While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios.
By these standards, pretty much everything one does of any consequence in international relations spawns a dozen other problems.
As soon as you use "sufficient brutality" and prove yourself to be dangerous, you will prompt everyone else to become more dangerous.
Everyone else is quite capable and willing to become more dangerous without any prompting from us. Becoming dangerous is useful for its own sake, not just as a response to others being dangerous.
Here's my op-ed that uses long-term orientation, probabilistic thinking, numeracy, consider the alternative, reaching our actual goals, avoiding intuitive emotional reactions and attention bias, and other rationality techniques to suggest more rational responses to the Paris attacks and the ISIS threat. It's published in the Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer, a major newspaper (16th in the US). This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.