“There is a real black-and-white, good and evil struggle in Somalia,” said Stephen Schwartz, who served as U.S. ambassador there until the end of September 2017. “The forces of chaos, of Islamist extremism, are powerful and have decades of inertia behind them in criminality, the warlords and cartels.”
“They would be running their own schools, their own clinics, collecting trash. That is where the appeal of this group comes.”Forces of chaos don't collect trash, do they?
During the last two years of the Obama administration, there were only 18 airstrikes (both drones and manned) on Somalia.Hardly any, then, really. Just occasional death from the sky.
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So there is effectively no way to assuredly know when the US won't use military force; it's broadly discretionary on the negative side. (One presumes the other NATO countries must wonder about this from time to time, given the current occupant of the WH.)
As to when the US will use military force, I suppose it's a lot of tea-leaf reading. There are treaties, of course, but there's just the various articulations of each Presidential administration's foreign policy. E.g. the "Bush Doctrine" (sort of a misnomer; "Bush Catechism" might be more correct) was the summation of various policies and statements from the Bush II White House. On top of that, there's the question of what Congress will authorize, or has already authorized, or what the President can do without explicit authorization of any kind. And that depends rather significantly on public opinion, and whether it's an election year, and so on.
IMO, one of the reasons that the same faces show up in administration after administration (e.g. Kissinger) is in part because it signals the continuation of a particular set of policies, or at least priorities and interests, points of view, etc.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:44 AM on January 3, 2019 [7 favorites]