How Somaliland’s recognition campaign is outgrowing the foreign-policy establishment in Washington and London

For three decades, U.S. and British diplomacy treated Somaliland as a problem to be managed rather than a strategic choice to be made. That caution once kept diplomatic costs low. Today it is beginning to create costs of its own. Israel, members of Congress, former senior diplomats, think tanks, security analysts and diaspora networks are all pushing Somaliland into a wider Red Sea debate. President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi Irro’s Washington campaign is benefiting from that shift: he is not carrying the recognition case alone anymore.

A policy built to avoid a decision

For years, Washington found a comfortable way to deal with Somaliland. U.S. officials could praise its elections, work with its authorities, fund democratic programs and discuss security without touching the political status question. Recognition remained somewhere else: with the African Union, with Mogadishu and Hargeisa, or with some future negotiation that never quite arrived.

The formula was stated plainly in 2007. The State Department said the United States would continue engaging Somaliland but would allow the African Union to deliberate first on recognition because Washington did not want to get ahead of the continental organization. What began as caution became habit. Later administrations kept the same basic architecture even as the region around Somaliland changed. The original policy is worth reading because so much of today’s language still echoes it: U.S. State Department, “United States Policy on Somaliland” (2007).

By the early 2020s, the standard U.S. formulation was even stronger: Washington recognized Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its 1960 borders.  When the Ethiopia–Somaliland memorandum caused a regional crisis in January 2024, the State Department again fell back on territorial integrity and dialogue.  That response was understandable in the moment. The larger problem is that almost every new Somaliland development has been processed through the same old template. See the continuity in the State Department’s U.S.–Somalia relations framework and its January 2024 press briefing on the Ethiopia–Somaliland MoU.

There are defensible reasons for that caution. The United States has spent heavily on Somalia’s federal institutions and counter-al-Shabaab campaign.  A recognition decision would anger Mogadishu, unsettle some African governments and force Washington to revisit legal and diplomatic assumptions embedded in years of policy.  Career diplomats are trained to see those costs clearly.

The weakness appears on the other side of the ledger. A bureaucracy can become so practiced at avoiding the immediate cost of a decision that it stops measuring the cost of postponement.  That is where the Somaliland file now sits. The Red Sea is more militarized. China is established in Djibouti. The Houthis have made maritime vulnerability impossible to ignore.  Taiwan has a political relationship with Hargeisa. Berbera has acquired greater commercial and security value. Israel has recognized Somaliland. Yet much of the diplomatic vocabulary in Washington remains rooted in an earlier strategic landscape.

Former officials are challenging the policy they once inherited. One of the most revealing changes is the number of former senior U.S. Africa officials who now say, in different ways, that the status quo no longer makes sense.  These are not outside activists unfamiliar with State Department constraints. They include people who once sat inside the system and understand how recognition decisions are weighed.

Jendayi Frazer, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President George W. Bush, has said she believed Somaliland deserved recognition. In a retrospective interview, she recalled that South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia and Nigeria at various points appeared open or sympathetic to Somaliland, while other states resisted. Her account is important because it shows that recognition was not always dismissed as unthinkable; there was a period when a multilateral African opening seemed possible. Frazer’s account is available through the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tibor Nagy, another former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and a former ambassador, has become one of the sharpest critics of bureaucratic hesitation.  Herman Cohen, who held the same Africa post decades earlier, has also been a longstanding supporter. J. Peter Pham, a former U.S. special envoy and one of Washington’s best-known Africa policy voices, has repeatedly made........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)