Ann Coulter does not understand American foreign policy. She should stop pretending to.

Approaching ISIS with nuance is like approaching any enemy of America with nuance. If you are a President, you must keep in mind realpolitik. ISIS is nothing more than the latest expression of the Sunni desire to have a Sunni Caliphate. You destroy them and someone worse will take their place. That's why it was fundamentally dangerous to take out Saddam Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi. No matter how bad they were, their presence was a stabilizing force in an unstable part of the world.

ISIS may, like it or not, become a real government for a real country that just isn't recognized by the current ludicrous international borders. Any competent US President would know this, and Obama is a competent US President despite what an uneducated ignoramus like Ann Coulter would have you believe. For the record, so were both Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan. In fact, you'd have to look pretty hard to find a truly incompetent President.

Your main question as President is, where does your power really come from? Presidents are not omnipotent and omniscient, nor are they benevolent. A US President is primarily interested in securing America's future. If some dictator on the other side of the planet is gunning down civilians for speaking their mind, the US President has to decide whether doing something about it actually aligns with US interests.

Bringing stability to the Middle East runs counter to US interests. It's just that simple. When you keep that in mind, every move made by the US in the Middle East makes a lot of sense. A unified Middle East means a safe Silk Road, which is a threat to America's main source of power in the world: America controls all the safest routes of cargo transport on the planet. America's primary interest is in maintaining this power.

But Ann Coulter does not recognize this. She thinks that the particular miraculous circumstances surrounding the collapse of the Soviets is some kind of guide for the future. What she doesn't realize is that military commitments in the Middle East frighten Russia, and Russia is better left to collapse under the weight of its society's contradictions. A frightened Russia is a dangerous Russia, whereas a hubristic Russia is much easier to manage.