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A policy analysis
The White House released the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy in May, Washington’s first comprehensive counterterrorism doctrine since 2018 and the Trump administration’s foundational statement of how America First applies to the global terror threat. The document reorders the threat hierarchy. Transnational criminal organizations and the Western Hemisphere lead. Jihadist groups follow. State sponsors of terrorism, Iran in particular, receive expanded attention. It commits Washington to a “light military footprint” in Africa, calls openly on Europe to assume greater responsibility for the African counterterrorism portfolio, and conditions U.S. cooperation on alignment with American threat assessments and “the principles that define our shared civilization.” Homeland protection is the core success metric. In Africa specifically, the strategy adds protection of Christians as a second goal, citing recent administration action in Nigeria. The doctrine is narrower in scope, transactional in character, and unwilling to underwrite partners whose conduct no longer warrants the investment.
For the Federal Government of Somalia, the implications are decisive, and the document’s most consequential sentence about Somalia is the one it does not write.
For more than a decade, Washington structured its Horn of Africa policy around the survival and capacity of Mogadishu. Strikes, training, salary supplements, humanitarian throughput, AU mission funding, diplomatic cover at the United Nations: the architecture treated the federal government as the indispensable partner against Al-Shabaab and the indispensable vehicle for any future Somali state. The new strategy formalizes a posture in which the federal government is not the indispensable anything. Al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia are named threats. Mogadishu is not named as the partner against them. That omission is the policy.
The shift is not ideological. It is the doctrinal end-state of three failures of the federal government’s own making: an operational oversell that consumed the credibility of the U.S. officials defending it; strategic alignment with the United States’ principal strategic rival and prospective adversary, whose interest in Somalia centers on the suppression of Taiwan; and a corruption record so flagrant that Washington’s senior diplomats had no remaining argument to make at home. The actors now positioned to benefit from the vacuum will not replace Washington. They are not attempting to. They are extracting what they can while the federal government remains desperate enough to license it.
The doctrine, applied to Somalia
The strategy’s analytical key is its External Operations threshold. The document organizes its priority Jihadist target set around five groups assessed by the CIA as having “the intent and capability to execute External Operations against the United States, starting with al Qaeda – especially its most aggressive subgroup, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) – and ISIS, starting with ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K).” Al-Shabaab is named in the Africa section as a Somalia-based threat. Neither it nor ISIS-Somalia appears in the priority five. By the strategy’s own measure, the Somali groups that have absorbed a decade of American counterterrorism investment do not currently rise to the threshold that justifies it. The document also explicitly disavows the model that produced that investment: “In Africa, we have two clear goals that depart from the nation-building and interventionist policies of the past.”
The change is operational, not rhetorical. The Mogadishu embassy, downgraded to a Chargé d’Affaires, sits on the State Department’s own consolidation list. USAID’s Somalia programming has been gutted. The salary supplements that propped up Somali security forces have been terminated. The diplomatic and developmental wraparound that surrounded the kinetic mission, with weight at the United Nations and patient capital across two donor cycles, has been withdrawn. The contrast is sharpened by the existence of a neighboring polity in Somaliland that has kept its domain largely free of terrorism, including Al-Shabaab, without equivalent external underwriting.
Operational oversell
The Biden-era credibility collapse was the proximate cause. Ambassador Larry André told Voice of America in March 2023 that Somali offensives had “restored Somalia’s sovereignty to one-third of the territory formerly misruled by Al-Shabaab.” AFRICOM Commander Gen. Michael Langley delivered congressional testimony year after year describing U.S.-enabled Somali forces as gaining ground. The battlefield told a different story. Al-Shabaab mortared the Halane compound housing the U.S. embassy and overran the U.S.-equipped forward base at Adan Yabal in 2025, forcing Danab units to abandon American-paid equipment in retreat. By mid-2025, in remarks to African defense chiefs, Langley conceded what had been visible for months: Al-Shabaab remained “entrenched, wealthy, and large.” The credibility gap closed only when the policy did.
Strategic defection
Beijing’s documented interest in Somalia has consolidated around diplomatic alignment against Taiwan and against Somaliland-Taiwan engagement. In September 2024, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Xi Jinping formally elevated Somalia–China relations to a strategic partnership at the FOCAC Summit in Beijing. Xi explicitly linked Beijing’s Taiwan claim to Mogadishu’s claim over Somaliland: “both China and Somalia shoulder the historical mission of achieving complete national reunification.”
