The Islamic State’s unfettered expansion in the Middle East has all but vanished, at least for now. Unfortunately, the White House takes this to mean victory is commensurate with a geographic stalemate. By Barack Obama’s logic, an acquiescent foreign policy is justified by self-convincingly belittling our enemies to a nominal threat. “What I do insist on is we maintain a proper perspective and that we do not provide a victory to these terrorist networks by over-inflating their importance and suggesting in some fashion that they are an existential threat to the United States or the world order,” the president told CNN’s serial plagiarist Fareed Zakaria. No doubt al-Qaida operatives are nodding in agreement. Obama explained that keeping terrorism in a proper perspective “means we don’t approach this with a strategy of sending out occupying armies and playing Whac-a-Mole wherever a terrorist group appears because that drains our economic strength and it puts enormous burdens on our military. What’s required is a surgical, precise response to a very specific problem.” The wildfire-like spread of jihadi fundamentalism demonstrates exactly why all radical Islamists pose an existential threat, regardless of size. ISIL may represent the early onset of a small, albeit vicious, cancer, but that doesn’t mean the remedy is letting it take its course. Because by the time it matures, it’s too little, too late.