Things are quite different in Somalia now from the time of the so-called Black Hawk Down incident, when the country had been plunged into civil war after overthrowing its strongman leader Siad Barre in 1991. The country has a recently-elected federal government, led by a dual U.S.-Somali national who has thrown down the gauntlet to Al-Shabab, an extremist militant group with ties to Al-Qaeda. Yet some of the same scourges that roiled Somalia in the early 1990s—including a harrowing drought that is threatening to escalate into famine; clan rivalries; and the instability caused by frequent bombings in the capital—remain.

President Donald Trump has outlined defeating “radical Islamic terror groups” as the foremost foreign policy goal of his administration. But given the U.S. leader’s insistence on putting American interests first, the Somalia deployment raises the question of what threat Al-Shabab poses to the U.S.

“The question is a fair one. From the U.S. perspective, do we really have a dog in this hunt?” says Kenneth Menkhaus, professor of political science at Davidson College and a Somalia expert. “That’s one of the things that the Trump administration is going to have to explain to its constituency.”