"Two Videos of American Airstrikes on ISIS That..." Topic

… Should Scare Iran.

"Credibility in international relations, noted Benjamin H. Friedman in TNI in August, "doesn't travel well." Tough actions in one part of the globe don't necessarily make leaders in another tremble at the sound of our footsteps. Weakness in one place doesn't necessarily provoke aggression in another. "Historical studies show," wrote Friedman, "that leaders deciding whether to defy foreign threats focus on the balance of military power and the material interests of the threatening state, not on its opponent's record of carrying out past threats." So all the worries that Obama's false start on Syria last year inspired Russia's revanchism in Ukraine or China's pushiness in the South China Sea are overwrought. And the new campaign against the Islamic State will probably have a similarly ephemeral impact on America's credibility in other confrontations.

But a faraway war can still send shockwaves through national-security establishments around the world. A rival might demonstrate that his forces are stronger than expected; a friend's hidden weaknesses might come to light. The decisive U.S. victory in the 1991 Gulf War lit a fire under the Chinese military, which realized the extent of its inferiority. Days after the war, the Soviet Union's Marshal Viktor Kulikov—formerly commander of the Warsaw Pact forces—told an interviewer that "The military operations between the coalition forces and Iraq have modified the idea which we had about the nature of modern military operations….The Soviet Armed Forces will have to take a closer look at the quality of their weapons, their equipment, and their strategy." There were similar recalculations after, for example, the 1999 NATO air campaign in the former Yugoslavia…"
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