December 26, 2025: Israel recognizes Somaliland.
January 6, 2026: Israel’s foreign minister visits Hargeisa and announces plans to exchange ambassadors and open embassies.
April 2026: Israel appoints an ambassador to Somaliland.
May 18: Somaliland’s ambassador presents his credentials in Jerusalem.
June 14: President Cirro arrives in Israel.
June 15: Cirro opens Somaliland’s embassy in Jerusalem.

Somaliland is the second Muslim-majority “country” to open an embassy in Jerusalem, after Kosovo (Which is also not a real country). Israel, meanwhile, has not yet opened an embassy in Hargeisa.

An Israeli think tank closely tied to the country’s political establishment has published a plan for placing the African side of the Red Sea under an Israeli-led security order.

The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs says Somaliland should become the “cornerstone” of an alliance linking Israel, Somaliland and Ethiopia, with support from the United Arab Emirates. Israel would provide intelligence, military technology and overall direction. The paper calls Israel the “natural anchor” of the entire system. In plain terms, Israel wants to run the show.

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JCFA is not formally part of the Israeli government, but it is close to it. Its former director, Yechiel Leiter, is now Israel’s ambassador to the United States and previously served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff when Netanyahu was finance minister. This is not an obscure group talking from the sidelines.

At the center of the project is Berbera. Somaliland’s port and four-kilometer runway sit directly across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. A Le Monde investigation reported that the UAE is turning Berbera Airport into a military facility intended for Emirati, American and Israeli use. Satellite analysis by Rich Tedd/@AfriMEOSINT says the Berbera base now includes new air-defense and radar positions, larger drone and aircraft hangars, underground structures, reinforced bunkers, weapons storage areas and more than 10 fortified observation posts. The expansion is reportedly nearing completion. Le Monde also reported visits by Israeli military delegations, while AFRICOM has publicly confirmed that its commander toured Berbera and reviewed the port’s operational capacity.

Berbera would give Israel a closer position from which to monitor Yemen, operate drones and surveillance systems, and potentially launch military operations around the Bab el-Mandeb.

The plan does extend beyond Berbera though. Ethiopia gives the alliance scale: a large market for Israeli weapons and technology, as well as a powerful regional military that Israel could train, equip, and coordinate as local muscle. The paper says the alliance could eventually expand into a “post-dictatorship Eritrea” and a Sudan “free from Islamist domination.” So, Eritrea would need a new government, while Sudan would have to remove the political forces Israel opposes. (They want to do regime-change. My theory is that, Israel may eventually openly back the RSF in Sudan and support Ethiopia if it moves from threatening Eritrea to invading it. Both outcomes would help create the regional order this paper describes.) The tone is almost managerial: both countries are treated as future members once their politics have been cleaned up and made acceptable.

The rest of Somalia offers little to this plan. The project is not really about East Africa as a whole. It is about the coastline facing Yemen and the Red Sea. Somalia is only relevant mainly because Somaliland remains internationally recognized as part of Somali territory, making Mogadishu a legal obstacle to be ignored.

To justify the expansion into internationally recognized Somali territory, JCFA makes the extraordinary claim that Iran is cultivating Al-Shabaab through the Houthis and supplying the Somali al-Qaeda affiliate with drones, intelligence, training and logistical support.

The claim is absurd. Al-Shabaab is a hardline Salafi-jihadist movement that sees Shia Muslims and Iran as enemies. Iran and its allies have spent years fighting al-Qaeda-linked groups elsewhere in the region. Yet JCFA asks readers to believe Tehran has suddenly decided to build an al-Qaeda affiliate into a proxy in Somalia, without presenting evidence of Iranian funding, orders, personnel or direct contact. (Meanwhile, Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, a former al-Qaeda commander, was welcomed into the White House. By JCFA’s own logic, there is a stronger case for accusing Washington of cultivating al-Qaeda and its networks than Iran.)

There have been reports of limited dealings between the Houthis and Al-Shabaab. UN monitors described those contacts as transactional and opportunistic, not ideological. That is a long way from proving an Iranian command structure. The Houthis have their own interests and networks; not everything they do is ordered by Tehran. JCFA takes a supposed murky arms relationship and turns it into an Iranian conspiracy in Somalia. The reason is obvious. Israel needs an Iranian threat in the Horn to make its move into Somaliland look defensive. Without that invented network, Israel is not “containing Iran.” It is building a offensive military position opposite Yemen.

The strangest section turns to African Americans. The authors propose sending Black venture funds, family offices and technology entrepreneurs into the Berbera Economic Zone to invest in logistics, digital infrastructure, manufacturing, apparel and, bizarrely, “streetwear ecosystems.” They also want HBCUs and Black media figures to build ties with Hargeisa and Jerusalem and help create what they call an “organic shield” of support in the United States. (Basically they want to cultivate a group of prominent Black American validators, people who can present the project as progressive, African and empowering while defending Israel’s interests in mainstream media. They want to manufacture more CNN’s Van Jones-type spokespeople for Somaliland.)

No actual investors or organizations are named. African Americans are simply imagined as a ready source of money, cultural influence and public relations. Meanwhile, Israel would contribute technology and gain new markets, diplomatic reach and safer access to the Red Sea, while the UAE builds much of the infrastructure. The Black empowerment language is bullshit obviously. The proposed investments will all lead back to Berbera, helping make Israel’s military foothold cheaper, deeper and harder to remove.

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The arrangement always contained a contradiction. Déby and much of Chad’s military establishment are Zaghawa, while the RSF has repeatedly attacked Zaghawa communities across the border in Darfur. As is so often the case in Africa, colonial powers drew borders through existing communities, not around them. Zaghawa families, political loyalties and military networks extend across both sides of the border. Although they make up less than 5 percent of Chad’s population, they hold more power than any other ethnic group in the country. Déby could have used that power to protect Zaghawa communities in Sudan. Instead, his government actively helped sustain the force slaughtering them. (It does not require invading Sudan: Chad could have offered diplomatic, financial or covert support or simply could’ve refused to join the UAE’s war network.)

