United States President Donald Trump has made it very clear that a central focus of his tenure will be, in his own words, to “eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth”.

In adopting such rhetoric, Mr Trump has gone further than Mr Barack Obama and Mr George W Bush, his immediate predecessors. Both took care to avoid associating Islam with the terrorist threat posed by the likes of Al Qaeda and later the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS).

When such a plan does materialise, it will likely be one in which military force will play the dominant role in the ongoing struggle against “radical Islamic terrorism”. But how effective will it be?

… Kumar Ramakrishna is associate professor, head of Policy Studies and coordinator of the National Security Studies Programme in the office of the executive deputy chairman, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. This is adapted from a piece in RSIS Commentary.