On the Fourth of July, Trump addressed the nation from the Mall in a speech that felt, as the host put it, like '1954 out there.' He boasted about sinking 159 Iranian ships and spoke at length about American military glory. But he made no mention of Somalia — a country where the US has been conducting airstrikes for two decades and where strikes have escalated sharply under his second term. The host sets up the episode's central provocation: the United States is fighting its longest ongoing war, and the president doesn't talk about it, Congress doesn't debate it, and the media barely covers it.

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The host introduces journalist Mohamed Gabobe, a freelance reporter based in Mogadishu who writes for The Guardian and Al Jazeera. Gabobe sketches out the conflict's architecture: al-Shabaab, formed in 2002 and prominent since 2006, has waged a two-decade insurgency across southern and central Somalia. The US has at least 500 soldiers in country, has trained and funded the elite Danab (Lightning Force) unit, and provides drone surveillance and airstrike support. The UN describes al-Shabaab as the greatest immediate threat to Somalia and East Africa. Despite all this, 196 airstrikes under Trump's second term have not dislodged the group, which now runs a parallel government inside Somalia's borders. ^{[1] — Mohamed Gabobe "196 US airstrikes in Somalia under Trump 2nd term: The US has carried out 196 airstrikes in Somalia since Trump's second administration beg…" 03:07 Play}

Under previous administrations, every proposed strike in Somalia had to move up the chain — from field commanders to the Pentagon to the CIA to the White House — before being approved. This was designed, Gabobe explains, to minimize civilian casualties by ensuring the right person was being targeted. Under Trump's second term, those safeguards no longer exist. Mid-level and low-level commanders have been given a standing green light to strike as they see fit. The result, Gabobe argues, is a dramatic increase in civilian casualties: insurgents live embedded within the local population, making it nearly impossible even for Somalis themselves to distinguish fighters from civilians, let alone a drone operator thousands of miles away.

The episode's most harrowing segment. Gabobe describes his investigation into a US strike on Jimaale, a farming town deep in southern Somalia controlled by al-Shabaab. Twelve civilians died, including eight children. One woman's three young children were wounded; she fled with them into the bushes because US drones were still circling overhead. She eventually made it to Mogadishu seeking help for her son, who needs a $1,000 surgery to have shrapnel removed — shrapnel that threatens his ability to walk. She cannot afford it. Another man lost four grandchildren who were 'ripped to pieces.' Against these accounts, Gabobe notes bitterly, AFRICOM issued a statement claiming the strike had degraded al-Shabaab's capabilities. ^{[1] — Mohamed Gabobe "12 civilians killed including 8 children in Jimaale strike: A US airstrike on the al-Shabaab-controlled farming town of Jimaale in southern…" 06:55 Play}

Gabobe explains the political architecture of US involvement: the Somali federal government welcomes American support because it is fighting a more powerful adversary. The US provides counterterrorism assistance, funds security services, and before the Trump-era dismantling of USAID, was the largest development funder in the country. But Gabobe draws a sharp distinction between supporting the Somali government and supporting the Somali people. Ordinary citizens do not benefit from the American presence; they bear its costs through airstrikes. Gabobe also offers a broader verdict: the international community has done more damage to Somalia than good, with decades of foreign interventions weakening local governance rather than building it.

When asked what Somalis want, Gabobe gives a frank and sobering answer: most want to be left alone. The sense of foreign subjugation — from international resolutions, from imposed leaders, from foreign forces — bothers ordinary Somalis more than the insurgency itself. Every outside intervention, however well-intentioned, saps local agency and entrenches dependency. Gabobe believes Somalis have the capacity to resolve their own internal conflicts, but that capacity is consistently undermined by an international community that refuses to step back. The observation has a particular sting given that the US is simultaneously bombing Somalia and barring Somali refugees from entering the country.

