For more than two decades, the United States has waged a quiet, little-noticed air and special operations war across the Horn of Africa. If most Americans are unaware of this fact, that is no accident. The campaign in Somalia has been conducted so far from public view, and with so little meaningful debate in Washington, that its continuation today is treated almost as a bureaucratic inevitability—a policy in search of a justification, defended out of habit rather than necessity. For there is no rational reason for the United States to be bombing Somalia at all. The entire enterprise stands...

In the sweltering heat of a second Trump term, the ghosts of interventionist folly are stirring once more. On October 31, 2025, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare Nigeria a "country of particular concern" for religious freedom violations, alleging an "existential threat" to Christianity there. By November 1, the rhetoric had escalated: Trump threatened to halt all U.S. aid to Africa's most populous nation and ordered the Pentagon—now rebranded by the president as the "Department of War"—to prepare for "fast, vicious" military action. "If we attack," he wrote, "it will be...

When the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder and longtime editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote in 2011 that the anti-interventionist movement needed a “big picture” framework, he was attempting to distill decades of polemic into a theory of international relations. In his essay “Looking at the ‘Big Picture,’” he dubbed this framework “Libertarian Realism.” Though Raimondo never set down a book-length treatise, his insights remain an invitation for libertarians to articulate a systematic foreign policy rooted in their own intellectual traditions. At its core, libertarian realism rests on two...