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On January 17, 2013, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stood beside Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and formally recognized Somalia’s Federal Government. This was a decision made days before she left office. It ended more than two decades of estrangement since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime. It was billed as a diplomatic milestone. It was closer to a parting photo op.
Nothing about Somalia in 2012 suggested the country had turned a corner. Decades of civil war, famine, piracy, and al-Shabaab’s insurgency had left it in pieces. The political settlement that preceded recognition was a clan bargain by 200-odd unelected civilians in a hangar, not a transformation. Meanwhile, next door, Somaliland had spent two decades quietly doing the things states are supposed to do: holding competitive elections, transferring power peacefully, keeping the peace. Washington looked at both and bet billions on Mogadishu. America is still finding out what that bet cost, leading to the decision to wind down funding for AUSSOM and related missions.
That history is worth remembering now. On July 8, 2026, at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel (former Chicago mayor, former Obama chief of staff, and a man weighing a 2028 presidential run) used his moment on stage to make a joke. Quoting his grandmother, he told the audience: “You lost Europe, you lost America, and you picked up Somaliland; such a deal.” The line landed. The room laughed.
It is a good line. It is also a cheap one. Somaliland is home to more than six million people who survived genocide, fought a brutal war, buried their dead, and spent three decades building functioning institutions without the international recognition routinely extended elsewhere. To reduce that achievement to “you picked up Somaliland” is not clever. It treats an entire people’s struggle for self-determination as a throwaway line.
Somaliland is not a punchline. It is a coastline on the Bab el-Mandeb. Nearly a tenth of global seaborne trade and a large share of the world’s energy shipments pass through that strait. This is arguably more strategically vital than Hormuz now that Washington’s arrangement with Tehran has left Iran freer to explore adventurism in the region. Somaliland controls a long stretch of that coastline and sits on mineral and rare-earth deposits the West is scrambling to secure elsewhere. This is not a nation asking for charity. It is a nation of roughly 6.5 million people (pro-American, pro-Israel, functionally democratic) offering a partnership most of the Horn of Africa cannot. American officials have taken it seriously enough to show up: AFRICOM commander Gen. Dagvin Anderson visited Somaliland on November 26, 2025.
Set that against 2013. Hillary Clinton had this same choice in front of her (a stable, self-governing partner with a functioning coastline, versus a fractured state run by limited clan consensus) and she chose the fractured state, with billions of American taxpayer dollars behind it. Nobody in Emanuel’s party has been asked to defend that decision in the years since. His grandmother has a line about Somaliland recognition; the Democratic establishment does not have one about Mogadishu.
Emanuel did not stop at the joke. He told the Tel Aviv audience that unconditional U.S. backing has “produced a prime minister who has presumed that his strategic interest would incur no political costs.” He called Israel a “territorial pariah,” and floated cutting American subsidies to Israel’s defense budget along with sanctions on Israeli politicians who back settler violence. He is entitled to that critique, and to make it in Tel Aviv rather than avoid the region altogether. But mocking Jerusalem for finding new friends while offering no account of why Washington sank its credibility into Somalia thirteen years ago is not strategic seriousness. It is a man testing applause lines for a primary.
Emanuel wants credit for centrism while his applause lines do the work of his party’s loudest anti-Israel flank for him. That is not moderation. That is outsourcing the punchline and keeping the podium.
When Israel recognized Somaliland (a move that may have encouraged other peace initiatives such as the recent trilateral agreement with Lebanon), the Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry did not just object. It framed the move as cover for something sinister, warning it was designed to displace Palestinians from Gaza onto Somaliland’s coast. Emanuel, in that same Tel Aviv speech, echoed these sentiments by pushing for more conditions on Israel, more accommodation of Palestinian grievances, less benefit of the doubt for Jerusalem’s strategic decisions. He never mentions Somaliland by name. He does not have to. His posture (assume the worst motive, treat every Israeli gain as a scheme rather than a strategy) is the same one the PA led with when it rejected the recognition outright. The overlap is not merely a talking point from his potential running mates Tlaib or Omar. It is a shared instinct: reflexive suspicion of Israel acting in its own interest, dressed up as principle.
The through-line is not hard to see. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland (like the Abraham Accords before it) is an attempt to widen the circle of states willing to work with it, on the strength of shared interests rather than legacy alliances. Hillary Clinton’s recognition of Somalia was the opposite: a legacy call, made on the way out the door, that spent American money and credibility on the weaker bet. If Emanuel wants to talk about who has picked a bad partner in the Horn of Africa, his own party (and the American taxpayer) has thirteen years of receipts.
He can keep the joke. But before the next one, someone should ask him: was Hillary’s recognition of a failed state any better?
About the Author
Mr. Aar Kaiser is an Associate Editor at Somaliland Chronicle.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, or viewpoints of Somaliland Chronicle, and its staff.
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