ISIS Was a Symptom. State Collapse Is the Disease by Thanassis Cambanis - Boston Globe

The collapse this month of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has been greeted with joy and relief in many quarters, especially among the millions of civilians who directly suffered the extremist group’s rule. Much of the predictable analysis has focused on long-term trends that will continue to trouble the world: the resonance of extremist jihadi messaging, the persistence of sectarian conflict, the difficulty of holding together disparate coalitions like the clumsy behemoth that ousted ISIS from its strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul.

But jihadis and sectarians are not, contrary to popular belief, the most important engines of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and similar groups. Nor are foreign spy services the primary author of these apocalyptic movements — as many around the world wrongly believe.

No, the most critical factor feeding jihadi movements is the collapse of effective central governments — a trend in which the West, especially the United States, has been complicit.

An overdue alliance of convenience mobilized against the Islamic State three years ago, but only after leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had taken over enough territory to declare statehood. The ISIS caliphate was as much as a state — for as long as it lasted — as many other places in the Middle East. Most of the coalition members detested ISIS, but only the local members from Iraq and Syria whose families were dying or suffering under Islamic State rule were fully invested. For the rest of the anti-ISIS coalition, fighting the caliphate was one of many other priorities.

The glacial, slow-moving, coalition united against ISIS but bound by little else. It is sure to dissolve quickly now that the emergency is over…

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Should We Still Care About the War of 1812? By Troy Bickhan - Oxford University Press

This summer marks 205 years since the United States declared war on the British Empire, a brief, but critical, conflict that became known as the War of 1812. This is a good opportunity to pause and take stock of its historical significance and relevance today.

The explosion in historical studies prompted by the bicentennial rehabilitated the War of 1812 from a widely disregarded conflict studied by a handful of specialists into the mainstream. The War of 1812 has received a modern makeover: scholars probed the conflict from every angle, considering the roles of race, gender, religion, technology, sectionalism, public opinion, nationalism, Atlantic and global contexts, and more. Included in these studies is some of the best historical scholarship of our young century, and historians and their students unquestionably have a better understanding of the complexities and significance of the war and the era as a whole than ever.

But will the War of 1812 slip back into historical irrelevance in the decades to come?

It might, but it should not. For starters, the War of 1812 provides useful lessons about the relationships between military power, public opinion, and wars’ outcomes. Britain was unquestionably the superior power in 1812, yet it failed to achieve a decisive victory primarily due to the constraints of domestic politics and public opinion. Even tied down by ongoing wars with Napoleonic France, the British had enough capable officers, well-trained men, and equipment to easily defeat a series of American invasions of Canada. In fact, in the opening salvos of the war, the American forces invading Upper Canada were pushed so far back that they ended up surrendering Michigan Territory. The difference between the two navies was even greater. While the Americans famously (shockingly for contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic) bested British ships in some one-on-one actions at the war’s start, the Royal Navy held supremacy throughout the war, blockading the U.S. coastline and ravaging coastal towns, including Washington, D.C. Yet in late 1814, the British offered surprisingly generous peace terms despite having amassed a large invasion force of veteran troops in Canada, naval supremacy in the Atlantic, an opponent that was effectively bankrupt, and an open secessionist movement in New England.

Why did Britain quit while it was ahead? …

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