In March, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies published a report on this contradiction (download report below). The center is part of the US Department of Defense (or now called Department of war I guess) and funded by Congress, so I would normally treat its work with suspicion. But this report does not read like an attempt to manufacture an opposition movement or prepare the ground for American interference in Chad.

The report says open-source evidence suggests that Déby’s government has facilitated support to the RSF since 2023. It describes Chad’s current position as an “alignment with the RSF network” and identifies Amdjarass as a transit point for military equipment entering RSF territory.

It also explains what Déby received in return. The UAE committed $700 million to Chad between 2023 and 2024, equivalent to roughly 15 percent of the country’s annual budget. According to the report, this gave Abu Dhabi “structural leverage” over N’Djamena’s foreign policy.

The report was published on March 9th. Developments since then have strengthened its central warning.

Chad Risks Instability

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TL;DR: If you don’t want to read the full report, keep going. I’ll cover the important parts below.

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The sequence suggested that a ground assault was approaching. The drones struck fuel stations, water infrastructure, electricity generators, markets and vehicles entering the city. By destroying the systems sustaining both the Sudanese military and the civilian population, the RSF could weaken El Obeid before committing its forces to an urban battle. But the expected assault did not come.

Instead, fighting erupted more than 400 miles to the west, along Sudan’s border with Chad. The SAF-backed Darfur Joint Forces advanced from the border town of Tina into North and West Darfur, forcing the RSF to redirect troops that had been assembled for the El Obeid offensive. At the same time, stronger Sudanese air defenses began intercepting some of the paramilitary’s most expensive long-range drones.

The immediate threat of a ground attack has receded. The threat to the people of El Obeid has not. The RSF remains positioned around the city, its eastern lifeline remains under attack and the destruction inflicted during June continues to deepen shortages of water, fuel, food and electricity. El Obeid has received a military reprieve. Its civilians have yet to receive relief.

the gateway to western sudan

El Obeid is more than the capital of North Kordofan. It is the principal junction connecting SAF-controlled northern and eastern Sudan with Kordofan, Darfur and the country’s south.

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After it went up, a video of Jordanian MP Ali al-Khalayleh appeared on my feed. I had seen a video of him before, and it was part of what made me want to write about Jordan’s role in the war. But once I got deeper into the research, I somehow forgot about the clip and I never saved it.

It appeared on my feed again yesterday. I found and searched his name and found several more videos of him saying dumb things. So I gathered a few of them here as a short addition to the original article.

Al-Khalayleh is a five-term MP from Zarqa. As far as I can tell, he is an established, mid-tier politician who has repeatedly been returned to parliament, so not a nobody. His position does not appear to come from any particular love of the United States, and he is certainly not pro-Israel. He is simply intensely anti-Iranian, to the point that he is willing to welcome almost any foreign power willing to attack it.

The remarks from the video above came on March 2, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran and Tehran retaliated with missiles and drones against targets across the region, including in Jordan. Rather than ask why Jordan had been drawn into the war, al-Khalayleh demanded that the government expel Iran’s chargé d’affaires and open Jordanian airspace to “all friendly countries” so they could attack what he called Iran’s “bloody, corrupt regime.” He did not name Israel or the United States, but there was little ambiguity about which countries possessed both the means and the intention to carry out such strikes.

The following day, speaking to Saraya News, al-Khalayleh doubled down. He called the Jordanians who had criticized him a “fifth column,” “shabiha of the Iranian regime” (Shabiha means “ghosts,” but in modern political usage refers to regime thugs or enforcers, most famously the pro-Assad militias in Syria.) and “remnants of the Majus.” (Majus is an old Arabic term for the Zoroastrians of Persia; here it was being used as a sectarian slur against Iranians and Shias.)

He said anyone who disliked his remarks could “go pave the sea,” (something like that, basically similar to “go pound sand”) an Arabic expression meaning he did not care what they thought. He also called anyone pleased by attacks on Jordan a dayyuth, in English… a cuck. Adding that “a dayyuth knows what that means.” He accused his critics of celebrating Iranian “scrap missiles” that had harmed Jordanians and predicted that the Iranian government would fall within days.

On March 4th, al-Khalayleh again insisted that Jordan should open its airspace for attacks on Iran. He denied that he meant Israel, saying he had never mentioned “the Zionist entity.” Instead, he named Britain and France as friendly, “good” countries that should be allowed to use Jordanian airspace if they needed it, “so that we can rid ourselves of this corrupt regime.” He also (again) declared that Iran was finished and that the remnants of its government would flee to Russia.

After American soldiers were killed in Jordan, al-Khalayleh told reporters at the Jordanian Parliament on July 19 that he had spoken with his colleagues on the Jordanian-American Friendship Committee to convey condolences to the American people. He claimed the soldiers had been on an excursion in the Jordanian desert with shepherds when missile fragments struck them. He then called the Iranian government a “bloody regime” and said that, God willing, it would soon disappear.

CENTCOM itself admitted that the soldiers were killed in action while American and partner forces defended against Iranian missile and drone attacks. The Pentagon confirmed that the attack took place at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, not somewhere in the desert among shepherds.

Al-Khalayleh’s story was not merely false. It was a stupid lie, so absurd that it showed how little respect he had for the people listening. American soldiers had not wandered into the desert for a picnic with shepherds. They were operating from a Jordanian air base against Iran, and he invented the outing because admitting what they were doing would also mean admitting that Jordan was participating in the war.

The irony is that al-Khalayleh had openly demanded exactly that. He wanted foreign countries to use Jordanian airspace to attack Iran, insulted anyone who objected and dismissed Iranian missiles as scrap. Then those same “scrap” missiles reached Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and killed American soldiers there. Faced with the consequences of the policy he had advocated, he did not defend it. He made up a story about shepherds.

