Barry R. Posen is Ford international professor of political science at MIT and director of the MIT Security Studies Program. His most recent book is Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy.

Here we go again. Whenever there’s a crisis anywhere in the world, you can count on America’s pundit class to demand action—usually of the military variety. Don’t just stand there, bomb something! After more than two decades of unchallenged American hegemony, Washington keyboards seem almost programmed to call for intervention halfway around the globe.

So it is with Iraq today, where the government has lost effective control of the Sunni Arab majority areas of the country. ISIS, the feared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has served as a vanguard uniting disaffected Iraqi Sunni Arabs into a fighting force effective enough to defeat larger and better-armed Iraqi government armed forces in certain areas. Chattering-class members from across the political spectrum see U.S. vital interests threatened, and are demanding that President Obama fire up the fighter-bombers.


Eleven years after the invasion that precipitated the present morass, how should we think about all this? Should we listen to the very same people who called for the war in 2003, with disastrous results, and are now insisting on action?

The escalating civil war in Iraq, and the increasingly likely de facto partition of the country, should be assessed from first principles. The United States spent enormous amounts of treasure and considerable blood trying to turn Iraq into a functioning multi-ethnic democracy; this effort failed. The costs are sunk. Our analysis must begin from the present: We are being asked to pay new costs and bear new burdens. For what and with what hope of success?

A small but increasing number of U.S. scholars, policymakers and politicians are beginning to subscribe to a new view of U.S. grand strategy, which in a recent book I have called Restraint. We believe that the United States needs to restore discipline to its foreign policy—set priorities more rigorously and calculate both costs and chances of success with a more skeptical eye.

The term grand strategy gets bandied about in various forms; I define it as protecting U.S. territorial integrity, sovereignty and safety and the power position needed to secure them in an uncertain world.

So where does Iraq fit in? ISIS is full of bad guys—no question. But a divided Iraq at worst might threaten U.S. safety by providing a “safe haven” for terrorists who might plot against the United States. The world is, unfortunately, full of bad guys and safe havens. The United States now watches them in Pakistan, Yemen and across Africa with various intelligence means, and occasionally raids them, solo or in the company of friends. More importantly, the United States has hardened itself against terrorist threats. This combination of defensive measures, surveillance and the occasional raid buys a lot of safety. America need not throw in with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a power-hungry Shiite supremacist bent mainly on serving the interests of his own faction, to keep its people secure. Maliki’s heavy-handed employment of surveillance, incarceration, and violence has driven Sunni Arab fence sitters into the arms of ISIS fanatics; he’s part of the problem, not the solution.

That ought to make us cautious about meddling in Iraq’s internal politics. Restraint strategists are alert to the costs of intervening in the internal politics of other countries and the low odds of success inherent to doing so.

In the first place, though the timing and the causes are murky, identity politics have surged across much of the world, a phenomenon that probably antedates the end of the Cold War. Here’s how it works: Political entrepreneurs organize followers around appeals to national, ethnic and religious identities. This kind of politics makes compromise hard. Politically mobilized identities are deeply mistrustful and fearful of neighboring groups. And they are especially resistant to outsiders who come to visit with guns and explain to them how they should live. The United States has paid a high price for its efforts to reengineer the politics of others, efforts that have usually failed. Still, a little well-timed meddling could be useful. Identity politics does open the door for the United States practice a version of “divide-and-conquer” politics, but this only works if America patiently holds back, avoids making itself the problem and waits for opportunities. Mobilized identities may seem homogeneous, but they often contain deep divisions as well. That’s an opening.

Consider Iraq. Sunnis and Shia may dislike one another, and dislike U.S. tutelage. But left to their own devices, these groups easily fall out even among themselves. Part of the hagiography of the Iraq “surge” is that the United States somehow played a magical tune that caused the Sunni “Awakening,” and brought many Iraqi Sunnis to the U.S. side. Smart diplomats and commanders actually took advantage of extant divisions. Iraqi Sunnis turned on their foreign jihadi allies, who somehow thought that Islam would overcome local loyalties and permit them to run the show. What’s the relevance to today? For those thinking of active participation on the side of the Shiite regime in Baghdad, a smarter strategy is to wait for the Sunni population’s alliance of convenience with the jihadis to fall apart.

