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ISIS is now Trump’s war, but does he have a plan for ‘the day after?’






In his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Donald Trump repeated his promise from the campaign trail to achieve a decisive victory over the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Just the day before, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had briefed the president and his national security team on a list of options for accelerating the fight against the terrorist group.
“As promised, I directed the Department of Defense to develop a plan to demolish and destroy ISIS — a network of lawless savages that have slaughtered Muslims and Christians, and men, women and children of all faiths and beliefs,” Trump told Congress, in an unusually restrained and disciplined speech. “We will work with our allies, including our friends and allies in the Muslim world, to extinguish this vile enemy from our planet.”
Dropping all his claims during the campaign that he had a secret and “foolproof” plan for defeating ISIS “quickly and effectively and having total victory,” Trump now faces what are likely to prove to be some of the most important decisions of his presidency. Barack Obama similarly promised to decimate al-Qaida and fight the good fight in Afghanistan as a presidential candidate in 2008, for instance, only to come to recognize that those early decisions on the Afghan war were the most difficult and consequential of his presidency, reverberating throughout his entire eight years in office.
The nature of Trump’s anti-ISIS campaign could fundamentally recast U.S. alliances, with repercussions lasting years, and even decades. Trump’s military plan will also reveal the level of risk that an inexperienced and unpredictable president is willing to assume in order to keep a campaign promise that plays well with his political base and burnishes his strongman persona, yet entails life-and-death consequences. With the recent loss of Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens on a commando raid in Yemen, Trump has already felt the weighty burden of the commander-in-chief who sends service members on perilous missions, only to have some return in flag-draped coffins

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