Gabobe delivers his personal verdict with quiet conviction: the US is doing more harm than good in Somalia. His reasoning is empirical — al-Shabaab has not been defeated after twenty years of strikes; if anything, it is stronger. It runs a parallel government, controls vast territory, and has a monopoly on force in the areas it holds. More fundamentally, Gabobe argues that airstrikes generate the very fighters they are meant to eliminate: every bomb that falls radicalizes more young Somalis, pushing them toward al-Shabaab. The host introduces a break before bringing in Vox correspondent Josh Keating to examine the question from Washington's perspective.

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Keating lays out the statistics that make the Somalia campaign impossible to dismiss as a minor operation. In 2025, the US conducted 125 airstrikes and one ground raid — a number that exceeds the 51 total operations Biden authorized across his entire presidency. ^{[1] — Josh Keating "125 airstrikes in Somalia in 2025 alone: In 2025, the US carried out 125 airstrikes and one ground raid in Somalia — more than Biden's enti…" 19:29 Play} By mid-2026, 70 more strikes had already been carried out. For scale, Keating notes that even the US campaign against drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific — which drew far more media attention — was smaller. Before the Iran war, Somalia was arguably the Trump administration's largest active military campaign. And almost no one in Washington was debating it.

Keating traces the roots of American disengagement from the Somalia story. The country has been in effective civil war since the early 1990s, and the US has been involved almost from the beginning — the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 was one of the formative moments of post-Cold War US foreign policy. But Somalia has never been a country that commands sustained American attention. More importantly, the military has absorbed a lesson from the post-9/11 era: when US troops aren't in direct harm's way and there are no American casualties to report, public debate simply doesn't materialize. The Somalia campaign is, by design, almost entirely invisible to the American public, even as it represents the most kinetically active US military engagement outside of Iran.

Keating grapples with the unsettling juxtaposition: Trump publicly disparages Somalia as 'no good for a reason,' calls it 'the worst country on Earth,' and has referred to Somalis as 'low-IQ people' — yet his administration is running an escalating military campaign there. Keating argues these aren't directly linked in a simple causal way: the strikes are conducted in partnership with the Somali government, and Trump doesn't appear to be personally supervising the daily targeting. But the worldview connects them: Trump sees Somalia as a place of irredeemable chaos, which in his mind justifies both bombing it and keeping its people out of the United States. The president, Keating observes, seems to learn about US operations in Somalia the same way ordinary Americans do — from news articles on his social media feed.

Keating offers a cautiously grim assessment. The good news: the Somali federal government is no longer in immediate danger of collapse — something that could not be said at multiple points over the past two decades. The bad news: everything else. Al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia still control vast territory outside the major cities. The World Food Programme has warned that the country is on the verge of famine. ^{[1] — Josh Keating "World Food Programme warns Somalia near famine: The World Food Programme has warned that Somalia is on the verge of famine, worsened by US …" 24:29 Play} That crisis has been deepened by the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID and by rising food and fuel prices caused by the US-Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Armed groups like al-Shabaab have historically weaponized food insecurity for both recruitment and as a literal weapon of war — meaning the humanitarian and security crises are inseparable.

Keating closes with the episode's sharpest irony. At a gathering of senior US military leaders at Quantico, Trump delivered a speech arguing that US politicians had wrongly convinced themselves their job was to 'police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within.' It was, on its face, a clear statement of intent to wind down this kind of engagement. And yet, while Trump spoke those words, his own military was conducting its most intensive Somalia campaign in history — with no sign of stopping. ^{[1] — Josh Keating "At Quantico, Trump said US politicians had wrongly convinced themselves 'our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia.' While …" 26:20 Play} The Somalia war is precisely the kind of unclear, open-ended, casualty-light forever war Trump campaigned against. He hasn't ended it. He's intensified it.

Sean Rameswaram closes the episode, crediting producer Hadi Mawajdeh, editor Jolie Myers, fact-checker Gabriel Dunatov, and engineers David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd. He teases the next episode, which will focus on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and reported changes to military promotion policy affecting women and Black service members.