The U.S. Has Won Its First Victory over Islamic State. What’s Next?

In the past six months, Islamic State (IS) has suffered a series of major defeats, largely at the hands of the U.S. and its allies, and has been driven from all of the major cities it held in Iraq and Syria. Yet the group still has between 6,000 and 10,000 fighters in the area, plus its affiliates everywhere from Nigeria to Uzbekistan. And IS hardly has a monopoly on jihadism: there is a resurgent al-Qaeda, active from Africa to Southeast Asia, various groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Iran’s network of Shiite militias that are wreaking havoc throughout the Middle East and planning terrorist attacks in the West. Surveying the situation, Max Boot takes stock of what the U.S. has done right in the war on terror, and where it has gone wrong: