Israel-Somaliland and the failure of Somalia’s political class

When Israel moved toward recognizing Somaliland, many in Mogadishu reacted with disbelief, framing the announcement as a diplomatic ambush. Yet the real shock lies not in the fact that Israel, of all countries, chose to make the first move, but in how long it took. The decision reads less like an external conspiracy than a long-delayed verdict on Somalia’s erosion as a strategic actor in the Horn of Africa.

For more than a decade, Somalia’s political class has remained absorbed in internal crisis while the region around it hardened into a theatre of high-stakes geopolitical competition. As Gulf powers entrenched themselves through port acquisitions and logistics corridors, and Turkey expanded its military footprint across the Red Sea basin, Mogadishu stayed trapped in elite bargaining, constitutional brinkmanship, and perpetual electoral survival. Even the most basic electoral processes have consumed Somalia’s political bandwidth. From the delayed 2017 transition, through the protracted 2020–22 impasse, and into the present cycle, each election has unfolded as a crisis rather than a moment of institutional learning. No durable lessons have been internalized.

Though the global order tilts and the world grows more transactional, Somalia’s leaders cling to self-preserving maneuvers — hoarding power, stitching fragile coalitions, and guarding the status quo — while the tides of change reshape both the nation and the region beyond.

Legitimacy through performance

Somaliland’s advantage has never rested on moral sympathy or international indulgence. It has rested on performance. While Somalia cycled through fragile administrations, corruption scandals, and federal disputes, Somaliland constructed relatively predictable institutions, maintained internal order, and cultivated durable relationships with investors and security partners. In international politics, legitimacy is not conferred by legal doctrine alone; it is earned through functioning institutions and capable governance.

That record is measurable. Since 2003, Somaliland has conducted multiple competitive presidential elections and overseen successive peaceful transfers of power. Over the same period, the expansion of Berbera Port, driven by a $440 million investment programme, has significantly increased container-handling capacity and positioned the Berbera Corridor as a strategic trade artery into Ethiopia. These outcomes stand in contrast to the limited institutional continuity and large-scale infrastructure delivery achieved by Somalia’s federal authorities over the same timeframe.

Yet performance has not translated into universal internal legitimacy. Significant segments of Somaliland’s peripheries remain unconvinced by the Somaliland project, a reality underscored by the Laascaanood crisis and recent unrest in Borama, where violence left more than twenty people dead and hundreds injured. These episodes expose a fundamental tension: Somaliland has learned to project stability outward, but it continues to struggle to consolidate consent inward. Its institutional gains coexist with unresolved fractures that test the cohesion of the Somaliland project itself.

The federal experiment in Somalia was intended to restore unity through decentralization. Instead, it entrenched fragmentation. Federal member states cultivated parallel diplomatic and security relationships, often bypassing Mogadishu altogether, while the centre steadily lost the authority to articulate, let alone enforce, a coherent national position beyond the capital.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud returned to office on a platform of domestic reconciliation, promising unity, institutional repair, and a foreign policy grounded in stability rather than confrontation. That mandate initially generated cautious optimism among regional partners, who anticipated a more coherent and disciplined diplomatic posture from Mogadishu.

That expectation quickly unraveled. Rather than consolidating Somalia’s position amid intensifying regional competition, the administration drifted between patrons with little strategic coherence. Outreach to the Gulf was followed by abrupt pivots toward rival blocs; Egypt was courted as a counterweight to Ethiopia, only for this posture to be undercut by high-profile gestures toward Addis Ababa. Somalia invoked Arab League solidarity even as it pursued bilateral maneuvers that hollowed out that very claim.

This oscillation was not strategy. It was improvisation. The pattern was compounded by the fragility of Somalia’s foreign-policy apparatus itself, where successive ministers have lacked both the authority and the institutional backing to impose a consistent diplomatic doctrine. In a polity that remains aid-dependent and whose security architecture is externally underwritten, such inconsistency is not merely inelegant, it is destabilising. By treating alliances as disposable, Mogadishu projected unreliability, encouraging partners to hedge their bets and quietly seek alternatives.

Why Israel recalibrated?

Israel’s engagement with Somaliland reflects cold regional calculus rather than ideological enthusiasm. As scrutiny over its conduct in Gaza intensifies and diplomatic isolation deepens, Tel Aviv has grown increasingly sensitive to the optics of contraction. In this context, the pursuit of new partnerships in peripheral yet strategically consequential theatres serves not only security objectives but also a narrative function: countering perceptions of encirclement by demonstrating continued diplomatic reach.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait and Red Sea shipping lanes rank among the world’s most vulnerable maritime corridors, particularly as conflicts in Yemen and Gaza reverberate outward. From Somaliland’s coastline, Israel gains proximity to these arteries without inheriting the volatility that increasingly characterizes southern Somalia.

