How Israel’s move in Somaliland fits in its broader strategy for regional dominance

As Donald Trump proclaimed a “forever peace” in the region last October, Israel proceeded to dramatically escalate its military operations, launching repeated assaults across Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. In Gaza, Israel has violated the ceasefire over a thousand times; in Lebanon, it continues to target resistance forces; in Syria, it attempts to destabilize the new regime by exacerbating sectarian divisions; and more recently, it has continued to beat the drums of war with Iran. Its recent recognition of Somaliland also signals an Israel that seeks to regionalize its terror regime, challenge Turkey’s presence in Somalia, and position itself closer to Yemen and Iran for future skirmishes.

Some might consider this a failure of Israeli policy — that Israel is incapable of translating military success into a new political reality, and its war grinds on while the political horizon remains frozen. Without such a political transition, the argument goes, military success remains transient: decisive in appearance, yet incapable of altering the structural conditions that generate and sustain resistance.

There is some truth to this. But it also papers over something more important: Israel views any fixed political arrangement — even an agreement that is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favor — would serve as a constraint on its freedom of military action. Israel’s moves in Syria and Lebanon, alongside its broader regional realignments, point to an emerging strategic preference for a model of managed, perpetual conflict, rather than a stable political status quo that cannot be altered. War is no longer an exceptional condition but a way of life, a normalized instrument of regional order. 

For now, this model is sustainable for Israel because its consequences are largely externalized: peripheral arenas and adversarial societies bear the brunt of the damage of its operations, while the Israeli home front remains relatively insulated from sustained disruption. The absence of a definitive political settlement is not a liability but a boon. 

Perpetual war, so long as it remains geographically displaced and technologically mediated, allows Israel to defer the difficult work of political resolution while maintaining strategic initiative, leaving the door open for unilateral military action in the future.

The strategic logic of this model is reflected in two developments, respectively spatial and geopolitical in nature. 

The first development is most immediately felt, with Israel expanding its buffer architectures in Syria, spatially dispersing resistance formations in south Lebanon, and continuously expanding its buffer zone within Gaza by bringing more parts of the Strip under its control.

These aren’t tactical adjustments, but long-term arrangements based on the logic of “security perimeters” and the preemptive management of threat horizons. 

The other development is less visible but no less significant, represented in Israel’s entanglement in the byzantine geopolitics of states jockeying for influence across the region. There is the Saudi-Turkish-Qatari scramble to determine Syria’s future — each backing different factions, pursuing incompatible visions, yet united in their determination not to be left out of whatever arrangement eventually emerges from the rubble. 

Meanwhile, Israel has been cultivating relationships with Greece and Cyprus, building up a network of eastern Mediterranean partnerships that look suspiciously like an attempt to outflank Turkey, with whom competition is becoming increasingly open. 

It’s a messy business, and the alliances don’t follow any neat ideological lines. Yesterday’s enemy can become today’s tacit partner if the circumstances require it, with Israel dealing with the Saudis on some fronts while watching them bankroll projects elsewhere that run counter to their interests. The Israeli-Turkish relationship oscillates between functional cooperation on trade and energy and bitter rivalry on everything from gas exploration rights to influence in post-Assad Syria.

But even though Israeli actions suggest a growing comfort with inhabiting a permanently offensive posture in the region, its imperial entanglements also create new liabilities. Yes, Israel’s room for maneuver has been enlarged, but it has also been constrained — and not always in predictable ways — due, in part, to its relatively new relations with states such as the United Arab Emirates. More partners mean more options, to be sure, but they also entail more obligations and points at which things can unravel once the interests of the various actors inevitably diverge. 

So the question isn’t whether Israel wields influence in the region (it plainly does), but whether this dense thicket of diplomatic activity constitutes a coherent strategy or a mere accumulation of tactical expedients whose long-term durability remains uncertain.

And then there’s Israel’s boldest move yet: its attempt to plant the first flag of its would-be empire in Africa.

Somaliland: the Horn of Africa gambit

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland on December 26, 2025, adds yet another layer to this already congested landscape, operating simultaneously across multiple vectors of competition: with Turkey over influence in the Horn of Africa, and against the ability of Yemen’s Ansar Allah (commonly known as “the Houthis”) to disrupt trade routes. 

Turkey has maintained its largest overseas military base in Somalia since 2017. Camp TURKSOM in Mogadishu has trained some sixteen thousand troops and secured, in February 2024, the exclusive rights to train, equip, and modernize Somalia’s navy and patrol its exclusive economic zone. This consolidation of Turkish strategic presence transforms Somalia into something approaching a client state, not through direct annexation but through the patient accumulation of security, infrastructural, and economic dependence. 

The Israeli move was framed explicitly as being “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords,” yet it functions equally as a counter to Turkish maritime ambitions and as a wedge into a region where Ankara has spent over a decade building institutional depth.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is not an isolated diplomatic gesture, but an attempt to secure a foothold in proximity to these competing networks. Somaliland’s coastline sits directly across from Yemen, offering monitoring and intervention capacity over Ansar Allah’s activities while simultaneously complicating Turkish ambitions in the region. What emerges is a field of overlapping projects: Turkish military infrastructure consolidating Somalia as a projection platform into the Red Sea; Iranian weapons flows moving through Somali territory to sustain Ansar Allah operations; and the Israeli recognition of Somaliland in an attempt to disrupt both. 