Using his own language, the man is a cuck. He wants stronger countries to use Jordan’s airspace and bases to wage their war while Jordanians absorb the retaliation. Then, when American soldiers are killed at the base they were operating from, he is too cowardly to admit what happened and invents a fairy tale about shepherds. A man who offers his country to foreign powers, begs them to fight from its soil and then lies to his own people when consequences reach Jordan has no standing to lecture anyone about honor.

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The next day, two American service members were killed and a third went missing when Iranian missiles and drones struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base near Azraq. Four more were hospitalized. It was the fourth Iranian attack on American forces in Jordan in five days. Earlier strikes had already wounded US personnel and damaged American assets.

The attack came during the renewed phase of a war that began on February 28, paused under an interim agreement in June and resumed on July 8. Muwaffaq Salti had been built into an American strike hub before the first attack on Iran and returned to that role when the fighting restarted.

Counterterrorism does not require a force assembled for a major air war. Ahead of the February attack, the United States concentrated at least 66 fighter jets at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. Experts examining commercial satellite images identified 18 F-35 stealth fighters, 17 F-15s and eight A-10 attack aircraft, alongside EA-18 electronic-warfare jets and military cargo planes.

These were not planes sent to chase Islamic State cells through the desert. F-35s and electronic-attack aircraft are built to penetrate defended airspace, blind radar and break a state’s air defenses. Muwaffaq Salti may have been expanded for the war against ISIS, but by February it had become one of the main land bases for the American air war against Iran.

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who made the call?

Aden’s defense ministry publicly claimed the operation, saying the runway was struck to prevent the Iranian aircraft from landing, while Riyadh issued no acknowledgment of its own role. But Axios, citing two U.S. officials, reported that it was the Saudi military that bombed Sanaa airport. The same officials said Mohammed bin Salman had asked Donald Trump for American backing beforehand and received it. The White House did not directly confirm that account and the Saudi Embassy has not responded to journalists.

That silence is politically useful. Since restoring relations with Iran through Chinese mediation in 2023, Riyadh has tried to preserve the détente that helped freeze its Yemen front. Publicly admitting that Saudi jets struck an airport to prevent an Iranian airliner from landing would mean owning the precise escalation the kingdom has spent four years trying to avoid.

Now look at the other side. Ansarallah have little peace left to protect. War has been their normal condition for more than a decade. Since the Saudi-led intervention began in 2015, Yemen has endured years of air strikes, import restrictions and institutional collapse, producing what the United Nations has repeatedly called one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. At the height of the crisis, most of the country required some form of humanitarian assistance.

The campaign was sustained by American weapons, logistics, advice and intelligence. Until November 2018, the United States also refueled coalition warplanes in flight, allowing them to remain over Yemen longer. Washington ended that refueling role, but not the wider military relationship.

Ansarallah have since fought the United States more directly. American and British forces repeatedly struck Ansarallah-controlled Yemen throughout 2024. Beginning in March last year, the Trump administration launched an intensified seven-week campaign that hit more than a thousand targets. It ended not with the movement’s destruction, but with an Oman-brokered agreement under which Washington stopped bombing and Ansarallah stopped targeting American vessels.

They have exchanged direct fire with Israel as well. An Ansarallah drone reached Tel Aviv in July 2024 and killed one person, while their missiles have repeatedly triggered alarms across central Israel. Israel answered with strikes on Yemen throughout 2024 and 2025.

A movement that has survived all of that has few soft and expensive assets left to hold hostage. Being attacked can even serve it politically. The Saudi border was the one major front Ansarallah had kept comparatively quiet since the 2022 truce. By striking Sanaa airport, Riyadh gave them a reason to reopen it. Large crowds gathered in al-Sabeen Square after the attack, condemning Saudi Arabia and backing the Ansarallah response. That is the political return on Riyadh’s strike: another demonstration of the movement’s ability to turn external attack into internal mobilization. You cannot easily deter a force whose baseline is war and whose legitimacy is reinforced whenever a foreign power bombs it.

Saudi Arabia is the opposite kind of target. Everything MBS is building depends on calm. everything from Vision 2030, the 2034 World Cup, to the foreign capital he is courting makes the kingdom’s exposure no longer only economic but physical, and within Ansarallah range. The East-West Pipeline was built across the peninsula in the 1980s to move crude from the eastern fields to Yanbu on the Red Sea, so that exports would not depend on tankers clearing the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis have demonstrated they can reach it before, hitting pumping stations in 2019 and the YASREF refinery at Yanbu in 2022. Right now, that backup route has become the kingdom's most important one. As the war on Iran halts Gulf shipping on the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Aramco increased reliance on the East-West Pipeline. The line was built precisely to give Saudi Arabia an alternative to Hormuz, but it also concentrates a larger share of the kingdom's exports on the Red Sea coast and within reach of Ansarallah missiles and drones. Ansarallah have already signaled they view those assets as legitimate targets. On July 4th (after accusing Saudi Arabia of trying to block the Iranian civilian flight from reaching Sanaa) they warned that any further Saudi action would put the kingdom's airports and other vital interests on land and at sea in their crosshairs.

The risk for Saudi Arabia is not only aerial, because back during the active war Ansarallah have pushed across the border into the southern provinces of Najran, Jazan and Asir, overrunning outposts on the ground with anti-tank and MANPADS teams. (These Southern Saudi regions are regions Yemen lost to Saudi Arabia in the 1934 war and they spent the time since treating the Treaty of Taif that ceded them as an imposition. In 1966 its government declared the treaty void and vowed to recover the provinces by force as historically Yemeni land. Ansarallah rose out of Saada which is directly on that border. You can kind of say this is the one front where they fight as a movement reclaiming what it calls occupied territory. That is something airpower alone cannot stop, and a front Riyadh cannot hand to a proxy to fight for it.)

