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What Israel’s Somaliland Move Could Mean for U.S. Policy and the Horn of Africa
Israel’s recent recognition of Somaliland has sparked new debate in Washington and beyond, raising questions about shifting alliances, regional stability, and the future of U.S. engagement in the Horn of Africa.
In this virtual event hosted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a panel of experts will examine the geopolitical implications of this decision and what it could signal for American foreign policy moving forward.
Bringing together policymakers, scholars, and regional specialists, the discussion will explore the strategic, diplomatic, and security considerations surrounding Somaliland’s push for recognition.
With perspectives on great power competition, African geopolitics, and evolving global partnerships, the event offers a timely look at an issue gaining traction on the international stage.
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After the subcontracting state
The withdrawal from the port city of Berbera by regional powers distracted by war, marks the end of an external system that managed the Horn of Africa—and the beginning of a deeper structural collapse.
There is a port on the Gulf of Aden that empires keep finding indispensable. Berbera, on the coast of what is today Somaliland, has served for three centuries as a barometer of great-power ambition in the Horn of Africa—a region where the strategic calculations of distant capitals become legible in the physical infrastructure of docks, runways, and fuel depots.
What has changed across those centuries is not Berbera’s importance. What has changed is who is operating it, toward what end, and what political fiction they are using to justify their presence. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union understood the port’s value without ceremony. When Major General Siad Barre seized power in Mogadishu in October 1969 and supercharged the pan-Somali irredentist project—the Soomaaliweyn vision of a Greater Somalia uniting the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, northeastern Kenya, and Djibouti—Moscow offered military hardware in exchange for access to Berbera’s port and airfields. The calculation was transparent: Berbera gave the USSR the capacity to monitor and interdict maritime traffic transiting the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. The Horn was not a humanitarian concern for either superpower. It was a chessboard, and Berbera was the square that controlled the board.
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