The US needs a coherent security strategy, especially in light of ISIS

THE two recent major military victories by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) - taking over Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Anbar province, and Palmyra, a key strategic city in Syria - have produced growing concerns in Washington and in the Middle East that the United States is gradually losing control over events in the region, and that ISIS could reach Baghdad and end up winning the war.

In that context, the Republicans have blamed President Barack Obama for the growing mess in the Middle East. The critics have charged that President Obama failed to anticipate the rise of ISIS and do anything effective to impede it, allowing the radical Islamist group to establish a jihadist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. But the bashing of the Obama administration's foreign policy goes beyond developments in the Middle East. The president has also been criticised for a lack of an effective response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine, as well as to China's assertive strategy in East Asia.

The case against President Obama's foreign policy is that he doesn't have any guiding assumptions, and that his strategy has been to retrench abroad by accommodating adversaries, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, cutting US military spending, and refraining from backing American commitments with force. Hence, he had drawn a "red line" in Syria but then decided not to use military force against that country's ruler, Bashar al-Assad, after he crossed that "red line" and used chemical weapons against his citizens.