It is thankfully rare that Americans are forcibly awakened from their determined introspection. Such moments can be valuable for they impose on us sobriety and demand of us a cold-eyed assessment of the state of play. The horrific bloodshed in Paris is one such moment. Only hours before a band of organized, highly trained, and dangerously well-equipped terrorists began their murderous work on Friday night, America was engaged in a bitter debate over the limitless grievances of America’s intellectually sequestered college students. How truly small and trivial their alleged injustices seem today, a small sample of which include the cultural insensitivity of Halloween costumes and sports mascots. We as a nation are, however, more like these transgressed students than we’d like to admit. On both sides of the aisle heading into the 2016 presidential election cycle, America’s front-running candidates reflect our own petty grievances, which were not so far removed from those aspiring on-campus revolutionaries. Our candidates are generally unserious people in grave times, but their frivolity merely mirrors our own.
Those civic-minded souls who managed to catch Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate were treated to one such display of monumental superficiality. Even in the immediate wake of the Paris attacks, with the tally of victims continuing to mount, the three remaining Democratic presidential aspirants were unable to rise to the moment.
Each candidate offered grand displays of solemnity and perfunctorily pledged to destroy the nascent Islamic State that the sitting president of their party allowed to mature and strengthen. Even the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders noted that America must come together resolved, “to destroy” ISIS. Of course, Sanders surrendered any accumulated goodwill when he averred as naively as he could that terrorism is a direct outgrowth of climate change, and the root cause of society-shattering violence is, in essence, the weather.
Asked if her former boss, President Barack Obama, had irresponsibly underestimated ISIS, Hillary Clinton blamed George W. Bush – not for allowing terrorism to incubate in Iraq, of course, but for setting a timetable for American withdrawal to which his successor dutifully abided. In an effort not to identify a course of action but to instead assign blame for the current state of affairs, Sanders and Martin O’Malley chose instead to litigate the decision to invade Iraq and the Islamist insurgencies that were its result. In response to this rehashed debate, Clinton insisted that Americans die in terrorist attacks overseas all the time, as did 23-year-old California college student Nohemi Gonzalez in the streets of Paris. “There is no question in my mind that if we summon our resources, both our leadership resources and all of the tools at our disposal, not just military force which should be used as a last resort,” Clinton said. “But it cannot be an American fight.” To suggest that the battle against radical Islamic jihadism is not an American fight is to confess a terrifying commitment to willful blindness.
Of course, there is no such thing as “radical Islam,” at least not in the minds of those candidates on that stage. When pressed, every candidate declined to contend that the West was at war with that competing ideology. Though O’Malley made an effort to split the baby and declare a war on “radical jihadis,” that’s not all that different from declaring a war on “extremism” or “violence,” although he used an Arabic word to describe these phenomena. This is not a trivial matter; no nation can fight a war against an amorphous enemy. No ideology can be defeated unless it is isolated and dissidents who would undermine it clearly identified. Radical Islamic terrorism is a product of the competition between two distinct philosophies of social organization. They are mutually exclusive and incompatible, and they will be at war until one or the other ceases to exist as we currently understand them. Anyone who lived through the 20th Century should not find themselves confounded by this concept.
Democrats are not alone in their wide-eyed naiveté. For months, the two leading Republicans displaying prohibitive strength and broad support in the polls are the two figures least well equipped to assume the presidency.
It is almost gratuitous at this stage to note that Donald Trump cannot function as a competent commander-in-chief, but it would do the gravity of this moment a disservice not to clearly state those reasons why that is the case. Trump’s philosophical approach to the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, to the extent one can be identified, has until recently been to default to the center-left position. He still contends that America’s presence in the region is the cause for so much of the Islamic world’s antipathy toward the West, and yet he still recommends that the United States essentially reinvade and annex portions of Iraq in order to “take the oil.” The fact that much of ISIS’s functioning oil exploitation centers are in Syria across a border that only NATO-aligned nations still respect is immaterial for him. Now, in a display of majestic presidential comportment, Trump insists that it must be America’s goal to “bomb the s***” out of the resource refinement and exploitation assets under ISIS control. That these contrary approaches can all exist simultaneously and alongside one another does not bother Trump, but it should finally begin to trouble his supporters. While they display due dissatisfaction with the present commander-in-chief’s apparent disinclination to carry out a serious war on ISIS, they back a figure that is equally at sea on the matter.
Trump’s chief rival for the largest plurality of Republican presidential primary voters, Dr. Ben Carson, is no better on matters related to foreign affairs and counterterrorism. In the last Republican presidential debate, Carson displayed a genuine ignorance on the Islamic State and its Syrian stronghold. He noted that the region is “complex,” and observed that Russia and, inexplicably, China have infiltrated the shattered country (the former clearly has while the latter has generally not). He admirably backed a “global” solution to the problem of Islamic radicalism but declined to identify it. Carson further noted that an ISIS rollback strategy must begin in Iraq, but contended that retaking the restive Sunni-dominated Anbar province, as well as great cities like Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul, from ISIS occupation could be achieved “fairly easily.” That mentality is how minor wars turn into long and costly affairs.
It would be pleasant to be able to observe that all this is over, and the Republican base electorate is ready to get serious about 2016, but the indications are that this is not the case. The primal American instinct to remake this nation into a fortress is returning to the fore. The focus of the GOP-leaning electorate in the wake of the Paris attacks has not been on power projection but on closing the country off to the Middle Eastern refugees fleeing violence in their homelands. The threat associated with the refugee flood is a real one, but a strategy aimed at combating the symptoms of war will not end this conflict or keep Americans safe in the long run. The West cannot be a fortress, even if it were inclined to surrender the freedoms that make it a beacon of hope for the world in the process. The only way to contain the refugee crisis is to render its scope manageable by mitigating the condition that compels these asylum-seekers to take flight.
On both sides of the aisle, a fundamental triviality has characterized presidential politics. Democrats have and continue to court a liberal base that desperately wants to pretend there is no threat, or that this threat can be minimized by obsequious displays of cultural abdication. Republicans would prefer their candidates tell them sweet lies about how the American homeland can be secured even as Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East descend into chaos and war. These are dangerous times, and they must be met with the steely resolve; the same resolve that earlier generations displayed when confronted with competing worldviews that sought their destruction and assimilation. Regrettably, it is unclear if we remain capable of that kind of tenacity and the will to endure adversity.
