PREVIEW
Hargeisa is also offering the US a Red Sea military base
Somaliland’s President Abdirahman Mahamed Abdullahi Irro is the latest African leader to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s transactional instincts by offering Washington a military base on the Red Sea and access to critical minerals.
Trump’s policy focus in Africa appear centres on three Ms: Minerals, migration and the military. Irro says that US military officials, including the most senior officer for the Horn of Africa, have recently visited Hargeisa. Irro has not stated what he wants in return but his allies say that US recognition of Somaliland’s nationhood is the end game. Pro-Trump officials strongly support Somaliland, which broke away from Somalia in 1991 but has never won recognition by the UN.
Hargeisa’s diplomats were cock-a-hoop when Trump won last November’s presidential election and hope to cash in on the presence of pro-Somaliland officials in senior posts in his administration.
Irro's allies point to J. Peter Pham, a Republican Africanist, as a supporter of Somaliland’s independence (AC Vol 65 No 23, Ahead of the US elections, African bankers and generals hired pro-Trump lobbyists), and to the growing number of congressional Republicans who want to recognise Somaliland.
Ahead of the US presidential campaign, Pham and fellow Republican Africanists Tibor Nagy and Joshua Meservey described the Biden administration’s ‘One Somalia’ policy as a ‘delusion’. They added that in the case of Somaliland, ‘Mogadishu’s claim to legitimacy could only be brought about by force’ (AC Vol 66 No 2, In the news: Trump’s new men in Africa).
Trump has not yet appointed a substantive assistant secretary of state for Africa, on 16 July, Jonathan Pratt, a former US ambassador to neighbouring Djibouti, was given the job on an ‘acting’ basis.
The Republican party has been far more critical of Somalia than Democrats and the Trump administration has suspended financial support for the new African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia.
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