"We Initiated, Basically, A New War" in Somalia (Director's Cut)

Edited by Zeteo (column) and Sam Thielman (top)

BEFORE WE GET to my Zeteo column, our friends at American Prestige, one of the nutritional pillars of my podcast diet, ran a video-only episode with me talking about the subject of Friday's newsletter: the aiming of the War on Terror at the resurgent U.S. left. You can see me dressed provocatively, since it was hot out when we recorded it and I had to turn off my air conditioner for the sake of audio quality. [Please subscribe for more provocative pictures of Spencer.—Sam]

After we recorded it, the State Department released a lengthy document made up of pure, laughable propaganda. It lays onto paper the fever dreams of the Miami Cuban exile community whose forefathers' coffee and sugar plantations were seized by the Cuban Revolution. The document, still high on the vanishing fumes of the Cold War, claims Cuba is the hub around which the spokes of the global left revolve. It's more comforting to believe that socialism traces its contemporary roots to Cuba than the truth, which is that socialism traces its contemporary roots to the decaying material conditions of the capitalist world. 

This, from the cohort that claimed that Russiagate was designed to treat MAGA as an inauthentically American phenomenon. Which, to be clear, is absolutely the wrong way to understand MAGA. (My extended reflections on Russiagate-as-journalism and Russiagate-as-political narrative can be found here.) MAGA is an authentically American phenomenon, rooted in American history. So is American socialism, which requires a whole lot of state violence and elite censure to suppress. Those who do not or will not understand the dialectic are fated to demonstrate it.  

What we might humorously call Cubagate is even less coherent than Russiagate—there were overtures between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, even if they turned out to be marginal to MAGA's political power—or the Bush administration effort by Dick Cheney and his Pentagon allies in the Office of Special Plans to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. This is the level of rigor that Marco Rubio is offering: 

The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa. Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States…

Castro’s ideological project now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony in leftist circles both within and beyond the West. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Havana had solidified its place as the ideological capital of the modern radical left.

Lol. Lmao, even. These are merely the delusions of the aging Miami Cuban population whose Cold War fervor led them to vote for Trump before learning, horrifically, that they would be treated like every other nonwhite immigrant population. (There is no better text than Miami by Joan Didion for exploring the bitterness felt by Cuban emigres who qualified as white in Havana but not in Florida.) Their most successful son is Marco Rubio, the first combination secretary of state/national security adviser since Henry Kissinger. 

For every other community, this comes across as not only delusional but laughably limp, a hopeless effort at manufacturing consent for aggression abroad and repression at home. The reason U.S. left-wing groups named in the report like the People's Forum, DSA, Black Lives Matter—these people aren't subtle at all!—and (wow) Equality for Flatbush express solidarity with Cuba is not because they are purchased by Cuban intelligence, but because the U.S. sanctions have starved Cubans for generations; U.S. efforts at overthrowing the Cuban socialist state and thwarting Latin American socialism were bloody affairs; and at this very moment, the Trump administration is accelerating the strangulation of Cuba to force the end of Cuban socialism. 

Many have correctly labeled the State Department report as McCarthyism. But for McCarthyism to work, it requires smearing people by association with something the public genuinely fears. No one is afraid of Cuba. This makes Rubio and his cohort look weird and irrelevant. It also makes them look like what they are: afraid of the appeal of socialism as it racks up its wins, thanks not to the hidden hand of Cuba but the wreckage of capitalist reality. 

I WROTE TWICE—in 2023 for The Nation and in 2024 for Zeteo—about the disaster that a U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal would represent. Now Trump is actually doing it. This amounts to a recognition that the Iran War is a failure on its own (pretextual) denuclearization terms (even though Iran has no nuclear weapon). It moves U.S. policy into tacitly supporting a Saudi nuke as a hedge against an Iranian nuke. And for more on that failure, Sina Toosi and Nancy Okail have a really good piece in The Nation this week about how the war is a culmination of longstanding U.S. policy toward Iran, not a departure from it, and not reducible to the personality of Donald Trump. 

OK, THE COLUMN. Zeteo asked me to look into the Somalia War. I found some things that shocked me. I drew some conclusions I didn't expect after seeing numbers I didn't expect. I know that asking you to read something about Somalia is practically daring you not to open this newsletter. I'm hoping you do anyway, because this is important. If you don't already pay for FOREVER WARS, here's where I'm hoping you'll subscribe, so you can access what comes after these first two paragraphs:

ASK THE AVERAGE person to name the major war that Donald Trump started, and they’ll understandably say Iran, now rounding out its fifth month with no end in sight. But entirely in obscurity, Trump has launched what one think-tank expert terms an “unprecedented increase” in strikes in Somalia—so unprecedented as, in his view, to represent an entirely new war emerging from the U.S. inability to defeat an adversary that it has fought for an entire generation.

It is no longer a surprise that Somalia garners little attention. But it should be scandalous, because such neglect has permitted the U.S. military to wage an adjunct forever-war against jihadists in Somalia for 20 years, ever since a U.S.-backed and long-forgotten Ethiopian invasion in 2006. That ties Somalia with the 2001-21 Afghanistan war as America’s longest foreign conflict. But since the U.S. fights in Somalia without conventional ground forces, it has never faced any pressure to demonstrate success, let alone end operations. The U.S. war in Somalia has become a signal case of the so-called “War on Terror” launching an imperial police action uninterrupted by any need to justify itself. In another six months, this invisible, politically frictionless campaign will rank as the longest foreign war the U.S. has ever fought.