For all three of those reasons, a large-scale European ground intervention against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq and possibly in Afghanistan would be justifiable and increasingly necessary: the self-defense and European collective self-defense case is obvious, the moral case for destroying the Islamic State and starting the process of restoring the human rights of the peoples of Syria, Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan is a very powerful one, and it is at least arguable that continuing massive refugee inflows into Western Europe could impose very high economic and societal costs, if not yet, then perhaps soon.
On the other hand, none of those reasons justifies U.S. military intervention—and by that I mean not only “boots on the ground,” but even the growing U.S. air and special forces interventions in the Middle East. First, unlike the 9/11 attacks, in the last fifteen years no terrorist attacks against the United States have been on a scale to justify going to war in the Middle East. On the contrary, it is precisely the growing U.S. military intervention—or re-intervention—in Iraq and Syria that is likely to provide the incentives for massive terrorist attacks on our homeland. Thus, our national security is not enhanced but in fact is threatened by our military interventions in the Middle East.
What about the case for U.S. participation in a European military intervention for reasons of collective self-defense? The principle of collective self-defense only makes sense when one’s allies are too weak to protect themselves, which hardly applies to our NATO allies. Should the terrorist attacks against them continue and air strikes against ISIL fail, surely at some point they will be forced to send ground troops into the Middle East.
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