Our War

As Harold MacMillan — the last great conservative British leader to serve the empire — said, events always catch up with us. For Obama the time has come to face the facts: change is needed. Terror must be confronted with force, and there is still only one power capable of exercising this force on a global scale, albeit reluctantly and in spite of its perceived decline: the United States. The president who in 2009 embodied the global dream of the good American — the return to multilateralism and the hand outstretched to opponents — is at war with the terrorism of the Islamic State which, surpassing al-Qaida, has staked out a territory in Mesopotamia the size of Catalonia and Valencia, and which threatens to throw the greater part of the Middle East into chaos (including the world’s main oil producer) and export barbarism to the West.

Thirteen years after 9/11, the first time since Pearl Harbor that the U.S. suffered a direct attack on their territory, it is no longer about making democracies out of dictatorships in Arab and Muslim nations or ethnically diverse and fragmented tribes, the ultimate and false rationale for the invasion of Iraq. The forgotten Arab Spring was a mirage followed by the atrocious civil war in Syria and, finally, by the return to the self-styled Islamic caliphate of the Middle Ages. Although some present it as such, we do not see the resurgence of the United States as the ultimate guarantee of international order. Because the balance of power — which is based on a set of shared liberal, Western values and within which disagreements are being provoked by Washington — no longer exists.

The West is no longer capable of enforcing these values: they are being rejected by China, Russia and the emerging Islamists. We have been walking for some time in a world of chaos, without clear boundaries, all the while groping for a new world order. In recent days we have seen the routines of the United Nation’s Global Forum every September. The forum is a suitable place to simulate, through endless well-intentioned speeches and photo-ops, that each country counts, no matter how small. Meanwhile, the Security Council remains subject to the veto of the victors of World War II, and it does not include India, Brazil or the countries of Europe united as a single voice. And the urgent — the economic crisis, terrorism — receives more attention than the transcendent — climate change, Ebola, the world we are leaving to our children.

Obama was trying to escape the morass of the Middle East, but he is once again submerged in it. Now he only aspires to erode the new jihadism, which did not die with Osama bin Laden. It is imperative to national security: avoid a new catastrophe on American soil, and avoid the destabilization of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, two crucial pieces of the Western system. Obama is aware that this will be a problem for the next president and the next president’s successor. It is not only an American war; it is also, although inconvenient, our war. The events have caught up with us.