One side maintains that the Islamic State, or ISIS, is none of our business, while the other presumes that America’s business is to establish acceptable regimes. Both err — the first by neglecting that Middle East potentates’ agendas sometimes intrude upon our business, and the second by failing properly to distinguish between what is others’ business and what is ours. Both avoid the substance of the American people’s demand: Kill the cutthroats who behead Americans, who make converts among disaffected sectors of our population and encourage them to kill us.

Doing away with ISIS requires honesty about what America’s business is and is not, what is within our capacity and right to do and what is not. In short, while we have neither the capacity nor the right to determine who rules whom or how anywhere but at home, we have the power and the duty to destroy any individual, band or movement that means to kill us.

Each side recognizes the American people’s demand, and avoids it for its own reasons. The Obama administration does so by a de minimis military campaign in former Iraq, combined with mild cooperation with Iran. Thus, to avoid inconveniencing the Middle East’s progressive forces, it kicks the ISIS can down the road. Meanwhile, Republicans Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina give that can another kick with implausible calls to “get the locals involved in dealing with their own problems.” They seem not to notice that ISIS is our problem now.