DOWN BUT NOT OUT? How the Islamic State Could Rebound.

As I’ve discussed before, despite the Islamic State’s goal of becoming a truly global insurgency, its success on the ground has been inexorably bound to local conditions, making it more of a “glocal” than global phenomenon. In European and North American countries with democratically elected governments, jihadist organizations like the Islamic State remain small, isolated and unable to pose an existential threat. By contrast, contemporary jihadists have thrived in locations marked by vacuums of authority; governments suffering from crises of legitimacy; and long histories of ethnic, tribal or sectarian conflict. Effective counterinsurgency programs — which also help establish security and justice for the local population — can successfully manage the serious threat posed by jihadism, especially if they balance military might with government policy. But mass executions, especially those that kill innocents, cause irreparable damage and destroy one of the most critical elements of a counterinsurgency: the trust of the local population.

Former Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, himself a very successful insurgent, once wrote that a guerrilla fighter “must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea.” In Iraq and Syria, jihadists were given plenty of room to swim from 2011 to 2014 because of the actions of the al-Maliki and al Assad governments. But after two years of the Islamic State’s brutal rule, the group has largely lost support from local populations — and the freedom and power that come with it. Consequently, now is an ideal time for counterinsurgency forces to use the advantage of negative public sentiment to help find, fix and finish Islamic State fighters.

However, that advantage can be lost, as it was after the death of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in April 2010. Unless the United States and its allies can help create some sort of legitimate and stable government in the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria, the coalition will not eradicate the group, no matter how many bombs it drops. Jihadists will be able to lay low within the countries’ local populations until the opposition eases its offensive, and then they will re-emerge.

A long, hard slog.

KIMBERLY STRASSEL: Our Self-Interested Senators.

The House bill isn’t perfect—no bill ever is—but it amounts to the biggest entitlement reform in history. It repeals crushing taxes. It dramatically cuts spending. And it begins the process of stabilizing the individual health-care market and expanding consumer freedom.

None of this is good enough for a handful of senators, so now it’s time to make this exercise all about them. Mr. McConnell should make clear that the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party stands ready to make good on its repeal-and-replace campaign promise—and that it would have done so already were it not for a cynical or egotistic few. It’s time for some very public accountability.

That rests in Mr. McConnell giving his caucus a drop-dead date to broker a compromise, after which he will proceed to bring up the House bill. And any Republican who votes against moving forward, “a motion to proceed,” will forever be known as the Republican who saved ObamaCare. The Republican who voted to throw billions more taxpayer dollars at failing entitlement programs and collapsing insurance markets. The Republican who abandoned struggling American families. The Republican who voted against a tax cut and spending reductions. The Republican who made Chuck Schumer’s year.

And that’s only a short list of the real-world accountability.

The Democrats could agree on almost any “reform” bill, so long as it brought more money and power to Washington — the important thing was to bring more booty to Washington for divvying. What the Republicans have to do is much tougher, as any repeal or genuine replacement means less booty.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Just. Cut. Taxes.

I’m not saying that Republicans couldn’t still do a comprehensive and permanent tax reform in theory. Set health care aside entirely and there are still lots of clever and plausible ways to overhaul and improve the tax code without sacrificing revenue.

You could cap various perverse deductions that mostly benefit wealthy blue-state taxpayers, like the home-mortgage and state and local tax deductions, and use the savings to lower rates across the board. You could cut the corporate tax rate and raise the capital-gains tax rate to compensate, as Senator Mike Lee has proposed. You could even (gasp, heresy, gasp) raise the top income tax rate, as Steve Bannon reportedly wants to do, and use the savings to cut payroll taxes or fund a new child tax credit.

But Republicans don’t seem equipped to pull off anything complicated, they don’t look united enough to take political risks, and they aren’t ideologically ready to pass anything heretical. So barring a sudden transformation in the party and its leadership, a temporary, deficit-financed tax cut is the only thing that has a decent chance of happening.

