The End of Modernity by Charles Hill, The Hoover Institution

The era called “modern” inexorably began to come to its end when, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a concatenation of foretold events unraveled the so-called modern world order. 

As always, the foreordained collapse was generated from internal weakness. We need to look no further than Europe to understand why. It has become evident that the European Union, a contrivance designed to do away with the structural elements of that international order—the state as its basic unit and the sovereign borders of its various nations—created nothing in its place capable of coping with an economic crisis, fending off threats to its security, or absorbing history’s Great Migration.

Long before this, however, the modern international system, which had welcomed into its ranks Muslims in more than a score of delineated “states,” had begun to feel the rise of believers dedicated to overthrowing the military, monarchical, and autocratic regimes of those very state entities formed in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate after the First World War.

The dynamism of this cause would, by the twenty-first century, produce two massive Muslim powers: The Islamic Republic of Iran which, by its 1979 Revolution, won recognition as a state in the modern world order while at the same time vowing to destroy that very system; and, a generation later, the fearsome rise of the Islamic State, which by its title proclaimed the goal of all the faithful: a new world order ruled by one, and only one, Order. Thus eventuated the fulfillment of American speculation that the only serious challenge to the modern international state system could come if events such as the 9/11 attacks were, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, “driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claims to supersede liberalism.” Precisely so: Islam claimed to be advancing a political and social model that rivaled and would replace Western modernity.

With this entire region of the globe, “its hour come round at last” as Yeats put it, moving to cast out the international system, the four other world power centers, each in its own way, headed toward a similar outcome…

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What Would Kennan Do? George Kennan, the Containment Doctrine, and ISI by John R. Haines, Foreign Policy Research Institute

Executive Summary

It may have been William F. Buckley, Jr., who observed that Tocqueville's Democracy in America is as oft cited as it is infrequently read. Something similar might be observed about Containment, the doctrine articulated by George F. Kennan in his famous 1947 essay. It is paradoxical that containment, an indisputable cornerstone of American Cold War statecraft, is so widely (and seemingly at times, willingly) misunderstood. Today, there is much consternation over suggestions that ISIS be contained within the fluid battlespace of western Iraq and eastern Syria. In some instances it is either implied or inferred that containing ISIS means something qualitatively different than defeating ISIS (whatever that itself means).

The question of containing ISIS begins with distinguishing its two key embodiments within the battlespace, Territorial ISIS and Political ISIS. The former refers to the de facto territorial state that ISIS has established in the otherwise ungoverned space of western Iraq and eastern Syria. The latter refers to ISIS as the vanguard of a metastatic revolutionary movement. It is "Islamic" only in the restricted sense of using Islam to establish a group identity and a political power base. ISIS' governance, terrorism, and ideology constructs give it several dimensions, each of which must be understood before any effective containment strategy can be devised. The role of local forces and a Syrian ground partner — the proverbial "Arab boots on the ground" — are also assessed as elements of containing ISIS…

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