The deliverables followed in sequence. On April 30, 2025, Somalia’s Civil Aviation Authority banned Taiwanese passport holders from entry or transit, citing United Nations Resolution 2758 in precisely the distorted reading Beijing has been pressing on African capitals. China’s foreign ministry “highly appreciated” the move and pledged reciprocal support for Mogadishu’s position on Hargeisa. In December 2025, Somalia and China announced a $1.2 billion investment partnership — the largest financial agreement Mogadishu had reached with any international partner in decades, according to Reuters. Days later, on December 21, President Mohamud appeared on China Global Television Network to mark the 65th anniversary of bilateral relations and publicly endorsed the prospect of Chinese military action against a U.S. democratic partner: “China has the capacity and military might to bring back Taiwan.” A federal government drawing American security assistance had positioned itself as Beijing’s geopolitical advocate on Beijing’s most consequential international dispute.
The State Department’s Africa Bureau under Assistant Secretary Molly Phee did not adjust. When Ethiopia signed the January 2024 memorandum of understanding with Somaliland on sea access — the most consequential diplomatic opening in the region in years — Phee characterized the deal as “disruptive” and reaffirmed Somali sovereignty and territorial integrity, holding the same line in Foggy Bottom that Beijing was holding in the United Nations. The position was defensible on its formal merits. It was indefensible against the documented record: Mogadishu was openly trading its diplomatic posture to the United States’ principal strategic rival.
The corruption ledger
Somalia has ranked among the three most corrupt states in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for more than a decade, sharing the bottom of the table with South Sudan and Syria. The federal government Washington was underwriting did not depart from that pattern; it institutionalized it. Padded payrolls, ghost soldiers, opaque procurement, and diverted assistance were the running entries on a ledger every American auditor could read. The closing entry filed itself on January 3, 2026.
According to a U.S. embassy cable dated January 6, port authorities at Mogadishu Port — acting on the direct orders of President Mohamud and over the explicit objections of the World Food Programme — demolished a U.S.-funded WFP emergency response warehouse, destroying or removing roughly 76 metric tons of nutritional food intended for malnourished civilians. The cable named the proximate cause: the port is operated by a Turkish company seeking to expand, and Somalia’s Minister of Ports “acts as [Turkey’s] primary agent in Somalia.” A federal government had bulldozed American food aid to accommodate a commercial transaction favoring its principal foreign patron. The State Department suspended all direct assistance within twenty-four hours.
After a decade of underwriting that pattern against the warnings of every audit, capped by a presidency now publicly aligned with Ankara’s commercial interests and Beijing’s geopolitical ones, Washington had filed its final argument against itself.
The Turkish concession
Into the space cleared by these failures stepped an actor whose ambitions warrant examination on their own. Turkey’s engagement with Somalia, frequently described in Western press as humanitarian outreach or counterterrorism partnership, is something else.
The ideological framing is on the record. Erdogan has publicly characterized the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — which set Turkey’s modern borders by formalizing the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire — as a betrayal Turkish leaders should not have accepted, and refers to modern Turks as “Osmanlı Torunu,” Ottoman descendants. The territorial reach of the lost empire included the Red Sea coast and the Horn of Africa. Erdogan’s flagship 2011 Mogadishu visit, the first by a non-African head of state in two decades, opened a relationship that has only deepened since.
The domestic backdrop matters. Turkish inflation reached 86 percent in late 2022 and remained near 31 percent at the close of 2025. The lira has lost catastrophic value across Erdogan’s tenure. In March 2025, Erdogan ordered the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, his principal political rival; the central bank burned through more than $40 billion in reserves in a single month defending the currency. This is the regime now committing roughly $6 billion to a foreign missile testing complex on the Somali coast.
