Islamic State survival

As with the Bolsheviks, the caliphate’s collapse isn’t inevitable

The fall of an autocrat leads to foreign occupation and civil war. A revolutionary movement with a messianic vision capitalizes on the chaos. The revolutionaries rule through terror and the promise of utopia and inspire copycats around the world.

But other nations impose a quarantine, internal rivals regain ground and despite initial successes the new regime seems unlikely to survive — especially once outside powers, including the United States, join the fight against it.

This is the story to date of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which defied predictions of its imminent collapse by capturing Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. A “tactical setback,” President Barack Obama called these developments, and quite possibly they are; it’s still hard to imagine that the self-styled caliphate can long endure.

But this is also the story of the Soviet Union’s early days, when it seemed highly implausible that a cabal of Bolsheviks would rule the Russian empire for 70-odd years.

When the Bolshevik regime was about the age that the Islamic State is today, the United States, France and Britain were supporting its White Russian adversaries and landing troops in Russia; Japan and a reborn Poland were pressuring the Bolsheviks from east and west. The fear instilled by the Red Terror seemed like the primary force keeping the pariah state from crumbling. A generation later, that pariah was a superpower.

The differences between the two situations are legion, of course. The Bolsheviks controlled key urban and industrial centers, while ISIS is truly dominant only in the Iraqi and Syrian hinterland. The Soviet Union’s foreign enemies were exhausted by world war, and their ability to project military power was far more limited than America’s is today. However geopolitically important, Russia in 1919 was peripheral to many great powers’ immediate security concerns, while ISIS is sitting at an oilrich crossroads and murdering Western citizens every chance it gets. And the Islamic State’s worldview lacks the Western cheering section and sense of historical momentum that Marxist-Leninism once enjoyed.

But the Soviet example is still a useful reminder that the “inevitable” fall of fanatical upstarts is not always actually inevitable.

First, great powers get war-weary and distracted. It’s clear that the United States would be more involved militarily against ISIS if we didn’t have the recent disillusioning experience of a bloody occupation in Iraq. And it’s easy to imagine events intruding — another economic crisis, a hotter war in Ukraine, brinkmanship with China — that could make Ramadi look as remote to our interests as Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok seemed to the average Westerner in 1919.

Second, a regime fighting for its survival has an edge over a coalition of less-invested adversaries. Yes, the Islamic State has made enemies of just about every neighboring government and military. But that means its leaders and foot soldiers know that they’re in a victory-or-death situation.

Third, realpolitik can help even fanatics find allies of convenience. The Bolsheviks came to power in part because Germany deliberately shipped Lenin to St. Petersburg, and Berlin cultivated secret military ties with the Soviets across the 1920s. In a somewhat similar way, the Islamic State has already been funded by Sunni donors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, and so long as the Islamic State remains at war with Iran and its proxies, the Sunni powers won’t root unreservedly against it.

In an Atlantic essay on the Islamic State’s theological commitments, Graeme Wood argued that the caliphate will be “hamstrung” by its apocalyptic vision, which rules out any real truce or suspension of jihad. Fanatical movements often burn themselves out for just this reason.

But sometimes they find a way — as the Bolsheviks did — to tweak their ideologies when survival requires it, and to rely on ethnic and national loyalties as well. The Islamic State has exBaathists in its military leadership, just as Trotsky’s army had ex-czarists; it’s exploited Sunni grievances just as Stalin relied on nationalist and even religious pride in World War II.

Whether it can compromise further depends on power struggles that are probably already underway, invisible to Western eyes. And it’s still likely that no strategy will preserve the caliphate, especially if the next American president commits fully to its destruction.

But it hasn’t collapsed yet. And the longer it survives, the longer it might.