Somalia

The world has grown numb to Somalia’s seemingly endless crises: eighteen years of anarchy, warlords, refugee flows, chronic poverty, intermittent famine, piracy, proxy wars, and rising Islamic extremism. But the current crisis in Somalia is not just more of the same, and it is dangerous for the U.S. and the rest of the world to brush off Somalia’s plight. In the past few years, conditions in Somalia have descended to a new low. Desperate levels of humanitarian need exist alongside armed conflict and assassinations, political meltdown, radicalization, and virulent anti-Americanism. The country’s past political violence, though brutal and disruptive, was local in scope. Today, many of Somalia’s inner struggles are beginning to take on a global significance. It will be extremely difficult to reverse these dangerous trends in Somalia, and to do so will require both sustained commitment and coordinated, nuanced policy-making from the United States: two things that have proven elusive to date.