Turkey is almost finished building its wall to keep out Syrian refugees. That seals off the ISIS Caliphate’s Northern border. See this map to refresh your memory on the geography.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is building a “bad-ass” wall along its entire border with Iraq. Jordan has plans for its own wall, for the same reason. And we can assume that Israel and Iran will be improving their border control too, if any improvement is needed.

The United States and Russia can – if they want – seal off the coast of Syria with warships and drones and digital surveillance. Better yet, let Russia and its Syrian client (now much smaller than it was) build its own wall to keep ISIS from having ocean access.

After all of the walls are built to “keep out refugees” you will – by no coincidence whatsoever – also have a wall that “keeps in ISIS.” That’s the real story here.

The future of the ISIS Caliphate has been clear (to me) since at least 2003 when I wrote my sequel to God’s Debris, titled The Religion War. In the book, I predicted the rise of a Caliphate in that general area, endless “small” terrorist attacks in the United States, and the eventual walling-in of the Caliphate to stop the “idea” of ISIS from spreading.

Here’s how you kill an idea:

Step one: Quarantine the idea. (Build a wall around it.)

Step two: Remove all digital communications from the area.

Step three: Remove any foreign press in the zone so there are no witnesses to war crimes.

Step four: Depopulate the Caliphate over time by removing trusted women and children and killing everyone else. I don’t recommend any of this, by the way. I’m only predicting it will happen, as I have since 2003. If you have been watching my Trump-related predictions, you might recognize that I used the same filter – persuasion – to predict the rise of the caliphate and the eventual walling-off.

If you take a purely military approach to ISIS, you never kill the idea that is at its core. You might even strengthen it. Persuasion is the only weapon that can make a difference. And to persuade, first you must control the conversation. You can only do that by physically and digitally quarantining the entire Caliphate. Otherwise there will always be too much idea-leakage.

We also need persuasion tools to deter crazy loners from self-radicalizing. But that’s a separate persuasion process. The most important strategy involves blocking all communication into and out of the ISIS Caliphate. Once you brand ISIS as a loser – by totally controlling the stories coming from that zone – you can mop up the self-radicalizers over time.

That’s how you kill an idea virus as strong as ISIS. There really isn’t any other option. I believe most trained persuaders would agree.

Another key part of my prediction is that the Caliphate will start to weaponize hobby-sized drones for attacks all over the world. When that nightmare starts – and you know it will – expect to never hear another press report from the Caliphate, because that’s when the depopulating will begin.

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You might like my newest book because both of us are moist robots.

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Update: The books I mentioned are sitting at #1 and #3 in their Amazon category today. In unrelated news, people keep telling me to “stick to cartooning.”