Saudi Arabia is exposed on the water too. The East-West Pipeline only solves the Hormuz problem if the Red Sea remains open. That sea narrows at Bab al-Mandeb, the chokepoint where Ansarallah attacks have disrupted shipping since late 2023 and forced many vessels onto the far longer route around the Cape of Good Hope. The campaign effectively strangled Israel's only Red Sea outlet at Eilat, where activity collapsed by more than 85 percent before the port slid into financial crisis and eventual shutdown. Reopening the Yemen front creates the risk that the same pressure could be turned against Saudi-linked shipping. If Bab al-Mandeb becomes hostile to Saudi cargo as well, the kingdom would find itself squeezed between two maritime chokepoints at once. Saudi Arabia spent decades and billions of dollars building a way around one. A renewed war in Yemen could make the second one the more dangerous of the two.

None of that exposure was live while the truce held. Riyadh reopened all of it for a single plane, breaking the ceasefire that had stood since March 2022. Ansarallah answered within hours by launching ballistic missiles and drones on Abha International Airport and a warning to every airline to stay out of Saudi airspace until the siege of Sanaa is lifted. Saudi Arabia answered that by bombing Saada, Ansarallah heartland. These were the first Ansarallah strikes on Saudi soil in three years, and every rung of that ladder is climbed by the side with everything to lose.

The airline warning works the same way as the shipping threat. Ansarallah only have to keep putting missiles and drones onto airports, as they did at Abha, and the cancellations follow. Airlines have already cancelled flights serving Abha. The Houthis are also making it clear that they do not see the fight ending at Abha. In footage released by them, they highlighted major Saudi airports including Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. Saudi Arabia is trying to become the region's aviation and tourism hub. It even just launched a new airline, Riyadh Air. Coupled with the giant construction projects and the 2034 World Cup, it all depends on safe skies. Once airlines and passengers begin treating Saudi airspace as a potential battlefield, the war has reached the exact thing Vision 2030 is built on.

So in the end, to stop a single Iranian plane, Saudi Arabia broke a four-year calm and put its own airports, ports, oil infrastructure and shipping lanes back within range. The plane landed in Hodeidah anyway, the delegation walking off on camera the same day. the whole move prevented nothing and changed nothing. What it did accomplish was reopening a conflict that had largely been frozen since 2022. For Riyadh, that is a remarkably high price to pay for so little.

The UN was built in 1945. What it fails to do follows from how it was built. I took the public tour to see what the building says about itself.

After booking online and paying $30 (a pretty good deal, I might say), you fill out a form with your information and upload a passport photo. The day of, you arrive an hour early, show your reservation and ID. They print a badge and you clip it on. You wait in line a while for the airport-like security. It's fascinating though, because the people-watching is good. I spotted a bunch of uniformed foreign military men waiting in line too, and had fun trying to guess where they were from by the flag patch on the shoulder (I noted Jordanian and Guyanese).

It is actually a myth that you are leaving the United States without crossing a border. The UN owns the land but isn't sovereign over it. It's still US territory; the 1947 agreement only keeps US authorities from entering without the UN's consent. It's a similar kind of protection a foreign embassy gets, and an embassy isn't foreign soil either, though people think it is. Julian Assange spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for exactly this reason: British police couldn't enter without permission, but the ground always belonged to Britain. The day Ecuador withdrew its consent, they walked in and carried him out.

The first thing the tour wants you to understand is why the institution exists. The guide tells you it was created in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust. The panel on the wall calls it a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism, and prejudice. This is the founding promise. Standing there, I sort of believed it. The guide was earnest, the building has a certain weight to it, and it feels like you are inside a place where real work is being done to hold the world together.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights hangs, article by article, as an art piece. It is the UN's founding statement of rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948: the right to work, to rest, to protection from arbitrary arrest. The artwork is by Otávio Roth, a Brazilian artist who illustrated all thirty articles on his own initiative and showed them at a New York gallery in 1980. A staffer in the Secretary-General's office saw the show, liked it, and invited him in. They have hung at UN headquarters since 1981. The most-displayed image of the Declaration in the building is there because one official walked into a gallery.

On another wall is a Norman Rockwell mosaic, a crowd of the world’s faces meant to stand for all of humanity. At the center is a white-bearded elder in white robes, a Jewish rabbi. Across the middle runs the sentence: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is from the Sermon on the Mount. So an image meant to hold all of mankind is built around a Judaic elder and a Christian gospel verse. The golden rule appears in almost every tradition on earth, but here it is given in its Judeo-Christian form and placed at the center, as the source. One civilization’s moral vocabulary is offered as the baseline for everyone, and everyone else is arranged as its audience.

The mosaic did not arrive by accident. It is a gift of the United States, unveiled by Nancy Reagan in 1985. It would be moving if the government that gave it were not, in the same years, for example, mining the harbors of Nicaragua. In 1986 the UN’s own court ruled that mining illegal and ordered the United States to stop and pay reparations. The United States had already walked out of the proceedings. When Nicaragua took the ruling to the Security Council for enforcement, the United States vetoed it. The mosaic says do unto others. The same government was told by the World Court to stop what it was doing, refused, and used its permanent seat to kill the resolution that would have made it comply. Imagine it the other way around with a stronger country mining American harbors, ignoring the court, vetoing the enforcement. Nicaragua is one example among many. The tour mentions none of it. The mosaic is a gift, and you are meant to admire it as one.

The General Assembly was in session the day I went. It was the last room on the tour, and I am starting with it when it comes to the rooms. Every recognized state has a seat and a vote here, all 193 of them, and the room was maybe half full. A delegate was speaking. I could not tell which country he was from. I asked the guide; he did not know either, and said you can usually tell from the lapel pin, but we were too high up and too far back to make it out. We guessed Angola. I wanted to know who he was and what he was saying, but there was no way to find out from the balcony, and no way for the guide to stop and get into it, if he even could.