What Mogadishu has signed away is documented in agreements concealed from the Somali Parliament, the Council of Ministers, and the federal member states until they leaked. The hydrocarbons agreement signed in Istanbul on March 7, 2024 grants Turkish Petroleum Corporation up to 90 percent of annual oil and gas production as “cost petroleum” before any profit-sharing begins. Somalia’s royalty is capped at 5 percent — half the global floor for fragile-state extraction agreements. Turkey is exempted from all upfront payments: no signature bonus, no development bonus, no surface fees, no administrative fees. Turkish entities may export and retain all foreign-earned revenue without Somali audit. Disputes are arbitrated in Istanbul. Turkey may resell its concession rights to third parties without establishing a Somali entity or notifying Mogadishu. If any future Somali government enacts a policy change that raises Turkish costs, Somalia must compensate Turkey from its own profit share. None of this was reviewed by the parliament the Somali constitution requires.
The hydrocarbons concession is one layer. The February 2024 Defense and Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement and a February 2025 supplement granted Turkish naval forces a ten-year operational mandate in Somali waters. A 900-square-kilometer parcel along Somalia’s Indian Ocean coast — larger than the city of Berlin — has been allocated, according to Bloomberg, to a Turkish Space Agency facility marketed as “Africa’s first orbital launch complex.” Turkish defense press has confirmed the site will also host long-range ballistic missile testing, including the Tayfun Block 4 hypersonic system unveiled at IDEF 2025, with stated ranges up to 3,000 kilometers — sufficient to reach most of Europe, the entire Middle East, and the Red Sea basin from Somali soil. Turkey’s existing range at Sinop on the Black Sea cannot safely accommodate weapons of this class. Somalia’s coast can.
Mogadishu’s airport is operated by a Turkish company. Its principal port is operated by a Turkish company — the same operator whose expansion plans drove the demolition of the WFP warehouse. The largest hospital in the capital is named for Erdogan personally. The Maarif Foundation schools and Diyanet Foundation mosques have replaced alternative interpretations of Islam with one aligned with the AKP. The cumulative posture is not a partnership Somalia has entered. It is a concession economy Mogadishu has surrendered to, executed outside its own legal process, in exchange for a security relationship the patron has every incentive to maintain rather than resolve.
An accident in Istanbul
In November 2023, the Somali president’s 40-year-old son struck and killed an Istanbul motorcycle courier, Yunus Emre Göçer, a father of two, with a vehicle bearing diplomatic plates. He was released the same day, left Turkey two days later, and was outside the jurisdiction when Göçer died and the arrest warrant issued. Istanbul prosecutors sought up to six years. The court fined him roughly $900. Three weeks later, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government signed the framework defense agreement with Ankara. Five weeks after that, the hydrocarbons agreement.
Who picks up the slack?
The strategy assumes Somalia’s security situation can be managed by partners. The honest answer is that no actor currently in the picture is positioned to reproduce what Washington provided, and the actors most visibly present are not attempting to.
Europe is the natural inheritor, and the strategy is right to demand it act like one. The document is unambiguous: Europe must “actively share its threat intelligence globally and move counterterrorism burdenshifting to take greater responsibility for its own security. This includes CT operations in Africa.” It calls “unfettered mass migration” the “transmission belt for terrorists” and declares it “unacceptable that wealthy NATO allies can serve as financial, logistical, and recruitment hubs.” The geography supports the demand. Somali instability does not threaten the American homeland. It threatens the European one. The migration flows from the Horn run north through Libya to Lampedusa, not west across the Atlantic. The radicalized fighters who eventually surface in European cities do not transit American airports. For two decades, European capitals have had every opportunity to lead in the Sahel, in Libya, in the Horn, and have produced either a French collapse in Mali or token contributions paired with sustained critique of American methods. The strategy ends that arrangement. Europe is now being asked to put diplomatic weight and budget into the security of its own approaches, rather than commenting on how the United States secures them. Whether European capitals — stretched on Ukraine, the eastern flank, and their own defense budgets — can mount that response remains genuinely unclear. AUSSOM’s successor will be tested almost immediately, and likely with insufficient resources.
Turkey and China are not picking up slack. They are taking what has been left unguarded. The Turkish concession and the Chinese strategic partnership are not failed substitutes for American patronage; they are not substitutes at all. Ankara is extracting hydrocarbons, leasing coast for missile testing, and securing strategic position. Beijing is collecting diplomatic compliance on Taiwan and Somaliland and registering a coastal asset on its global ledger. Neither relationship is structured around resolving Somalia’s underlying institutional weaknesses, because those weaknesses produce the leverage. China does not operate an equivalent of USAID. Turkey does not staff humanitarian throughput. Neither will underwrite SNA salary supplements, fund the AU mission, or commit forces against Al-Shabaab on terms that do not include the next concession. The proof case is the WFP warehouse: when Mogadishu’s Turkish patron wanted the port footprint, malnourished children’s food was bulldozed; Beijing did not intervene; the federal government delivered.
