Henry Kissinger Says Trump Should Leave ISIS Alone

Former top U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger has warned the Trump administration that Iran should not be allowed to fill the power vacuum that will be created when the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) is defeated.

In Iraq, Baghdad's forces have liberated the northern city of Mosul from the jihadi group and are close to ousting ISIS from all of its population centers. In Syria, a Kurdish-Arab coalition has recaptured almost half of the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa, which became the de facto ISIS capital after the group rose to prominence in mid-2014.

Now, the 94-year-old Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under Richard Nixon, has cautioned that defeating ISIS could lead to a “radical Iranian empire” across the Middle East.

“In these circumstances, the traditional adage that the enemy of your enemy can be regarded as your friend no longer applies. In the contemporary Middle East, the enemy of your enemy may also be your enemy. The Middle East affects the world by the volatility of its ideologies as much as by its specific actions,” he wrote in an article last week for CapX.

“The outside world’s war with ISIS can serve as an illustration. Most non-ISIS powers—including Shia Iran and the leading Sunni states—agree on the need to destroy it. But which entity is supposed to inherit its territory? A coalition of Sunnis? Or a sphere of influence dominated by Iran?

“The answer is elusive because Russia and the Nato countries support opposing factions. If the ISIS territory is occupied by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or Shia forces trained and directed by it, the result could be a territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut, which could mark the emergence of an Iranian radical empire,” he wrote.