The White House is enthusiastically touting its plans to put together a coalition to fight the Islamic State that will include Britain, Turkey, and, among others, Poland. But the United States' most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated the limits of even the broadest-based coalition warfare -- over 40 countries in the case of Afghanistan -- in places where the host government has its own ideas about what an acceptable end state could and should look like.

Regardless of one's position on the Iraq war, when militants from the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) last month paraded through the streets of Mosul -- a city over which U.S. forces fought a pitched battle in 2004 -- in U.S.-supplied Humvees, waving the Islamic State flag as barefoot children watched from the curb, it came as a very hard blow. Add in the crucifixion of eight Christians by the same group in Syria and countless other horrors unfolding now in the Middle East and beyond, and one is left with the overwhelming feeling that U.S. efforts abroad since 2001, including spending vast amounts of money, blood, and political capital, have done little to make the world less dangerous, less brutal, or less cruel.

North Waziristan is not where you want to spend July 4. When you hear what sounds like fireworks, it's more likely coming from an unmanned drone than your neighbor's kids. Sadly, this is how some Americans are spending Independence Day this year.

President Obama's commencement speech at West Point last Wednesday touched a lot of nerves. From America's already uneasy allies in East Asia to concerned Afghans to a litany of critics who feel he is abrogating the United States' role in the international order, the vision he sketched for U.S. engagement has been a popular target for opprobrium. But in the speech, he also set forth one oft-repeated goal that has generated little discussion: renewing the effort to build partner nations' capacities to combat al-Qaeda and related groups on their own soil.

Random arrests, indefinite detentions, and religious oppression are certainly nothing to aspire to. But observers of China's internal affairs can in some respects consider Beijing's campaign against Muslim Uighur separatists in the Western region of Xinjiang to be a success, at least to the extent that the unrest there hasn't devolved into an all-out war. Still, tensions there appear to be rising. There seems to be an increase in violence between Han Chinese and Uighurs, who make up just under 50 percent of the region's roughly 22 million people, as well as in Uighur-planned terrorist attacks. In late October, a car crash near Beijing's Tiananmen Square killed five -- an exceedingly rare attack on one of the most heavily policed parts of China. On March 1, masked attackers stabbed to death 29 people and injured more than 140 in a railway station in the southern city of Kunming. And an April 30 bomb and knife attack at a railway station in Urumqi, which killed three and injured 27, was all the more dramatic as it took place at the end of Xi Jinping's first visit to Xinjiang as president.