The General Assembly decides almost nothing that binds anyone. General Assembly resolutions are recommendations. The votes with force behind them happen somewhere else, in a smaller room, decided by fewer people. The Assembly is the part of the building where the whole world speaks. That is a separate thing from where the world acts. The tour saves it for last for because it is the furthest room out, near the elevators where you exit. But it is also the biggest and most democratic-looking room in the building and there is something fitting in being walked through it on the way out. It is like they are setting you up to make sure you leave with a good impression.

Take the embargo on Cuba. For thirty-three years running, the General Assembly has voted to condemn it. In the October 2025 vote, the vote was 165 to 7. It has never once actually mattered. The resolution is non-binding, and the only body that can lift the embargo is the United States Congress. So the whole world, assembled in the room built to represent it, demands the same thing for three decades, and the country doing it does not have to listen.

There is a chamber that no longer meets. The trusteeship council oversaw the end of formal empire. They walked colonial territories to independence until the “last one”, Palau, became independent in 1994. Then it declared its work done and suspended itself. The room is kept intact for some reason.

But the file it closed isn’t really closed. What ended was the foreign flag and the foreign governor. The control didn’t end. It just moved outside. Now it's whoever sets the terms from outside the country: what a country can charge for what it sells, what it has to pay for what it buys, which leaders get money and which get pushed out, which coups get a quiet nod, which rebels get weapons, which elections get bought, rigged or suspended. Most of the Global South still trades on terms it didn’t set, and is still kept weak enough that it keeps needing the same countries that keep it weak.

It’s not just the old European empires anymore. Other powerful states that weren’t really colonizers, and big banks and companies that don't really answer to anyone, are all part of it now (or more intensely involved now). The trusteeship council shut down the moment this kind of control stopped being official, and the UN has acted like the problem was solved ever since.

What replaced it has no room. It isn't one office or one council. It's spread across the whole building, and a lot of it happens outside the UN entirely. That's what makes it hard to see. The old trusteeship council was one room you could point at. What came after has no address at all. Shutting the council down let the UN say colonialism was over while the same control just kept going somewhere else.

Then we got the Economic and Social Council. This is the organ meant to handle development, trade, poverty, the economic relationship between rich countries and poor ones. It is, in theory, the room where the world addresses inequality between nations. It also has no binding power. It issues reports and recommendations and cannot make a single government act on them. The decisions that actually determine whether a poor country can develop, the terms of its debt, the price of what it sells, the conditions attached to what it borrows, are made in the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, where votes are weighted by wealth and the rich countries hold the majority by design. The UN’s economic chamber only discusses the problem. The institutions that hold the power over it are somewhere else, and they are not one-country-one-vote.

The room is a gift of Sweden. As you can probably tell now, all three council chambers are Scandinavian furnished. First in the 1950s, arranged by the first Secretary-General, who was Norwegian: Norway did the Security Council, Sweden this one, Denmark the Trusteeship. When the chambers were renovated in 2013, each country was handed back its own room to redo. So the rooms have permanent owners the same way the Security Council has permanent members. It is a small, largely insignificant detail next to what does and doesn’t happen inside them, but it is an interesting fact.

On the way to the General Assembly, the tour walks you past a board the UN made about arms. It quotes a former Secretary-General: “the world is over-armed and peace is underfunded”. Below the quote are the figures. Worldwide military spending, $2.9 trillion a year. The budget for the world’s disarmament and non-proliferation bodies, $771 million. A running clock counts the day’s military spending in real time.

The board says “the world” is over-armed, which spreads the blame evenly. But The United States outspends every other country by a wide margin, more than its nearest rivals put together, and it is still climbing. Congress authorized roughly $900 billion for the Pentagon in 2026, and once the extra military funding passed alongside it is counted, the year crosses a trillion dollars. The administration has requested $1.5 trillion for 2027.

And it isn’t only the United States. Everyone is arming. Europe is rebuilding militaries it had let shrink, Japan is tearing up limits it kept for eighty years, and states that can barely afford it are doing the same. Some do it out of ambition and some because they have calculated they have no choice, but the direction is the same everywhere: up. The board is right that the money is obscene. It just leaves out who spends the most of it, and who sets the pace the rest are matching.

Nearby stands a stone Saint Agnes pulled from the ruins of a cathedral near the Nagasaki hypocenter. The cathedral it used to belong too was called Urakami Tenshudo, in the Urakami district, the oldest and largest Catholic community in Japan. They descended from converts who held their faith through centuries of persecution. The bomb detonated 500 meters away. The back of the statue is scorched.

Beside it is a map of the world's nuclear-weapon-free zones. There are nine nuclear-armed states, but only five are recognized by the treaty as nuclear-weapon states and those five are the permanent members of the Security Council. The Non-Proliferation Treaty logic is that the five who already had the bomb in 1968 may keep it, and everyone else agrees never to build one.

None of the five will give up theirs. Each calls its own arsenal defensive, a matter of survival, while treating the same weapon in anyone else's hands as a threat. The message is that some states are entitled to defend themselves this way and others are not. And the states without the bomb are the ones that get invaded, sanctioned, bombed, and pressured, while the ones that have it are handled carefully. Give up the bomb and you are exposed. Keep it and you are safe. Libya ended its weapons program in a 2003 deal with Washington and London, and its leader was dead in a NATO-backed war eight years later. North Korea kept its program and has not been touched. Anyone watching learned the same thing: the surest protection against invasion is the weapon the treaty exists to deny you.