The strategic partnership with China carries a further structural problem Mogadishu cannot solve. Beijing’s interest is durable only for as long as the Somaliland question remains open. If Hargeisa achieves international recognition by Washington, Jerusalem, or any combination of partners reading the strategic landscape clearly, Mogadishu loses the only asset it brought to the FOCAC table. China will continue to invest where commercial logic dictates. It will not continue to court a federal government whose primary use to Beijing has been overtaken by events.
What the strategy implicitly recognizes
The 2026 strategy does not name Somaliland. It also does not need to. What it does name is the Red Sea, where it preserves a continuing American military commitment that the rest of the Africa section explicitly disavows. The document declares that “freedom of maritime navigation is crucial to the U.S. economy” and that Washington “will not allow strategic waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz or Red Sea to be held hostage by non-state or state actors. In Yemen, we are prepared to take decisive military action again if our ships are endangered by the Houthis.” The Red Sea is one short crossing of the Gulf of Aden from Berbera. Trump administration officials have explored relocating U.S. operations to a Soviet-era airbase in Somaliland. Israel and Somaliland have publicly discussed security cooperation, including potential basing for operations against the Houthis. The Taiwan-Somaliland relationship continues to deepen.
The maritime evidence has arrived in the past six months. Five hostile incidents involving commercial vessels off Somalia were logged in a single ten-day window in late April 2026, including a tanker hijacking northeast of Mareeyo and a cargo seizure northeast of Garacad. The Malta-flagged tanker Hellas Aphrodite was boarded by pirates with rocket-propelled grenades approximately 560 nautical miles southeast of Eyl in November; its crew survived only because a Spanish frigate operating under EU NAVFOR executed a rescue. Maritime security analysts tracking the resurgence draw a consistent line: the redirection of U.S. naval assets to the Red Sea against the Houthis and to the Persian Gulf against Iran has thinned patrols across the Somali Basin. The resurgence has emerged overwhelmingly from waters adjacent to federal Somalia rather than Somaliland’s 850-kilometer Gulf of Aden coastline.
None of this constitutes recognition. All of it reflects a strategic landscape in which Hargeisa’s record — self-financed governance, peaceful transitions of power, a domain kept largely free of terrorism including Al-Shabaab without American salary supplements, and steady alignment with democratic partners — has produced a different set of options than the federal government’s. The doctrine’s geographic line is now visible: Mogadishu sits on the burdenshifting side of it, while Berbera sits inside the active CT theater the strategy explicitly preserves.
The strategy’s silence on Somaliland is itself a position. By declining to reaffirm the One Somalia line that Phee defended through 2024, Washington has withdrawn the diplomatic cover Mogadishu most needed. That is not advocacy for any particular outcome. It is the consequence of removing the underwriting.
The wider lesson
The 2026 strategy is most usefully read as a stress test for how African capitals will manage U.S. engagement under stricter American interest-calculation. Washington under this administration will fight where the homeland is plausibly threatened, partner where the math works, and walk where it does not. Capitals tempted to interpret Mogadishu’s Beijing alignment as a viable model should weigh what alignment with the United States’ principal strategic rival actually entails while drawing American security assistance, and should examine what Beijing has delivered, what it has declined to deliver, and what both Beijing and Ankara have extracted in exchange.
None of this guarantees American strategic disengagement from Somalia. Washington retains significant counterterrorism interests in the Horn, policy reversals are common across administrations, and the strategy itself preserves an active military posture in the Red Sea. But the trajectory of the doctrine is unmistakable, and the federal government’s conduct in 2024 and 2025 has accelerated rather than slowed it.
For the Federal Government of Somalia, the test is the one it has spent three decades deferring. The powers now in the harbor will sell it lifejackets at market rate. They will not jump in after it. The Horn of Africa’s other actors — including those that have made their own arrangements without American patronage all along — now deal with the federal government on its actual terms, not the propped-up version of itself it presented to its donors.
Sink or swim.
