the sake of its British creators) as a nation-state. Our misguided attempt at imposing "democracy" on these ideologies only pulled the cork out of the fragile nation-state bottle--and created ISIS, a terrorist group dedicated to replacing civil law with religious law.
As a consequence, we now have voices in the media like this one, urging a hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-us approach to ISIS that involved more of the same misguided military intervention that got us to this point. The irony in Roger Cohen's piece is that he concedes a basic truth: that ISIS is as much an idea as it is anything else. Once again, if history teaches us anything, it's that you can't kill an idea with bullets. You can only kill it with better ideas.
Contrary to what you may have learned about the Cold War, that's how we won it. We demonstrated that democracy worked better than Communism. And that was enough because, apart from the mutual assurance of nuclear destruction, the war was explicitly based on a competition between two political philosophies--and the better one won. That is why we need to deal with ISIS in the same way that we fought the Cold War, by deploying soft power ranging in form from propaganda to espionage. Military power may have a role to play at some points, but it has to be used very selectively. Again, if history teaches us anything, the worst thing we can do to members of a movement seeking martyrdom is to give them martyrs.
One the other hand, hard power is essential, when the opponent is a nation-state looking to gobble up other nation states. That's why I find myself nodding my head when I read this piece from Slate, urging us to prepare to meet Vladimir Putin on the battlefield he has chosen to confront the U.S. and its NATO allies: Ukraine. Putin is a very different kind of threat from ISIS. If he has any ideology at all, it is strictly himself. He is an international bully whose power comes entirely out of the barrels of guns. We have no alternative but to show that we are ready to meet him on the battlefield, and we have already started to take steps to do that.
Different crises, different solutions. Those are some of the lessons that history can teach us, provided that we are still willing to learn. I can only hope that we are still willing. Our children and grandchildren are counting on it.
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