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.
How do you know?
(The most obvious example of US willingness to be sufficiently brutal seems like Vietnam, which wasn't a responding success.)
Let's steelman VoiceOfRa's argument and choose the nuking of Japan as an example of the U.S. using sufficient brutality. While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios. Most notably, it paved the way for the Cold War. The madness that was the latter half of the 20th century could have been avoided if neither part had felt scared enough to engage in a spiraling arms race by building up their nuclear arsenals.
The same logic has been repeated elsewhere: Pakistan o... (read more)