India and Pakistan both built their bombs outside the treaty. Both were sanctioned briefly and then normalized. India was even handed a US nuclear deal that treated its arsenal as a fact to work around rather than a violation to punish. Israel did the same, built its arsenal outside the treaty, never signed, never admitted it, and has never been made to account for it. Stay out of the treaty and build the weapon, and the system adjusts to you. Iran did the opposite. It signed, it let inspectors in, and it was bombed over a weapon there was no proof it had built. The state that stayed inside the rules and opened its doors is the one that got hit. The strikes on Iran also makes proliferation more likely, not less. Inside Iran, after the strikes and the killing of its supreme leader, the argument that gained ground was that the country should have built the bomb years ago, that the mistake was restraint. And the pressure spreads outward: Saudi Arabia and Turkey have both said or signaled they would get their own if Iran did. The lesson of hitting an inspected signatory is that inspection and restraint are what get you attacked. The rule was never that nuclear weapons are dangerous. The rule is that some states may have them and others may not.

There was a wall exhibit on Palestine. It runs year by year and it starts with the 1947 partition. The 1967 occupation. The settlements, which the UN records as contrary to international law. The resolutions. The operations in Gaza, with the dead counted on the panel in the UN’s own figures.

The timeline ends in 2017. Everything after it is missing. The 2023–present Gaza war is absent. So is South Africa's genocide case before the International Court of Justice. So are the findings of multiple UN bodies and investigators that emerged after October 2023. The institution's own wall goes silent eight years before the most consequential period in the conflict's modern history. Whether that reflects bureaucratic inertia, political caution, or the difficulty of updating a display on an issue this contested, the result is visitors leave with a chronology that stops before the events that now dominate the debate.

A visitor stopped the tour here. He was Israeli, and he wanted the group to understand that the wall was wrong. The guide waited. Nobody in the group said anything. I looked around, a few people rolled their eyes, most just stared ahead, waiting for it to end. No one argued. No one agreed. The man made his case to a group that had already decided not to engage, and the tour moved on. It was the only stop where anyone interrupted. Nobody stopped the tour at the Trusteeship chamber, or the disarmament board. You are a tourist on a public tour; you are there to look, and the guide is not a policy expert who could argue the fine points even if you wanted to. There is nothing to win. And still, at this one wall, an Israeli man felt he had to stop everything and make his case to a bunch of strangers. (He also invited the Uzbek guide to Israel so he could see the “truth” for himself 😂)

The placement says something too. We walked past the Palestine wall at the very beginning, on the way to start at the Holocaust exhibit, and came back to it after the three council chambers and before the General Assembly. You could read that path as an answer prepared in advance. Of every issue the UN handles, this is probably the one a visitor is most likely to raise, and the building has a careful and sympathetic wall ready for it, held until near the end of the tour.

The Security Council was the first room on the tour. I have kept it for last. It is a small room for what it is. It is the only room in the building where the decisions bind. Above the table is a mural by Per Krohg, a gift of Norway from 1952, a phoenix rising from the ashes of war. It is a nice image to hang over the table, and it has nothing to do with what the table does. The phoenix says rebirth, peace, the world starting over. The seats beneath it were an arrangement to keep the five winners of one war permanently in charge, each with a veto so that none of them could ever be overruled. They do not agree with each other. Most of the time they block each other. Its not five states ruling together, but five states that each kept the power to stop anything, so that nothing the world decides can ever be forced on any of them. Eighty years on, it still works exactly like that. The mural is the part you photograph. The table is the part that works.

The five permanent members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States.The other ten rotate, and decide nothing on their own. Take the seats on their own terms. The case for the veto is that you seat real power, because a rule the strong ignore is worse than no rule at all. But the five were chosen for the world of 1945, not this one. Some of them were empires then and are middle powers now (The UK), holding a permanent veto over the entire planet on the strength of a war that ended eighty years ago. Meanwhile the states with the most people, the largest of the emerging economies, whole regions of the world, were not in the room in 1945 and have not been let in since. India has more people than any country on earth, the fourth-largest economy, nuclear weapons, and one of the biggest militaries in the world, and no permanent seat. Neither does any nation in Latin America, nor any of the fifty-four states of Africa. The arrangement the council enforces is out of date. The obvious fix is to change who sits at the table.

It will not happen. Amending the UN charter requires the agreement of all five permanent members, and each of them holds a veto over its own removal. Any seat that no longer fits the world could only be given up voluntarily, by the state sitting in it, and no state gives up a veto over the entire planet. So the most obvious reform in the world is also an impossible one. The council is not a body that refuses to change. It is one that cannot, because it was built that way on purpose.

There is also a smaller room nearby where the fifteen members meet in private, among themselves, with no cameras and no record. This is where the actual arguing and dealing happens. No press is allowed in. No outside states can sit in. By the time a resolution reaches the public chamber I was standing in, it has already been settled in there. It is the least democratic room in the building, which is probably why it isn't on the tour. The ten elected members, the ones meant to represent everyone outside the five, sit in, but the bargaining that decides things runs through the permanent five. Lately the ten have started pushing back, banding together to force votes the five would rather avoid. In June of last year they tried to break the deadlock on Gaza. The United States vetoed it. That is the ceiling on what the elected members can do: they can force the vote, and the vote is where they lose.

Outside the visitors' entrance there is a bronze revolver with its barrel tied in a knot, a gift of Luxembourg from 1988. I had walked past it on the way in without stopping. I looked at it on the way out. The knot is a nice idea. However, ever since the UN was founded in 1945, at the dawn of the nuclear age, and in the eighty years since, weapons have advanced faster than in all of human history before it. We went from the first atomic bombs to hydrogen bombs thousands of times stronger, from artillery to precision missiles and armed drones flown from another continent. The institution built to end war has presided over the fastest arms race the world has ever seen. Ironic.

You drive through or along cities, mountains, villages, coastlines, random empty fields, and there they are. Concrete reminders of a regime that once feared the outside world so deeply it physically fortified itself against it.

The best way to explain the vibe in Albania is calm. Outside Tirana there were mostly older people, quiet towns, half-empty villages, unfinished buildings, decent roads, and long stretches where the country felt caught somewhere between post-communist transition and whatever comes next.