This recalibration is not an endorsement of Somaliland’s political claims; it is a risk assessment. Somaliland offered access, relative stability, and political clarity. Mogadishu offered ambiguity.

The Turkish footprint and the Ankara question

Somalia’s deepening alignment with Turkey further complicated its regional standing. Ankara’s evolution from humanitarian partner to strategic patron was crystallized by the authorization of a Turkish-backed space-launch and missile-testing facility on Somalia’s Indian Ocean coast. Officially framed as a development initiative, the project’s geopolitical significance was unmistakable: Somali territory was becoming a node in broader power contests.

The decision was taken without meaningful parliamentary debate and public scrutiny, reinforcing perceptions that the Somali state no longer exercises sovereign discretion over major security commitments.

The Ankara Declaration, signed by Somalia and Ethiopia on 11 December 2024 in Türkiye, was presented as a diplomatic breakthrough designed to de-escalate tensions over Ethiopia’s access to the sea and the contested status of Somaliland. Publicly framed as an assertion of Somalia’s diplomacy, the agreement has instead come to symbolize the country’s diminishing strategic autonomy. Rather than clarifying Somalia’s position, it exposed the extent to which its core interests are increasingly mediated by external actors.

As the agreement approaches its first anniversary, coinciding with the Ethiopia–Somaliland memorandum, a more troubling picture has begun to emerge. Somalia appears less as the author of its own diplomacy than as the venue in which regional powers negotiate over its future. Evidence indicates that elements of Somali sovereignty and strategic assets may have been quietly mortgaged and conceded, positioning the country as collateral in a widening geopolitical contest. Vast tracts of strategically significant territory appear vulnerable to opaque concession, long-term leasing, and informal partition — patterns disturbingly reminiscent of earlier eras of dispossession.

The Emirati clandestine agenda

Mogadishu’s political class remains largely absorbed in tightly controlled, state-funded electoral theatre, even as the foundations of the republic erode beneath them. This inward fixation has left Somalia exposed to external recalibration, none more consequential than that undertaken by the United Arab Emirates.

Abu Dhabi has responded to Somalia’s volatility not with open confrontation, but with strategic repositioning. Its approach in the Horn of Africa privileges infrastructure, ports, logistics corridors, and commercial leverage over personalized diplomacy. From Berbera to Bosaso, Emirati engagement has gravitated toward jurisdictions where authority is sufficiently coherent to enforce agreements, quietly bypassing Mogadishu in the process.

This reflects a ruthlessly pragmatic foreign policy. The UAE has long demonstrated a willingness to operate within weak and fragmented states, exploiting institutional vacuums to advance strategic and economic interests. Influence is built less through declaratory politics than through control of ports, trade routes, security contracts, and commercial monopolies. The playbook is now familiar, and increasingly destabilizing.

In Sudan, dense Emirati commercial and security entanglements are widely understood to have entrenched fragmentation and fueled proxy genocidal war. During the Ethiopia–Tigray conflict, Abu Dhabi emerged as a consequential external actor, leveraging security partnerships to shape outcomes well beyond its borders. In Somalia, this pattern has manifested through the steady expansion of Emirati influence across semi-autonomous administrations, where weak federal oversight and fragmented authority provide fertile ground for external penetration. This has been documented, with reports indicating that the UAE has used Bosaso Port as a logistical hub for transporting weapons to Sudan. In other words, the UAE has emerged as a destabilizing actor, whose entanglement with autonomous regions has now placed Somalia in a precarious position.

Somaliland’s appeal in this context is not that it is fully stable, but that it offers a narrower and more predictable field of authority in which agreements can be enforced with minimal interference from Mogadishu. Yet this engagement has not been benign. Local administrations have increasingly functioned as operational platforms for Emirati commercial, security, and intelligence activity, enabling Abu Dhabi to project power through ports, logistics corridors, and opaque security arrangements. Somalia, in turn, is being drawn into a wider architecture of control in which sovereignty is diluted not through overt occupation, but through the quiet outsourcing of strategic space.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s first official visit to Abu Dhabi was framed as a diplomatic reset. In practice, it underscored Somalia’s declining weight as a strategic partner, as Emirati commitments continue to gravitate toward administrations perceived as more disciplined and operationally reliable. It was also the first formal engagement between a Somali president and the UAE in nearly five years, a hiatus shaped by the previous administration’s posture during the 2017 Gulf crisis. President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo publicly adopted a stance of neutrality, while in practice deepening ties with Qatar at the expense of other Gulf states. Doha enjoyed unusually close access to Villa Somalia, most visibly through the influence of Fahad Yasin, Farmajo’s chief of staff, intelligence director, and national security adviser, who had previously acted as a “Qatari liaison” during Farmajo’s electoral campaign.

