The White House has dubbed its attempts to court NATO members to join their new “coalition” for the ISIS war as a success, even though so far there hasn’t been any mention of a military request to those coalition members.
Still, officials are determined to continuing massing coalition members, and Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to the Middle East this week aims at courting potential Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to join that coalition.
Officials see getting some regional support as a potential key to stopping ISIS’ continued recruitment growth, though exactly how that might happen remains unclear.
Convincing the Sunni Arab nations to jump on this particular war’s bandwagon may be difficult, as right now it is being done primarily to support Shi’ite-dominated Iraq, and ISIS remains the dominant rebels in Syria, where many of those nations, Saudi Arabia in particular, have invested a lot of money into regime change.