Tirana at night felt like a different country entirely. Once the sun went down, parts of the city turned into a parade of wealth. The streets around the downtown restaurants, bars and clubs filled with traffic. Except it was not ordinary traffic. It was luxury cars everywhere. Ferraris, BMWs, G-Wagons, Lamborghinis. Men in black suits driving slowly through the city like a moving display case of power and money. Which was strange, because Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe. The countryside I had just driven through felt closer to the developing world than to the EU. So where were the Ferraris coming from? You do not have to spend long in Albania before the same answer keeps surfacing.

Albania has long carried a reputation, fair or unfair, for organized crime. That reputation has shaped both the country’s international image and parts of its post-communist economy for decades.

There was also a lot of unfinished buildings scattered throughout the country. Outside the center of Tirana, you constantly pass half-built seemingly abandoned structures. Empty developments standing in strange places with no obvious purpose. I noticed it far more than almost anywhere else I have traveled.

Albanian is also an incredibly hard language to pick up as a foreigner. After a month there, I learned nothing beyond Thank you (Faleminderit), and one word I kept seeing everywhere: “Shitet,” meaning something like “for sale.” It was written across buildings, apartments, storefronts, empty lots, everywhere.

The explanations I heard for all the strange construction varied. Some said speculation, corruption, money laundering, construction bubbles, permits frozen midway through projects. Whatever the cause, the effect on the landscape is unmistakable.

And yet, despite all of it, Albania really is beautiful.

The mountains in the north, the coastline, the towns, the Ottoman history, the Mediterranean vibes, the cafes, the Italian influence, the roads through the south. It genuinely does feel like a hidden gem. Albania’s fascinating history was probably the main reason why I wanted to go there, but I cannot lie, the travel vlogs definitely had some influence too. When travelers and YouTubers began marketing it online as Europe’s underrated destination, I understood why. Next to Croatia or Greece, it still feels less consumed and less polished.

Which is one of the main reasons why global capital is arriving now.

Places like Albania only stay “hidden gems” temporarily. Eventually the algorithms find them. Then the investors arrive. Then the luxury developments. Then the branding campaigns. Then the prices rise. Then the country slowly reorganizes itself around tourism, real estate, and foreign demand. That is the stage Albania appears to be entering now.

When I was there, Tirana did not really feel like a major capital. It felt like a medium sized city, with one upscale center. Not really the luxury towers now associated with PM Rama’s new Tirana. The transformation has been fast. Albania is being rebranded right now in real time. A capital that only a few years ago still felt almost like a provincial capital is now being pushed into the language of luxury towers, foreign architecture, investor summits, and real estate speculation.

Nothing captures that speed and what’s happening in Albania in general more sharply than what is now planned for a small island off the southern coast. It may soon become a luxury resort backed by a man who sits at the center of American political power, Gulf sovereign wealth money, and the post Abraham Accords economic order.

The island is Sazan, it sits on the Strait of Otranto, right where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet. A strategic chokepoint which passed through Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and centuries of Ottoman control before being heavily fortified by Mussolini’s Italy during the Second World War. Under communist Albania, the island was transformed into one of the regime’s most secret military bases, covered with roughly 3,600 bunkers, underground command infrastructure, ammunition depots, bomb shelters, Soviet-installed naval infrastructure and roughly ten miles of fortified tunnels connecting military positions carved through the rock.

Now, decades later, the same island is being recommissioned as a luxury destination for globally mobile elites (or so they say).

that transformation is not accidental.

The public story of how Trump’s son in law and daughter, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump first became interested in Sazan almost sounds like travel content.

According to Ivanka, they were on a friend’s yacht in the Mediterranean, stopped for a swim, “found” the island, swam ashore, hiked around barefoot, and became fascinated by the place. Coming from her, it sounded like a story about discovery, beauty, architecture, conservation, and long-term vision. (It’s hard to imagine the “barefoot hike” was quite as spontaneous as it sounds or even possible, considering the island is filled with bunkers, tunnels, snakes, undetonated mines and abandoned military infrastructure.)

Kushner mentioned at the FII PRIORITY summit in Tirana, speaking by video call, that the yacht belonged to Nat Rothschild, which honestly tells you everything you need to know about the world this project is emerging from.

Kushner also mentioned that he first met Prime Minister Edi Rama aboard that same yacht in the summer of 2021 and came away impressed by Rama’s vision for transforming Albania. He explained that about a year later, while actively searching for investment opportunities in the Balkans, he remembered the trip, looked more seriously at Albania, and became especially interested after learning that a major international airport was already being developed near Vlorë. (This interview took place last May, a full year before Ivanka came out telling the barefoot-discovery version. Someone should have told her that her husband had already given away the real timeline.)

So now, the question is not whether Kushner and Ivanka liked the island. Albania is beautiful. Lots of people would. The question is how a swim and a supposed barefoot hike or some chance encounter at sea on a yacht with a Prime Minister of a nation, became a billion-dollar strategic investment on protected coastal land, with government backing, in one of the most sensitive environmental zones in the country.

Vacations do not usually end in reclassified national parkland.

who is jared kushner?

The project is tied to Jared Kushner, founder and managing partner of Affinity Partners, former White House senior adviser, and current United States Special Envoy for Peace Missions. Few individuals sit at the intersection of American political power, Gulf money, Israeli leadership, diplomacy, and global real estate the way Kushner does.

During Donald Trump’s first administration, Kushner helped oversee the Abraham Accords and the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. In Trump’s second administration, he has returned as one of the president’s most trusted diplomatic advisers, participating in negotiations involving Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, and broader Middle East peace efforts while simultaneously leading an investment firm backed by billions from Saudi, Qatari and Emirati sovereign wealth funds. This combination of political influence, diplomatic access, and financial capital is what makes the Albania project more than a simple real-estate deal.

The project represents the arrival of a specific type of globally connected capital into Albania, capital that moves through political relationships, sovereign wealth funds, elite investment networks, and personal connections stretching across Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Riyadh, Dubai, Doha and beyond.

