Will America ever have a grand strategy for the Middle East?

Destroying the key elements of ISIS’s physical “caliphate” has been a long brutal battle, and the defeat of ISIS in Raqqa has removed an important center of terrorism and extremism. That said, the United States now has to deal with the fact it has never had any clear strategy for what would happen once it did defeat ISIS or for ensuring that a victory would end in serving U.S. strategic interests. Like virtually all of the U.S. fighting since 2003, no one has ever articulated a clear grand strategy for what will happen next, and for ensuring that the end result will be positive for either the United States or our allies in the region.

At the most direct level, defeating the “caliphate” will leave thousands of ISIS fighters whose future alignments remain totally unclear. They can disperse and become terrorists and advocates of extremism in other countries, create a new underground form of ISIS, join other movements, or form a new organization. One thing, however, is clear. Breaking up the “caliphate” will not do more than begin to win the overall battle against terrorism.

{mosads}The data on the global patterns in terrorism are uncertain, but the START global terrorism database used by the U.S. State Department does make some broad patterns all too clear. During 2011 to 2016, the half decade when ISIS emerged as a key force in world terrorism, START estimates that there were more than 70,700 terrorist incidents or attacks. ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq accounted for about 4,300, or 6 percent. The ISIS “affiliates” outside Syria and Iraq accounted for around 6,500 attacks, or 9 percent, and these affiliates survive. If one looks at just the number of attacks in the Middle East and North Africa, the centers of Islamist extremism, there were more than 51,300 attacks, and ISIS’s attacks in Iraq and Syria accounted for a bit over 8 percent.

All of the problems that are the source of extremism and terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa have grown since 2011. There is more extremist recruiting and ideological efforts, tensions and conflicts between regional states, sectarian and ethnic tensions, corruption, problems in development, a steady youth bulge from population growth, unemployment rates of 30 percent or more in some countries, as well as broader civil wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, and repressive state efforts at counterterrorism.

More broadly, any U.S. victory over ISIS has come so late that other states may well prove to be the real winners, if there are any “winners.” As is all too clear, the primary “victors” in terms of control and influence in Syria are Bashar Assad, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, while the U.S.-backed Kurds are isolated and face growing pressure from a Turkey whose alliance with the United States is now far more uncertain. Iraq is deeply divided and risks a civil war between Arabs and Kurds.

Further, tensions between Arab Sunnis and Arab Shiites have not diminished, and armed factions compete within all three major sectarian and ethnic groups. The Kurdish factions the United States has done most to back and that have been the core forces defeating ISIS are now all at risk, and the United States has yet to announce any clear post-ISIS strategy for security assistance to Iraq or to any faction in Syria.

The United States has virtually rejected any efforts at nation building at a time when Syria and Iraq are both effectively bankrupt and both have done little to show they can deal with even the most urgent human suffering from the past fighting. The United States has a token role at most in Libya and Yemen, has seen Russia reach out to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and has so far failed to achieve much success in ending the divisions in the Gulf Cooperation Council which now sees Qatar isolated by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with Kuwait and Oman on the sidelines.

The United States is still backing all of these Arab states in creating stronger forces to check Iran and in some aspects of counterterrorism, but its success seems increasingly limited, its “victory” over ISIS seems to have little impact on regional security or the broader extremism threat, and it seems to have no overall strategy for even the Gulf, much less the Levant, north Africa, and the other centers of instability and extremism.

The American military and civilians who shaped the tactical defeat of ISIS in Mosul, Raqqa and the rest of the ISIS “caliphate,” along with the Iraqi and Syrian fighters who partnered with them, have achieved a great deal at the tactical level. At the strategic and grand strategic levels, however, one is reminded of a British Parliament member’s description of the political and military leaders in World War I as “lions led by donkeys.”

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant on Afghanistan to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State.