theatlantic | At the core of Barack Obama’s terrorism speech
on Sunday night lay a contradiction. He gave the address to convince an
increasingly fearful nation that he takes the terrorist threat
seriously. But he doesn’t, at least not in the way his political
opponents do.
For George W. Bush, the fight against jihadist terrorism was World War III. In his speech to Congress
nine days after 9/11, Bush called al-Qaeda “the heirs of all the
murderous ideologies of the 20th century … they follow in the path of
fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” Many Republicans still see the
“war on terror” in these epic terms. After the Paris attacks, Marco
Rubio didn’t merely warn that the Islamic State might take over Iraq,
Syria, and other parts of the Middle East. He warned that it might take
over the United States. America, he argued,
is at war with people who “literally want to overthrow our society and
replace it with their radical Sunni Islamic view of the future.” In his
telling, the United States and “radical Islam” are virtual equals,
pitted in a “civilizational conflict” that “either they win or we win.”
Obama thinks that’s absurd. Unlike
Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within
Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself. And unlike Bush, he
doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor. In the 1930s, when
fascism and communism were at their ideological height, many believed
they could produce higher living standards for ordinary people than
democratic capitalist societies that were prone to devastating cycles of
boom and bust. No one believes that about “radical Islam” today. In
Obama’s view, I suspect, democratic capitalism’s real ideological
adversary is not the “radical Islam” of ISIS. It’s the authoritarian,
state-managed capitalism of China.
While Republicans think ISIS is
strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it’s weak and growing weaker.
“Terrorists,” he declared on Sunday, now “turn to less complicated acts
of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our
society.” In other words, the Islamic State probably can’t do anything
to America that we Americans aren’t doing to ourselves all the time, and
now largely take for granted.
Obama
also argued that the Islamic State is losing in the Middle East, where
the “strategy that we are using now—air strikes, special forces, and
working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their
own country” will produce a “sustainable victory.”
