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The “Broad Coalition” on ISIS That Still Doesn’t Exist

The "breadth" of this very shallow coalition isn't very meaningful.

The administration is so eager to boast about its “broad coalition” against ISIS that it is announcing contributions before they have been secured:

The latest row concerns the key question of whether Turkey, which hosts a sprawling American air base, will let U.S. warcraft fly from it into Iraq and Syria to batter the militant group. U.S. officials said Sunday that Ankara had given the green light. Less than a day later, Turkish officials categorically denied that they’d agreed to allow their bases to be used against the terror group.

The conflicting versions of events from the two allies have one of two causes. One is political: The White House is eager to show a war-weary American public that the United States won’t be fighting alone, but many Middle Eastern countries don’t want to rile up their own populations by advertising their roles in the coalition. The other is a more basic and troubling one: that Washington may be consistently misreading its partners and overestimating just how committed they are to the fight [bold mine-DL].

Some of the examples cited in the report would seem to support the second explanation. The Georgian government quickly swatted down the story about its willingness to host a training camp for anti-regime Syrian rebels, but the proposal never made any sense for Georgia in the first place for reasons that should have been plain to Washington. Slovenia complained about being included on a list of contributors to the “broad coalition” when it had made no such commitment, which is a bit more embarrassing. Then again, it was always unlikely that most of our European allies were going to contribute anything substantial to the war, so Slovenia’s participation–or lack thereof–doesn’t matter very much. Almost all contributions from “coalition” members are token and symbolic ones for obvious reasons: our European allies have no reason to be involved in another U.S.-led war, and they have little to contribute even if they did. The states that have the most to contribute militarily so far won’t participate in the Syrian part of the war against ISIS for their own reasons, so the “breadth” of this very shallow coalition isn’t very meaningful. A coalition that included Georgia and Slovenia, but didn’t include meaningful Turkish participation, would still be risible, and as it turns out the coalition doesn’t even include these states.

What interests me about these crossed signals and misunderstandings is the administration’s desire to keep up the pretense that the coalition it has organized is something other than window dressing. The war has been fought and will likely continue to be fought almost entirely by U.S. forces, and if the administration foolishly escalates the war any further it will be U.S. forces that will bear most of the burden. If the U.S. can’t persuade other states to make more significant contributions, that is probably because they don’t perceive the threat to be that great or because they take for granted that the U.S. will bear almost all of the burden and foot almost all of the bill. Talking about what our “partners” are contributing is a weak attempt to distract Americans from that reality.

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