Israel has recognized Somaliland. Will the US follow?

Not to be outdone, Abdullahi said afterward in a televised address, “I am the happiest person in the world today.” Israel is the first country to recognize Somaliland since it broke away from Somalia in 1991.

Not so enthused was the primary audience for this mutual admiration society: President Donald Trump.

“Does anyone know what Somaliland is, really?” the U.S. president told the New York Post when the newspaper called him the same day, asking for comment.

Asked if he was interested in following suit to become the second leader to recognize the republic, Trump said no. It was a short call, and Trump returned to golfing at the course he owns in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The resistance to recognizing Somaliland still holds, the State Department said in a statement to the Washington Examiner, while noting that the United States nonetheless maintains friendly, low-key ties with the breakaway republic.

“The United States continues to recognize the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Somalia, which includes the territory of Somaliland,” the statement reads. “Within that framework, the United States maintains a positive relationship with Somaliland and other subnational actors with whom we work to advance shared counterterrorism, security, and economic priorities.”

It was clearly not the outcome Somaliland was seeking: The breakaway Muslim-majority republic has, for years, sought recognition from a U.S.-friendly country as a means of getting the superpower to grant it recognition.

“U.S. recognition of Somaliland would strengthen American security interests in one of the world’s most strategic and most contested maritime corridors,” Bashir Goth, the representative of Somaliland in the U.S., said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Our 460 miles of coastline along the Gulf of Aden, adjacent to key global shipping lanes, have been kept free from terrorism and piracy for more than a decade since piracy reached its peak in 2011. In a region where instability often spills across borders, Somaliland offers the U.S. a reliable, democratic partner committed to safeguarding trade routes and promoting peace.”

In 2024, Somaliland nearly reached the finish line, with Ethiopia, which would share a roughly 932-mile border if it were widely recognized as an independent nation. But that country backed out under pressure from Turkey, which maintains deep military ties with Somalia. Somaliland has friends in Congress, all Republicans, who have introduced legislation pressing for recognition.

The pros and cons of U.S. recognition of Somaliland are mired in the potpourri of the foreign policy tremors that have shaken the free world in recent years, particularly since Trump first became president: the U.S.-China superpower rivalry, rivalries among Sunni Arab nations in the Persian Gulf, the falling away of diplomatic conventions including opposition to unilateral breakaways, the immigration crisis in the U.S., the collapse of Yemen to the Houthi militias, and the rise of militant Islamism.

And now the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has become a factor as well. Somaliland is adjacent to the Bab el Mandeb strait on the Gulf of Aden, a critical commercial shipping route, across from Yemen, where Houthi militias have threatened to but not yet joined the war in support of Iran. The Houthis have, since the Oct. 7, 2023, launch of the Hamas war against Israel, obstructed shipping to the Jewish state with missile fire.

Israel’s interest in forging a relationship with the republic has a clear strategic objective, said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank with deep sources in the U.S. and Israeli defense establishments.

“The Houthis have stayed out of the war until now, but I think it’s clear that, given the number of attacks that they’ve launched over the last year or two, that the idea of [Israel] having a base for drones closer to the Houthis had its own rationale,” Makovsky said in an interview. “I think it should be seen very much in the context of this Houthi threat.”

Netanyahu told Abdullahi in their phone call that he would propose to Trump that Somaliland join the Abraham Accords, the landmark 2020 normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab nations. “I’ll communicate to President Trump your willingness and desire to join the Abraham Accords,” he said, a move that would necessitate U.S. recognition of Somaliland.

Netanyahu met Trump three days later at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The Israeli embassy in Washington did not respond to a question about whether Netanyahu brought up Somaliland at the meeting.

Makovksy said he doubted that Somaliland came up in Netanyahu’s one-on-one talks with Trump, now known to have been preoccupied with Iran war planning.

“It could have been a side reference, so they could say they mentioned it or they did it in a wider meeting with aides that doesn’t have the same impact as the one-on-ones,” he said.

Israel’s broader Africa diplomacy strategy

Netanyahu had additional considerations in recognizing Somaliland. The prime minister spent much of the 2010s expanding Israel’s footprint in Africa and among Muslim-majority countries as a means of proving that Israel could expand its diplomatic horizons even absent a peace deal with the Palestinians, and also as an outlet for Israel’s thriving export sector.

Somaliland’s stable democracy, rooted in its British colonial past, also validates Netanyahu’s long-standing argument that Western values are the best means of ensuring stability.

Netanyahu praised Abdullahi’s “leadership and commitment to promoting stability and peace” in his official statement on Dec. 26 and invited Abdullahi to visit Israel officially — the president of Somaliland had secretly visited the country in October.

