Donald Trump can’t defeat Islamic State

High in the hills between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, someone has scrawled an old piece of wisdom on the concrete barriers that slice across the former border: “all walls fall.”

One can but hope. With Donald Trump now heading for the White House, the signs are not good. Trump himself declared during the campaign “I think Islam hates us.” His choice for National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, is notorious for his anti-Islamic tirades—he once tweeted “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s new chief strategist and senior counsellor, frequently attacked Islam while running Breitbart News.

But extremists relish this approach. IS commander Abu Omar Khorasani has already declared that the “complete maniac” in the White House will increase terrorist numbers by thousands. According to the Global Terrorism Index, IS is now the deadliest terror group in the world. Last year, it killed over 6,000 people. It is facing defeat in Mosul and Raqqa, but experts such as Britain’s EU Security Commissioner Julian King have warned that this defeat “may lead to the return to Europe of violent IS fighters.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said that our border security isn’t tough enough to stop terrorists smuggling in weapons.

For some years, neoconservative thinkers have argued that the west is locked in an epic struggle with Islam. But as former US commander David Petraeus correctly observed, we are fighting an insurgency. We cannot kill our way to victory. Ultimately politics must prevail—and to win in politics, you have to first win the battle of ideas. I suggest that the key idea is the core shared interest between Islam and the west: the defeat of heretical, totalitarian theocrats who love death as we love life.

As evidence of IS' brutality seeps out of Mosul, it becomes clear that its project is nothing more than an empire of intolerance. Its aim is, as one Mosul resident explained, the “micromanagement of religion.” The Caliphate that IS plans involves the conquering of 67 nations which are home to 2.6bn people, including 1.1bn Muslims. Its goal is to end all distinction between the Sunni and its five different schools of jurisprudence, wipe out the Shias, destroy the Ibadis of Oman, and eliminate Sufism worldwide. For IS, the devil is in the diversity. It wants uniformity, and its members prepared to kill their way there.

This battle, between what is orthodox and what is heresy, presents an existential threat to modern Islam. And there is a second, newer political conflict between the tyranny of theocracy and the freedom of conscience that early Islamic scholars saw as sacrosanct. What is at stake is something worth fighting for. Yes, there is a war to defeat IS and its potential empire, but it is also, crucially, something more: a struggle to deliver freedom of conscience for 1.3bn Muslims across the Islamic world and beyond, a group of citizens who may soon number one in five of the world’s population.

This simple insight has crucial implications for how we frame our battle with extremists. The fight we’re waging on the frontline in Iraq is not between Islam and the west. The good guys are not divided by religion, we are united in the ambition for freedom: the freedom to plot our own paths to paradise, however prone to error and weakness we mere mortals are.

We think of globalisation as something new, but it isn’t. It was slowly invented along the filigree of trade roads and sea lanes that connected Europe to the Middle East and China from the very birth of towns and cities, connecting the fortunes of east and west. Today, we share Abrahamic prophets, Greek philosophy, Arabic science and millennia of history. Despite the best efforts of extremists, walls are falling. It is the task of our generation to finish the job. And it is now down to the Europeans to lead from the front.