Garrett Exner
In 2016 Robert Ford, U.S. Ambassador to Syria from 2011-2014, said the Obama Administration held a “myopic view of ISIS.” In his book, Degrade and Destroy (2022), Michael Gordon goes further, exposing just how persistent the myopathy around ISIS and counterterrorism was under Obama’s leadership. And with the same cast of characters back at the helm under Biden, it’s no wonder why chaos has once again enveloped the Middle East. Besides Gordon’s fascinating history of the American policy failures that contributed to the rise of ISIS, his book also provides insightful guidance for an impending second Trump Administration, describing important lessons that can be gleaned from the Obama-Biden team’s mistakes.
Gordon’s thorough accounting begins with the initial failure to counter ISIS in 2012, followed by a desire to minimize and obfuscate the magnitude of the threat through 2013 and 2014. As Obama’s second term went on, the genesis of ISIS revealed an absence of any coherent foreign policy strategy in conjunction with the suffocating micromanagement of the military by Obama and his staff. Of note, nearly all of Obama’s advisors described in the book returned under Biden, having been promoted to new heights in response to their failures.
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