And while it’s not the greatest idea, neither is it a terrible one.

Washington may have near-record peacetime deficits, but Washington is also collecting record revenues. In other words, Washington has a spending problem, not a tax problem.

RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA: Grassley Ready to Use Subpoena to Get Manafort, Trump Jr. to Testify Next Week.

IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ‘EM… Sears to Sell Kenmore Brand on Amazon.

Sears Holdings Corp. SHLD 10.60% said Thursday it will start selling its Kenmore appliances on Amazon, loosening its grip on one of its historic product lines and becoming the latest big American brand to capitulate to the online-retail giant.

News of Amazon’s move into appliances, one of the categories it hasn’t deeply penetrated, rippled through the industry. Investors dumped shares of big appliance sellers that have been benefiting from Sears’s retreat. Lowe’s Cos. tumbled; Home Depot Inc. HD -4.09% and Best Buy Co. BBY -3.93% fell 4% apiece.

Amazon’s rapid growth has displaced traditional stores and left even powerful brands unable to ignore it. Nike Inc., one of the biggest holdouts, recently decided to start selling directly to Amazon.

All within Prime, nothing outside Prime, nothing against Prime.

21ST CENTURY EUGENICS: Inmates could get out of jail earlier if they get a vasectomy or birth control.

ALLIES: Turkey says it would reciprocate German threats.

Turkey’s foreign minister has accused Germany of engaging in “blackmail and threats” against Turkey and says Ankara would reciprocate those threats.

Speaking to reporters during a visit to Cyprus, Mevlut Cavusoglu said as a once close friend and ally, Germany would know “that Turkey would never bow to blackmail and threats.”

Germany is calling on Turkey to release a German human rights trainer, who was arrested pending trial on suspicion of links to terror groups.

The Turkish minister accused German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel of making “ill-tempered statements” against Turkey after the country rejected an alleged request for “Turkey to interfere in the judiciary.”

Erdogan’s Turkey reminds me in one small way of ISIS — picking fights with nearly everybody around. Turkey can’t afford to be the Middle East’s next pariah state, but that’s the direction Erdogan is taking his country.

TRUMP’S SIX-MONTH REVIEW, MUELLER’S RED LINE, AND SPICER’S EXIT: All that and more on Hot Mic’s morning brief.

Tyler O’Neil is filling in for the traveling Liz Sheld again today.

EARLIER THIS WEEK IT WAS SHIPS WITH LASER BEAMS: Navy’s Hypervelocity Railgun Could Be A Gamechanger.

“Hypervelocity” is a term of art in physics that has a somewhat fluid definition. In the case of artillery rounds, it denotes muzzle speeds in excess of about 1,000 meters per second. The railgun technology the Navy is testing today can achieve about twice that speed, potentially delivering much greater range than a conventional gun. At that velocity, many types of targets could be destroyed through the sheer energy of impact, without requiring an explosive warhead.

But the array of threats that warships must counter is constantly growing, so the Navy isn’t counting on kinetic energy alone to kill targets. The Hypervelocity Projectile will carry a guided warhead capable of delivering diverse effects depending on the mission. When mated to a railgun, it will create a shipboard defense system unlike anything else in existence. Not only would the survivability of warships be greatly enhanced, but their versatility in contributing to other missions like fire support of forces ashore would be boosted.

The lasers mentioned in the headline are for close-in defense, but a hypervelocity railgun is a long-range offensive weapon. Very long range. And if you’re on the receiving end of one, very offensive.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Three Years Into Cheap Oil, Gulf Is Still Depending on a Rebound.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have curtailed subsidies and introduced new taxes to bolster non-oil revenue and reduce ballooning budget deficits. Much of the savings, however, have been due to spending cuts and the pace of reforms has slowed across the region, said Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. Overall progress in economic diversification has been limited, she said.

