“I don’t oppose all wars,” he said as a senator in 2002. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”
The rise of ISIS, or the Islamic State, has challenged this strain of realism in profound ways. It’s certainly clear that Obama is loathe to act hastily in response to the group’s sweep through the Middle East. It’s why he openly admitted last week that he didn’t have a strategy for handling ISIS’ sanctuary in Syria. The absence of a plan, his aides argued, is far better than the pursuit of a bad plan.
But Obama was only going to drag his feet for so long. It wasn’t just the immense political pressure domestically to act on a threat that, while not imminent to the country, has been hyped as such. His advisers see dangerous national security crises on the horizon, should ISIS remain unchecked. Lest we forget, while Obama may have waited to formulate a Syria-specific policy, he did authorize more than 150 airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.