“The State of Israel plans to immediately expand its relations with the Republic of Somaliland through extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology, and economy,” Netanyahu’s statement reads.

There were, in January 2025, when Trump appeared to support calls by right-wingers in Netanyahu’s government to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, unconfirmed reports that Somaliland was prepared to accept them. Trump has since then backed off from any plan to resettle Palestinians, and Somaliland has formally denied any such offer.

Israel was among the 35 nations that recognized Somaliland when it declared independence from Britain in 1960. Within five days, the new country united with Somalia, which at the time was also a British protectorate. It had been an Italian colony until World War II. Unification was always the plan: At the time, it was thought that the larger entity was the best means for the new state’s survival.

It didn’t take long for tensions to arise, in part because residents of the northern region that had comprised British Somaliland believed their interests were sidelined in the new country’s constitution.

Conditions worsened after a 1969 coup led by Mohammed Siad Barre, and the Isaaq clan, the preeminent clan in northern Somalia, believed to be descended from a medieval Islamic scholar, became a principal target of Siad Barre’s Marxist regime. That led to the launch in 1981 of a Somaliland separatist movement, which precipitated a civil war. In 1988, Human Rights Watch reported to a bipartisan congressional panel that the north had suffered the “worst atrocities” under Siad Barre’s totalitarian rule. A United Nations-commissioned consultant in 2002 concluded that the Isaaq people were the victims of a genocide between 1987 and 1989, although that designation does not have the power of international law.

Siad Barre’s rule came to an end during a broader civil war in 1991. Somaliland seized the opportunity to declare independence. Over the years, the government set up a constitutional system that encouraged ideological rather than clan affiliation — no more than three parties may exist at a time. There have been five peaceful transfers of power since Somaliland’s founding, most recently in 2024.

Somalia is beset by internal strife, especially in its center and south, where the Islamist al Shabab movement, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government, remains influential. Somaliland is, by contrast, an island of stability positioned in a key strategic junction on the Bab el Mandeb strait, said Rabbi Michael Freund, a former deputy director of communications for Netanyahu who has become a prominent advocate for recognizing Somaliland.

“Ever since the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre fell in 1991, Somalia has been a mess — the president of Somalia, his authority barely extends beyond the edge of his desk,” Freund said in an interview. “And Somalia’s government, as it were, is basically propped up by foreign aid and foreign troops. Somaliland is a stable, functioning democracy. It’s had six presidents and five peaceful transfers of power. Since 1991, it’s built democratic institutions. Because it’s not recognized, it does not receive international aid or support like Somalia does, and nonetheless, it’s succeeded in building civil institutions and a culture of democracy, and there is an openness there.”

China’s expanding influence in the region is another spur for recognition. Djibouti, which borders Somaliland, has hosted for decades the U.S. Africa Command. More recently, in 2017, it allowed China to establish an advanced military base. Somaliland, in turn, has cultivated ties with Taiwan, spurring anger in China, which claims the island nation.

Some congressional Somaliland recognition support

Top Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), and House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa Chairman Chris Smith (R-NJ), have cited China’s influence in advocating Somaliland recognition.

“Somaliland’s strategic location and deep-water port at Berbera also underscore its national security significance to the United States,” Smith said in a statement on Jan. 6, welcoming Israel’s recognition and urging the Trump administration to follow suit. “And Somaliland’s close ties with Taiwan offset Communist China’s malign influence in the region — as underscored by [Chinese] Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s upcoming visit to neighboring Mogadishu.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the second Trump presidency, calls for the recognition of Somaliland as a means of containing Chinese influence. “The recognition of Somaliland statehood as a hedge against the U.S.’s deteriorating position in Djibouti,” it recommends in a section titled, “Counter malign Chinese activity on the continent.” Like much else in the Trump-adjacent think tank’s blueprint, the recommendation appeared to have traction — at first. Tibor Nagy, a seasoned diplomat who, for the first three months of Trump’s second term, ran management at the State Department, is a longtime champion of the breakaway republic and made recognition a priority. Nagy left in April 2025 for reasons still not entirely clear.

So why won’t Trump recognize the country? First off, because the U.S. already enjoys many of the benefits that would accrue from recognition, said Dov Zakheim, a deputy undersecretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, and later comptroller of the Pentagon during former President George W. Bush’s administration.

“We don’t necessarily need to recognize Somaliland to operate out of there,” Zakheim said in an interview. “If we want to operate out of there, the people of Somaliland are not exactly going to object. And at this stage of the game, Trump has so much going on already that I don’t think he’s going to want to or his people are particularly going to want to focus on whether or not to recognize Somaliland.”

Somaliland, as the State Department indicated in its statement to the Washington Examiner, cooperates with the U.S. on counterterrorism and security. The country last year welcomed a delegation led by the U.S. ambassador to Somalia and the commander of U.S. Africa Command.

