President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to defeat ISIS, but his strategy to fulfill that promise can only be described as like former President Barack Obama's, only worse, Spiegel notes in an editorial.
Taking back once ISIS-held cities like Mosul and Raqqa is one thing, but what is Trump's plan to exterminate ISIS before it goes underground and reforms into ISIS-2.0? There doesn't seem to be one, Spiegel says.
"Trump, who had actually wanted to do things completely differently than his predecessor, is now continuing Barack Obama's Middle East policy," Spiegel writes. "Except that he is doing a worse job of it. He is pursuing all sorts of goals that contradict each other."
That includes fighting with Iran in Syria (alongside the Russians) but condemning it in Yemen, just one of several the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend campaigns happening between several countries — all saying they want to defeat ISIS — on the Middle East battleground, Spiegel writes.
The United States' continued passive-aggressive policy and its inability to lead on the issue will accomplish very little, except in the case of ISIS.
"What we are seeing instead is countries bombing without strategy from the air and, on the ground, an ever-increasing number of parties to the war who are officially opposed to IS but which are, in fact, fighting for their own goals. And that means a golden age for IS. It's not for nothing that its official motto is 'lasting and expanding,'" Spiegel concludes.
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