In the West, the imminent death of ISIS has been greatly oversold. ISIS is destined to fail on its own, in part because it is a ‘desperately poor nation trying to fight a three-front war’, in part because of a ‘noxious ideology of governance’ as two professors recently argued in Politico. The authors, the economist Eli Berman at the University of California, San Diego and the political scientist Jacob Shapiro at Princeton, invoke the doomed destiny of the current Zimbabwe State and the collapse of the Soviet Union to bolster their argument.