Making a State by Iron and Blood

None of this excuses the present-day atrocities of the Islamic State or makes them any less horrifying, particularly in this era of nearly universal acknowledgment of basic human rights. But if we ignore the historical continuities between the current behavior of the Islamic State and the past behavior of dozens of other states we now consider exemplary global actors, we risk misunderstanding the logic behind the group’s seemingly senseless violence — and we risk increasing the odds that current U.S. efforts to end its reign of terror will fail.

For one thing, failing to see the Islamic State’s actions in a historical context allows us to sustain the comforting but false illusion that the Islamic State is just “insane” — or, as U.S. President Barack Obama put it in 2014, that it “has no vision other than … slaughter” and, in 2015, that “it can never possibly win [anyone] over by its ideas or its ideology — because it offers nothing.”