Why not just give Syria back to France? That is one question that occurs as — in the wake of the attacks in Paris — world and regional powers gather for talks in Vienna. The talks were well in train before the Islamic State struck France, but the attacks, which President Hollande calls an “acte de guerre,” certainly put the parley into relief. This is a moment to up the ante in the war against the Islamic State. But to what end? France starts to look like the most logical authority to govern Syria.

It is, after all, clear that the Islamic State’s motive for the attack in Paris is to drive the French from a land over which it once had a mandate. The Islamic State itself is citing French actions in Syria in justifying the slaughter in Paris. The Islamic State calls its attack the “first of a storm,” threatening that France will remain a target absent a change of policy. “As long as you keep bombing you will not live in peace,” one of the figures in an Islamic State tape warns.

This appears to be a reference to the fact that French warplanes recently began their first airstrikes in Syria. The French carrier, Charles de Gaulle, had been ordered in January to move into the Persian Gulf as part of Operational Chammal, named for a famous wind that blows over Iraq. The attacks in Syria began in late September. The right response surely is for France to redouble its military operations in both Syria and Iraq. And let America and other free nations who have been in the lists join a larger campaign.

What, though, is the goal? The last mandate the French were given in respect of Syria— by the League of Nations after World War I — lasted until 1943. It’s a phenomenon of the colonial era that most of the lands held by France learned the craft of governance less well than those governed by Britain. Yet France’s generation in Syria produced nothing like the catastrophe the Syrians have produced themselves. So there is a logic to returning to the status quo ante and letting France run the place.

Now we understand full well that this is not what President Obama has in mind in sending Secretary of State Kerry to Vienna. Yet no one in this administration has ever laid out a strategic goal in respect of the Middle East. Whom do Messrs. Obama and Kerry want to run Syria — Iran? Nor has the Obama administration defined our national security interests in the region, as Conrad Black points out in his latest column. We’re simply suggesting that in this vacuum and in light of the fact that an act of war has been committed against it, France would be one logical candidate to hold Syria for one, two, or three generations. It would serve the Islamic State right.