I'm John Batchel with my good colleagues, Bill Rajo, Senior Fellow for the Foundation for the

Defense of Democracy.

He keeps the Long War Journal where you will see routinely quoting from and pointing to the

jihad in Africa, reported by the Bridgeway Foundation and the FD's Caleb Weiss, who's with us now.

We've been talking about a success at a town away from Mogadishu in the south by al-Shabaab.

And Caleb has made it clear that al-Shabaab has recovered all the territory at lost previously.

However, Bill has a question about the other parts of the country, the Puntland and Somaliland.

Bill?

Well, Caleb, so Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote an op-ed in the National Security Journal, and he is arguing that the U.S. should cut off the about $100 million in aid that the U.S. provides to the Somali military.

Why would Rubin advocate for this? And what does this have to do with particularly this situation in Somaliland?

Yeah, so I'm not going to take an official side just to be objective here. But, you know, Rubin's argument is that Somaliland, because it is a, you know, non-old democracy, they do have a functioning electoral process.

They do vote for their legislature and president.

Their security is better.

You know, they are a functioning state, essentially, among a host of other semi to almost

non-functioning Somali states.

So from that angle, I think that's what Rubin is coming from.

But there's also sort of a geopolitical angle here, as that Somaliland is not really pro-China,

unlike Mogadishu or even Djibouti.

So Somaliland kind of takes the side of Taiwan, which is also an American ally.

But also there's been talks that America wants to move its military base from Djibouti to somewhere on the Somali coast, either Somaliland, Pawland, or wherever.

Rubin is among the cadre that argues that that should be Somaliland because of how secure it is,

and also to get away from the Chinese influence in Djibouti and other places of the horn.

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