The question is whether these entanglements represent calculated strategic depth or merely additional commitments that generate their own unforeseen vulnerabilities, binding each actor to the volatile fortunes of a region where clarity remains perpetually deferred, and alliances shift faster than the institutional arrangements meant to stabilize them.

What we are witnessing is not chaos but rather the return of classical balance-of-power politics. It is something far more familiar to students of European statecraft: a multipolar regional system where even ostensible allies pursue contradictory objectives, and where every gain by one actor automatically triggers compensatory maneuvers by others. 

Consider the balance of forces. Turkey, a NATO member, builds military infrastructure in Somalia while competing with Israel — another American partner — for influence across the Horn and the eastern Mediterranean. The Saudis and Turks back opposing factions in Syria while both maintain channels to Washington. Israel cultivates Greece and Cyprus as counterweights to Turkey, yet all remain within the American security umbrella. This isn’t alliance breakdown — it is alliance complexity. The trouble is that it requires a kind of diplomatic sophistication that the current regional leadership often lacks.

The recognition of Somaliland is instructive precisely because it appears minor. On its own, it registers as a small diplomatic gesture; in practice, it reverberates across multiple strategic theaters at once — the Horn of Africa, the Red Sea shipping lanes, the Turkish sphere, the Emirati-Israeli alignment, and the broader axis of resistance. This is how power increasingly operates in a multipolar environment: not through singular, decisive moves, but through the cumulative positioning of nodes whose strategic value emerges relationally and in anticipation of the other’s actions. 

More centrally, however — as with much of Israel’s regional conduct — this move is best understood as part of a broader preparation for future war. Perpetual war, here, isn’t an emergency condition to be avoided, but a governing paradigm to be managed, expanded, and spatially pre-configured long before war erupts again.

Regionalizing Israel’s strategy towards Palestine

Israel’s reorientation toward perpetual war is not unprecedented. States that enjoy overwhelming technological and military superiority often discover that victory is less useful than managed instability. An unresolved conflict preserves freedom of action, allowing borders to remain elastic, threats to be continuously redefined, and exceptional measures to become permanent. Israel’s conduct across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now the Horn of Africa suggests a growing comfort with precisely this condition. 

Seen in this light, the apparent failure to translate military dominance into political settlement begins to look less like an inability and more like a choice. Political closure would impose constraints: fixed borders, binding obligations, and reciprocal guarantees. Endless war, by contrast allows Israel to act preemptively, redraw security architectures, and embed its power into the geography of the region without having to negotiate or seek international ratification.

Israel is expanding territories under its control not to govern them, but to shape them for the purpose of absorbing shock. This strategy isn’t new to Israel when it comes to its relationship with the Palestinians, having for decades sustained a managed, perpetual war in the West Bank and Gaza that it has continuously modulated between alternating cycles of escalation and containment. The difference is that Israel is now moving to regionalize this model.

In other words, what’s new about this strategy isn’t its logic, but its scale, transplanting a decades-old strategy of managing its colonial frontier within Palestine to geographies far beyond it. Yet with this increase in scale, things get more complicated, giving the people of the region more reasons to resist.

As for the forces of resistance, it is precisely Israel’s refusal to entertain a political arrangement with them that keeps resistance alive. They have not been defeated because they can’t be so long as Israel’s only acceptable notion of defeat is total collapse or surrender. Certainly resistance won’t be defeated through Israel’s method of targeting the entire social and infrastructural body of what it declares to be “enemy societies.” 

And the Israelis actually understand this better than they publicly admit: the buffer zones, the spatial fragmentation, the preemptive configurations — these are all tacit admissions that victory in any meaningful sense is unattainable. 

What’s being managed and perhaps even perpetuated is the desire to sustain an intractable situation without any form of resolution. The resistance elements — whether Palestinian, Lebanese, or Yemeni — can certainly be weakened, perhaps even contained, but they can’t be eliminated entirely, because they’re embedded in political contexts that military force alone cannot address. 

At the same time, the regionalization of Israel’s regime of violence is generating an unintended strategic effect: by extending its operations across multiple theaters, it has renewed the salience of the idea of a unified arena, encouraging coordination, resource-sharing, and political alignment among resistance forces, including those that for long stretches viewed one another with suspicion. 

It is true that, for now, many of these actors remain preoccupied with survival, political relevance, and the arduous work of rebuilding. Israel is determined to keep it that way, working to further fragment Syria, consolidate partnerships with Greece and Cyprus, deepen military cooperation with the Emirates across the Red Sea, operate in tandem with select Kurdish forces, and continue to bomb targets in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran.

Yet the longer Israel pursues this strategy of regional entanglement, the more it collapses once-discrete arenas into a single, interconnected field of confrontation. 

In doing so, it pushes previously separated actors into closer proximity, lending renewed force to the idea of resistance not as a collection of isolated struggles, but as a set of interlinked campaigns increasingly compelled to operate in tandem.

Israel’s victoryless war is not an aberration, nor a failure of translation. It is the mature expression of a political order that can neither resolve resistance nor survive its resolution — and therefore reorganizes space, diplomacy, and force around the permanent modulation of war. 

Abdaljawad Omar
Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine. Follow him on X @HHamayel2