After eight years of retreat from global leadership, American foreign policy is in shambles, with the country’s adversaries ascendant from Crimea to the Middle East to the Pacific. Abe Greenwald notes that among Barack Obama’s many foreign-policy misjudgments is his belief that Islamic State’s warriors “do no threaten our national existence.”

Can it be that the world’s most bloodthirsty opponents of human liberty—having gone from near nonexistence to virtual statehood in less than five years and having acquired chemical weapons and inspired or trained terrorists inside the United States—do not threaten our national existence? As a matter of our immediate reality, the answer is yes, Islamic State (IS) is not poised to topple the republic. But as a long-term matter, the answer is undoubtedly no: IS and its related groups, if not forcefully opposed, will threaten the United States as a whole.

This could happen in one of two ways. In one, small terrorist attacks will continue or even multiply in the United States. As . . . Americans (and other free peoples) acclimate to the new insecurity caused by further attacks, they will impose upon themselves ever more restrictions on their own freedom. . . .

In the other scenario, IS could begin carrying out spectacular terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. By spectacular, I mean something on the order of 9/11. This is not hard to envision, as IS already has the money, the manpower, and in some cases the advantage of American citizenship to facilitate a coordinated, high-casualty domestic attack. Should this come to pass, then we would inevitably be in an active state of war with another “country,” entailing all the sorrows and upheavals that come with it. Once again, the United States would suffer as a whole. . . .

National purpose is forged in response to a specific challenge—and, then, only when our political leaders recognize that the challenge is so great as to require the galvanization of the country. . . . The United States will reclaim its national purpose when the continued threat of Islamic terrorism becomes too great for another American president to ignore.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.