BY SARAH MCCOOL ’18

On April 13, the United States of America dropped the “Mother of all Bombs” on Afghanistan, in what the Trump administration claimed to be a decisive action against the Islamic State. The bomb was originally designed as a deterrent during the Iraq War, a sort of de-escalation of Mutually Assured Destruction. It has all of the killing power of a nuclear bomb without the unsavory business of nuclear radiation. You could say that “America is back” or that America is finally acting by dropping this massive bomb on ISIS. Hawkish pundits will argue that there is no harm in dropping this bomb since the massive killing force of the U.S. military was turned against ISIS, whichthey would characterize as an evil organization of radical Islamic terrorists that threatens the national security of the United States. But their actions threaten the United States even more directly than ISIS does.