Absent a rebound in oil prices, analysts say it’s unlikely that these nations can repair their finances without deeper spending cuts that could further hurt growth. The standoff between a Saudi-led bloc and Qatar is also undermining investor confidence at a time when the GCC is seeking foreign funds.

That’s less money and attention the GCC states have for giving headaches to the West and funding Islamist madrassas around the world.

CHARLIE MARTIN: In the 48th Year of Space.

Of course, Richard Nixon decided that now that we had gotten to the Moon, it wasn’t important to continue. NASA has been refocused again and again, from Earth science to low-orbit bus service to Muslim outreach, and even more destructively, has been consumed by creeping bureaucracy.

But it doesn’t matter. Now we have SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and a half-dozen other commercial space companies. We have people seriously looking at mining the asteroids and Elon Musk seriously trying to colonize Mars. And if those don’t work, the Chinese and the Japanese and the Indians will go.

I hope it’s us. Americans do best when we have a frontier.

AL GORE: ‘Some Levels of the Earth System Have Crossed a Point of No Return.’

21ST CENTURY DATING: Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed.

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID: The Mystery of Why Japanese People Are Having So Few Babies.

Japan’s population is shrinking. For the first time since the government started keeping track more than a century ago, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” said Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University who edited the recent collection of scholarly essays Japan: The Precarious Future. “The birth rate is down, even the coupling rate is down. And people will say the number-one reason is economic insecurity.”

I’d wager that there are cultural elements at play, too. But overall, there may be no greater expression of confidence about the future than starting a family.

TYLER O’NEIL: Ben Affleck under fire for 20-year-old comment about the acting challenge of kissing another man.

ORAL AGREEMENTS AREN’T WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON: Elon Musk Says He Has ‘Verbal’ OK To Build N.Y.-D.C. Hyperloop.

EZRA KLEIN: Trump can’t make a health care deal because he doesn’t understand health care.

As Andrew Breitbart pointed out years ago, liberals portray conservatives as either evil or dumb. I see we’ve moved on to dumb.

CALIFORNIA SECSTATE: ‘Not Hiding Anything’ from Trump’s Election Commission.

CHANGE: Hip-hop is bigger than rock music for the first time, thanks to nobody buying albums.

DOUBLING DOWN: Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions.

THAT WOULD BE NICE: Jeff Sessions Should Drop His Expansion of Civil Asset Forfeiture.

BRUCE BAWER: Highlights From a Summer in Eurabia.

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

SAYS THE MAN WHO BY ALL APPEARANCES GOT BULLIED INTO CLAIMING THAT A MANDATE IS A TAX: Chief Justice Roberts says criticism won’t stop judges.

BUT WHEN WILL THEY GET SERIOUS ABOUT ISLAMISTS INSIDE THEIR OWN BORDERS? Germany Is Now Warning Travelers About Going To Turkey.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The collapse of GOP support coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on college campuses.

Noah Rothman for USA Today:

The Missouri story is indicative of the broader crisis on at many American colleges. Increasingly, the evidence shows, they are places of strictly enforced intellectual, cultural and political homogeneity. That rigid conformity may be enforced from below by energetic activists, but it finds succor and rationalizations for its conduct from above.

A study of “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology” published in Econ Journal Watch in late 2016 found that at 40 leading universities, registered Republicans were outnumbered by their Democratic counterparts by an average ratio of 11.5-to-1. This disparity isn’t new, but it’s been exacerbated as identity politics has polarized the academy.

The Heritage Foundation’s Kim Holmes, author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind, blames the rise of multicultural studies departments. “If you’re going to have a Gender Studies Department, or something like that, the progressive assumptions are built into the very idea of the department, so you’re not going to hire any conservative professors,” said Holmes. If conservatives self-select out of programs like these, it follows that those who emerge from these programs will consider conservative ideas alien and threatening.

The irony of course is that it’s a mainstay of progressivism that only conservatives are held hostage by such primitive thinking.