Black Tiger V-A political and military aftermath

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by ikalugin

I view ISIS as potentially revolutionary power the same way RSFSR/USSR was viewed back in 1920s and current events as the breakdown of Russian Empire/civil war.

I don't; the real important difference is that the Russian revolution, for all its faults, had a real economic basis, problematic though its solutions might've been. It was a sort of forward-looking quasi-Marxist response to the problems of industrialization in a world made up of nation-states, and it had a basis in a Russian economy which was no joke. Isis is a joke. In a global, post-nation-state world, their only economic basis is the patience/insanity of their benefactors, and are already successfully biting many of the hands that feed them. They will eat themselves within a few years because they're not capable of surviving in the world as it is today.

That goes with some irony as well, seeing that in many ways the original expansion of Islamic rule was an economic revolution, spurned by Mohammed - a merchant - who had a very good understanding of how the economics of his world worked, and had succeeded largely through being able to consolidate and improve the Arab world's economic system from a backwater to a world power. IS has no abilities of this sort and no economic ground to stand on. And I would go so far as to say that IS are already effectively finished; the discussion around them is merely a convenient cover for the continuing attempts by far more traditional regional powers to bite off a bigger piece of influence. Again, so far Iran is probably the main beneficiary, having expanded their influence far more over the last couple of years than IS ever could.