Trump Expands Restraint To Mali
President Donald Trump is considering military strikes in Mali, extending the America First doctrine to another nation several thousand miles beyond America. Officials said potential targets include Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, an al-Qaeda affiliate that has attacked Malian forces and Russia’s Africa Corps. Approval would make Mali the eighth country hit by U.S. strikes during Trump’s second term, leaving the administration one intervention short of earning a complimentary ninth under the Pentagon’s loyalty program.
Trump described the proposal as a measured effort to end foreign entanglements by opening enough new ones to obscure the existing inventory. “Mali is very important, tremendously important, and Americans come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, ‘Sir, please protect us from the country we learned about this morning,’” Trump said. “Other presidents ignored places they could not point to. I point everywhere. Nobody has ever had geography like this.” Advisers said the president’s ability to locate Mali somewhere on a sufficiently large map demonstrated the national-security expertise required to authorize an air campaign there.
Mali would join Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela in the administration’s expanding portfolio of countries receiving premium airborne diplomacy. The policy rests on Trump’s theory that overseas conflicts become simpler whenever another country is added, much as a desk becomes cleaner when fresh documents cover the original pile. Aides said Trump remains committed to restraint and will carefully consider every option before selecting the one delivered by aircraft. They added that bombing distant countries remains the most reliable method of avoiding prolonged involvement, provided nobody counts the years, casualties or return visits.
Critics said another open-ended use of American force could cause civilian deaths, regional instability, retaliation and obligations lasting beyond Congress’s attention span. White House officials dismissed those concerns as old-fashioned pessimism, noting that unintended consequences are traditionally discovered later and assigned to whichever administration inherits them. No final decision has been announced, preserving Trump’s standing as a noninterventionist president who brings peace closer by steadily increasing the number of places receiving explosives. Under America First, every country eventually comes first.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.