Realistic View of ISIL

The realist view of International relations focuses on importance of different states competing for power over each other, mainly through military conquest. During this struggle, each state’s aim is to achieve an ultimate hegemony over the other states. One of the largest problems at the front of the United States’ foreign policy is dealing with ISIL. The situation with ISIL is interesting, because at a first glance it could pose some problems for the realist view. There are two roads to take when thinking about ISIL: that ISIL is a state as they claim to be, or that they are a mere terrorist organization. Realists view states to be the only important players in the game that is IR, so if ISIL is a state this poses no problems for the Realist view. But, if ISIL was view as a terrorist organization they should not be anywhere as important as they are according to realism. While this may appear to be a hole in realist theory, the situation with ISIL can still be justified from a realist perspective.

The argument for why the United States is engaging with ISIL can be derived from the ultimate realist goal of hegemony over the other states. Therefor United States ultimately wants and needs to have hegemony to guarantee its security. But, this hegemony does not have to come from the elimination of other states but by making sure that you are a monolith of power that can control the other states in the international theater. The United States therefore should make decisions that would be intended to retain ‘control’ over a certain state. A good example of this is the United States involvement in the Gulf War. The United States enter the Gulf War at the plea of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who feared being invaded by Iraqi force after they had invaded Kuwait. The United States did not want to lose their ‘control’ over Saudi Arabia, so the United States entered the Gulf War and pushed the Iraqi force out of Kuwait.  Now the United States’ ‘control’ in the region has expanded into Iraq after ten years of the Iraq War. The Iraq War has been costly and now the progress made in Iraq is being threatened by ISIL riding the momentum of the Syrian Civil War as far as it can take them. ISIL want control over Iraq to acquire a large Islamic population, to bolster their claims to caliphate creating their own state, thus removing western and the United States ‘control’ over Iraq. The threat of ISIL is not that they can directly threaten the United States, but they can undermine the United States control over Iraq while creating their own state.  The United States responded to this threat, in a very realist fashion, with fairly heavy handed bombing campaigns. So while ISIL may appear to be a contradiction to realism, after you scratch the surface and understand the motivations of the conflict you see that realism actually explains it fairly well. 

- Steve McNamara