Joshua Meservey, an Africa expert at the Hudson Institute think tank, where he is a senior fellow, said Somaliland had not advocated robustly enough for U.S. recognition. Somaliland maintains a small office in Washington, one of a handful around the world.

“The Somalilanders themselves haven’t been quite as aggressive and strategic as they need to be in making the case,” Meservey, who has long advocated U.S. recognition of Somaliland, said in an interview. A number of Trump-adjacent think tanks and Republicans have advocated Somaliland recognition, which may have created a false sense of certainty. “My sense is a little bit that they felt as though recognition was just a done deal once Trump was reelected, but there’s no guarantee of anything.”

Another problem for the Somallanders, Meservey said, is that Trump keeps an extraordinarily tight and difficult-to-penetrate circle of foreign policy advisers.

“They’ve gotten it into the bureaucracy,” he said. “I know that, but once it goes into bureaucracy, it’s very hard to tell how high up it will go. And if they want this to move quickly, then they have to persuade somebody decisive within that small group around the president.”

Abdullahi met briefly with first son Eric Trump in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss investment opportunities, but the encounter was fleeting and not consequential, Meservey said. “I doubt that [Eric Trump] had much of an understanding of who President Irro was, or the potential significance of Somaliland,” Meservey said, using Abdullahi’s popular nickname.

The freedom Somalia affords America in its counterterrorism efforts may also be a factor. Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant and a senior national security official, has made killing Islamist terrorists a second-term priority, something he boasted about at a July 2025 event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he said the first kill he ordered was in Somalia.

“We said to the president, ‘Sir, this is a leading ISIS jihadi running freely around a terror compound, a cave system in northern Somalia, and we’ve been watching him for about a year and a half,’” Gorka said. “The president looked up from the resolute desk. He said, ‘What do you mean we’ve been watching him? Kill him.’ He got out the iconic Sharpie pen, ticked the ‘go’ order on the operational documents we had in front of him. Less than 30 hours later, I was back in the Sit Room under the West Wing with the national security adviser, with members of my team watching on the giant screens as this leading ISIS jihadi walked around this compound, and then got turned into red mist.”

Gorka, who reported then that the U.S. had since “neutralized” 250 Islamist terrorists, “stacking them like cords,” is reported to oppose shrinking the U.S. military presence in Somalia because it is such a rich killing field. Recognizing Somaliland could complicate that effort.

Trump may have a more visceral reason for not wanting to deal with Somaliland: He hates the Somali people. He has called Somalis in Minnesota, where his immigration authorities are conducting a crackdown, “garbage.”

“We know what he thinks about Ilhan Omar,” the Somali American Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, said Dan M. Ford, a research fellow at the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft think tank. “He’s been very, very aggressive in his verbal attacks against her and the broader Somali community, especially in Minnesota. Trump has said openly that he hates certain people. He hates his political opponents. He hates certain groups that he thinks don’t like him.”

Trump may also not want to stir existing tensions between U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, especially as he seeks their continued backing for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The Saudis and the Emiratis, each seeking to expand their influence in the region, are already at odds in Sudan and Yemen as well as in Somaliland — Saudi Arabia’s response to Israel’s recognition of Somaliland was to sign a military cooperation agreement with Somalia last month.

Lesley Anne Warner, a former senior U.S. government official whose career has focused on Africa, said she would not be surprised if Saudi Arabia, which has deep ties in the Trump administration, was proactively advising Trump not to recognize Somaliland.

“If I were the Saudis, I would have known that Bibi was likely to ask Trump to recognize Somaliland during his December visit to D.C. right after Israel recognition, and I would have tried to intercept that,” she said in an interview, using Netanyahu’s nickname.

Separatist movements in Nigeria and Cameroon may use Somaliland recognition as a pretext to press their case, Warner said.

TRUMP SAYS OTHER COUNTRIES WILL HAVE TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR STRAIT OF HORMUZ SECURITY

“I don’t think that it necessarily creates a stampede for countries to demand their independence, but I do think it raises questions like, ‘Why this territory and why not that one?’” she said.

“Only two new countries have been created since many of the countries [in Africa] won their independence,” she said, referring to Eritrea and South Sudan. “If you look at the pathway through which those countries received their independence, there was a process that the origin state was involved, the people who wanted to break away were involved, there was a referendum — it wasn’t a unilateral declaration of recognition by another country.”

Ron Kampeas (@kampeas) is a journalist based in Arlington, Virginia. He was the Jewish Telegraphic Agency‘s Washington bureau chief for more than 20 years and previously reported for the Associated Press from its Jerusalem, New York, London, and Washington bureaus.