Regional analysts now describe Abu Dhabi’s approach as the construction of an “axis of secessionists”: a networked strategy that leverages peripheral authorities and local surrogates to generate strategic depth with plausible deniability. Rather than negotiating primarily through capitals, the UAE frequently bypasses them, building influence through financial entanglements, and security partnerships that deepen dependency while diluting central sovereignty. In Somalia, this logic has accelerated the drift toward fragmented authority by systematically rewarding the periphery over the center.

Against this backdrop, institutional erosion within Somalia itself has become impossible to ignore. Senior officials, men entrusted with the authority of the state, now behave in public as though the institutions they command no longer matter. This is not merely undignified; it is symptomatic of a deeper collapse. When laws are bent, selectively enforced, and openly compromised to shield power from accountability, impunity spreads quietly but relentlessly, like termites undermining a structure from within. Somalia has entered the calamitous phase in which the legal order no longer restrains authority and disorder becomes the governing principle.

The relentless promotion of long-promised “one person, one vote” elections has become a convenient distraction: a ritualised performance masking the reality of an aid-dependent state edging toward political and economic unravelling. This is not simply a failure of diplomacy but a deeper failure of political transformation. After more than three decades of sustained international support — financial assistance, security guarantees, state building project —Somalia’s political system remains fundamentally unchanged. External partners learned how to manage Somali instability; Somalia’s leaders perfected the art of surviving within it, preserving the structures that generate crisis rather than dismantling them.

A neglected state does not remain neutral. It becomes terrain. Perhaps the most unsettling reality is that Somalia increasingly resembles a country without owners. Those who govern it often behave as if they are merely passing through — extracting resources, consolidating advantage, and positioning themselves for life beyond the state. In this sense, the crisis is not only institutional or diplomatic; it is a crisis of political belonging.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland does not initiate Somalia’s fragmentation; it exposes the depth of failure that preceded it. The moment renders internationally visible what has long been evident internally: Somalia’s territorial crisis is not imposed from outside but manufactured by the conduct of its own ruling elite. The true tragedy is not that foreign actors are shaping Somalia’s future, but that Somalia’s leadership surrendered the right to shape it themselves through years of strategic incoherence, institutional neglect, and the systematic erosion of national authority.

Hegemonic powers are never benign, and Turkey’s expanding footprint in Somalia is no exception. Through opaque security arrangements, Villa Somalia appears to have ceded sovereign authority at a cost astonishingly low relative to the value of the assets involved. Yet a narrow margin for reversal remains. The scale, ambition, and institutional fragility of this alleged dispossession — its timing, geography, and lack of public consent — leave it vulnerable to resistance, disruption, and eventual renegotiation.

The Ethiopia–Somaliland memorandum should have triggered a bottom-up process of diplomacy, reconciliation, and statecraft. Instead, it exposed the depth of strategic failure within Somalia’s leadership, who continue to trade foresight for expediency at the expense of sovereignty. History rarely unfolds as its architects intend. Somalia’s current crisis is not simply a collapse of political order or a chain of diplomatic missteps; it is, far more troubling, the erosion of political purpose itself. When institutions hollow out and accountability becomes symbolic, leadership ceases to function as stewardship and becomes brokerage.

In that vacuum, the country no longer conducts foreign policy in any meaningful sense. It merely manages exposure. A diplomatic corps assembled through patronage rather than competency cannot defend sovereignty; it can only ration access to it. Appointments become currency, ministries become corridors of influence, and serve as intermediaries for competing external interests. What emerges is not statecraft but substitution, a republic administered through borrowed authority.

Under such conditions, threats to sovereignty are not disruptions but outcomes. External actors do not intrude; they inherit. Israel’s recalibration, Turkey’s expansion, and the Emirati drift toward Somalia’s peripheries are therefore not surprises. They are the predictable dividends of a political class that has abandoned diplomacy as a craft of nationhood and repurposed it as a marketplace of access.

Somalia is not being dismantled by foreign hands. It is being vacated from within.