According to Foreign Policy Magazine, the ongoing US-led campaign against the Islamic State (IS) was a situation in which the US did not want to get involved. As Jack Detsch writes for the magazine, Obama underestimated IS and did not view them as the same level of threat as he viewed Al-Qaeda. Such thinking stemmed from the US attempts to avoid involvement in a war that would lead to significant sacrifice. The knock-on effect was that when US troops went back to Iraq in 2014 to fight, IS was much more capable than previously thought.

When US troops went back into Iraq in 2014 to fight the IS, the terrorist group was more capable than they thought. The fight with IS was inevitable as it posed a great threat to the world's peace and security. IS became a foreign policy issue for the United States exactly when Washington was least concerned about tackling it. By September 2014, the US could no longer ignore the threat IS posed. The terrorist group IS beheaded two American reporters on camera in separate incidents.

The world was altered after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Following the attack, Resolution 1373 was passed by the United Nations Security Council, marking a shift from zero cooperation in the fight against terrorism to extensive international collaboration. With this resolution, fighting terrorism became mandatory, and the creation of new defensive measures was necessary. US public opinion has shifted away from the war in Iraq because some Americans feel it is not their fight and that the lives of American soldiers are not worth losing. Opinion polls conducted in 2003 found that 72 percent of Americans supported the decision to go to war with Iraq. However, the percentage had dropped to 41 percent by early 2013.

By: Baniz Wasman