Restraint strategists believe that local politicians are strategic actors who intelligently pursue their own interests with the resources they possess. One resource is “the lie.” During and after the surge, the United States argued that the Maliki regime needed to take many steps to reconcile with the Sunni Arabs. Maliki was happy to assure us that these things would happen. If that is what we want to hear, that is what he will tell us. The Pentagon was required by Congress to issue quarterly reports on “progress” in Iraq. The political and economic sections of these reports, which ceased publication with the departure of the last U.S. troops in December 2011, make for dismal reading. They consistently report little if any progress. Why would Maliki, who depends on the Shiite majority for his electoral success, offer anything to the Sunni Arabs? It was entirely rational for him to talk the talk of reconciliation. But given the intense identity politics of Iraq, he wasn’t about to walk the walk: His best strategy was to “cheap ride” on the Americans. Let them fight the Sunnis, reconcile with the Sunnis, build up the Iraqi Army and rebuild infrastructure while he consolidates power in his own base.

Some, including me, believed there was a chance that after the United States left, Maliki would stop cheap riding on U.S. power and throw some bones to the Sunni Arabs in the hopes of consolidating the quiescence U.S. military and political efforts helped to achieve. No such luck. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Maliki believed that if things deteriorated either the Americans or the Iranians would come to the rescue. This is looking like a good bet. Be that as it may, those who presently argue that Maliki must demonstrate a real effort to unify the disparate groups in his country seem hopelessly naive. Maliki will say whatever he has to say to get outside assistance. He won’t deliver. Moreover, given his past pattern of misbehavior, such statements, even if accompanied by some small symbolic concessions, will lack credibility with Sunni Arabs.

Finally, restraint strategists have a certain respect for military power. We admire a drone, a smart weapon or an airplane as much as anyone. Footage of single strikes is strangely comforting—a single weapon is seen to hit a single target, yielding a white flash that one hopes took the right bad guy out of the fight. But taken together, we still think war is war: not a scalpel but a battle axe. And once you start swinging that axe, there may be unintended consequences. If the United States were to go so far as to help the Baghdad forces retake Mosul and other cities by providing air support, the Sunni Arabs who live there are not likely to think more kindly of us. If the United States provides such air support, and intelligence support, the Iraqi military will never grow up. The combination will be deadly to U.S. interests. All Sunni Arabs will know that we are the pillar of Shiite hegemony in Iraq. If one is interested in the safety of American citizens, this is not a particularly smart role to assume.

An ISIS statelet straddling Iraq and Syria might provide haven for Islamic terrorists who ultimately decide that attacks on Western targets are in their interests, though there is little sign presently that this is ISIS’s program. But “ISISstan” will not be a great base, or a safe one. It has no international airport or seaport. Its neighbors—Jordan, the Assad regime’s rump Syria, Turkey, Iran, the Kurdish statelet and the Baghdad-centered Shiite state in the rest of Iraq will be uncooperative, indeed hostile. Transit across them will be difficult. Given the regional ambitions of ISIS, they will further alienate these neighbors, who will have strong interests of their own in vigilance against aggressors and trespassers. Finally, the Sunni Arabs, if left to themselves, will likely have a falling out. As during the “Awakening,” some factions will look for external allies. The United States should avoid getting married to any group, but the price of its support should be intelligence on groups who might be “going global,”—intelligence that can be used against them.

Because the United States has fought and bled for Iraq, there is a strong disposition among those who supported that fight to fight even more for the same unattained and unattainable objectives. These objectives, including the construction of a liberal democratic, non-sectarian Iraq, are congenial to the foreign-policy operatives of both political parties, who seem to share a passion for reform projects abroad. These are, however, not vital interests of the United States, which is to say interests that the United States should be willing to do a lot of killing and dying to achieve. And they are probably not attainable in any case. De facto partition is an acceptable outcome.

Finally, to the extent that we can read the views of the American public, more of them than not wanted out of Iraq when President Obama was elected. He delivered on that promise. Aside from the arguments of restraint advocates that new military efforts in Iraq are neither necessary nor wise, we should also consider whether they would be consistent with the democratically expressed views of the American people. Odd indeed to repudiate the product of democracy at home to pursue a futile quest to achieve it in a divided and violent society abroad.