VIETNAMIZED IN TIME:

The American diplomat Brett McGurk is the central player in the seventy-two-nation coalition fighting the Islamic State, a disparate array of countries twice the size of nato. He has now worked all of America's major wars against extremism--in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria--under three very different Presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump. McGurk served in Baghdad after the ouster of Saddam Hussein; he used his experience clerking for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court to help draft Iraq's new constitution. President Bush brought McGurk back to Washington to serve on the National Security Council and help run the campaign against Al Qaeda. President Obama tapped him to work Iraq and Iran at the State Department. McGurk was visiting Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, when isis seized nearby Mosul. In 2015, he became Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter isis. President Trump kept him on.

In a sign of how fast the Islamic State is shrinking, McGurk last month visited northern Syria. I called on him Wednesday, at his small whitewashed office on the ground floor of the State Department, to assess the future of isis and the world's most unconventional nation. McGurk is an optimist, long-term, despite the chorus of skeptics in Washington about extremism, Iraq and Syria, and U.S. foreign policy in the volatile Middle East. The interview has been edited and condensed. McGurk's most chilling answer was when he talked about how many isis fighters are still alive. [...]

Is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the isis caliph, alive? And what is he doing?

This is someone who cannot show his face. He communicates by audiotapes, like we are back in the nineteen-nineties. He has dramatically tainted his claim to any legitimacy. Whether or not he is alive, we do not know. But his command and control over this organization is severed.

What is the U.S. military role after the caliphate collapses?

Our coalition has trained a hundred thousand members of the Iraqi security force that had collapsed in 2014. They have now fought some of the most difficult battles since the Second World War. We are in discussions with the Iraqi government about a future role for the coalition training and advising. In Syria, we have also pioneered this model of working by, with, and through local forces. It's local Syrians retaking their areas. Our footprint is small, it's light, but it is effective. We will want to be able to keep the pressure so that isis can't regenerate. [...]

Since 2003, Iran has played an increasing role in Iraq. How do you assess their intentions down the road and their power compared to the U.S.?

Iran likes to be flattered with the view that everything that happens in Iraq and Syria happens because Iran is pulling the strings. That's just not true. Do they have enormous influence? Yes. Just look at a map and you can understand why. But the differences, even within the Shia community in Iraq and the Shia community in Iran, are profound. The vision of [Iraq's] Grand Ayatollah Sistani --of quietism and a civil state, meaning not a state governed by clerics--is totally different from the vision of [Iran's] Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranians tried to do a number of things in Iraq that simply have not worked, because the Iraqis rejected it. Their influence is not dominant. I never discount the ability of the Iraqis to chart their own course.

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