The same post-Abraham Accords political world that promised prosperity through normalization and investment is now expressing itself physically and extending far beyond the Middle East itself.

Albania has maintained relations with Israel for decades, so this is not some sudden geopolitical realignment. But the country can still be used as an example of what happens when a Muslim-majority nation with good relations with Israel becomes attractive to this network of capital. Kushner arrives, and suddenly “development” follows.

To be precise about the footprint, this is really two separate developments. There is the roughly $1.6 billion “Sazan Island Touristic Resort,” granted strategic investor status by Albania’s Strategic Investment Committee on December 30, 2024. Sazan is currently uninhabited. Parts of the island remain under military control and it receives occasional tourists and guided visits.

Then there is the much larger mainland $4.7billion component near Zvërnec and the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape, north of the city of Vlorë. Unlike Sazan, this is not an empty island. The broader area includes villages, local residents, fishing communities, agricultural land, and growing tourism activity. It is also one of Albania’s most ecologically sensitive coastal regions, home to flamingos, pelicans, sea turtles, and hundreds of migratory bird species. This land was legally protected until the government decided it shouldn't be. In 2024, Albania amended its law on protected areas and redrew the boundaries, quietly lifting protection from the exact stretches now slated for development

The island is the headline because the symbolism is impossible to miss. A rich, politically connected American investor, with deep ties to Israel, trying to develop a private luxury resort on a bunker island. (At a time when the world is still processing the scandals tied to a certain wealthy and connected man and his private island.) But the coastline is where the real transformation is happening.

who is edi rama?

Rama presents himself as a modernizer. Before becoming prime minister in 2013, he was a painter and a professional basketball player, then mayor of Tirana, where he made his name ordering the city’s drab communist apartment blocks repainted in bright colors. He has always understood politics visually through image, surface, the look of a thing and as prime minister he scaled that instinct up from paint to concrete. He speaks the language of Davos and the investment-forum circuit. It’s always innovation, integration, growth. That seems to be what attracted Kushner to him. At the FII summit, Kushner said he was struck by Rama’s background as an artist and found it interesting to imagine what a country could look like when led and built by an artist, someone like Rama.

Tirana is the showcase. The low-rise communist city he started with is now studded with towers, many designed by international star architects he handpicks himself and gathers for festivals, almost like a curated collection rather than a market responding to need. A luxury-apartment market that barely existed a few years ago now sells units before they are built, largely to Albanians living abroad, at prices that have roughly tripled and even people inside the industry call it a bubble. Developers pitch the city as the next Monaco. The Albanian Riviera, meanwhile, is marketed online as Europe’s last hidden paradise.

To supporters, this is modernization and to many Albanians, understandably, the alternative to Rama feels worse. Young people were leaving anyway. If tourism, foreign capital, and luxury development can raise incomes and pull Albania closer to Western Europe, many are willing to accept the tradeoff.

But modernization for who?

Because there is a difference between building a sovereign economy and packaging a country for consumption. A sovereign economy develops productive power like industry, engineering, technology, energy, scientific capacity, manufacturing, food security, and pathways for citizens to build wealth themselves. A packaged economy sells experiences. It sells coastline. It sells cheap labor. It sells tourism. It sells “hidden gem” branding. It sells residency permits, passports and apartments to foreigners. It sells luxury access to outsiders. It sells the country itself as a platform. And eventually, the population becomes economically dependent on serving people wealthier than themselves.

Roughly 2.2 million Albanian citizens, nearly half of all Albanians, already live abroad, one of the highest emigration ratios on earth. Rama frames developments like this as a way to draw them home, to give the diaspora a reason to return and invest. Maybe. But the only time Albanians have come back in large numbers was during the 2008 crisis, when Greece and Italy cratered and going home briefly made more sense than staying. It was a return driven by the West's collapse, not Albania's success. The flow since has reversed back the other way.

A luxury resort priced for foreigners is not the thing that will reverse the reversal. Neither are the luxury apartments. The diaspora can buy them, and many do, as investments, but owning a flat in Tirana is not the same as moving back to it. The reason they left was that Albania could not offer the wages or the careers the West could. A holiday apartment does not change that. You can hold the keys to a place on the new skyline and still have to fly back to Germany to actually earn a living, because the economy underneath the towers still has no room for you. So the apartment becomes one more asset bought with money made abroad, which is just another problem, not a solution to anything.

there isn't much underneath the tourism.

Albania's economy is thin under the tourism. The sector now makes up roughly a quarter of it, and what holds up the rest is not the kind of thing that builds a country. There is no major industrial engine capable of carrying the economy. The economy leans on remittances sent home from abroad, alongside construction, some farming, mining, and low-wage service work, garment assembly stitched for Italian fashion brands, call centers answering phones for companies in Milan and Rome. It is an economy that mostly serves other people’s economies.

None of this is an argument against tourism, or against foreign investment. Tourism is not the problem. Depending on it is. In a healthy economy, tourism is a complement, it sits on top of something that actually produces and adds to it, rather than holding the whole thing up. And this has nothing to do with size. Slovenia is smaller than Albania and gets plenty of tourists, but it also kept its industry and makes pharmaceuticals and machinery. Estonia is tiny and built a technology economy from almost nothing. For both, the visitors are a bonus, not the foundation. Small countries can absolutely diversify. They just have to choose to.

Albania is leaning the other way. The sensible move from here would be to diversify, to build the productive base the country never really had, so tourism becomes one income stream among several instead of the whole bet. The Kushner model does the opposite. It doubles down on the one thing Albania already over-relies on, and spends the country's most valuable asset, its coastline, to make that dependence permanent.

And in a country leaning this hard on outside money and visitors, foreign approval starts to matter more than it should. The government chases rankings, investor conferences, travel lists, influencers, international branding. The country starts seeing itself through the eyes of outsiders, and at some point even the leadership begins behaving like a marketing department.

When the streamer IShowSpeed visited Albania, he met with Rama himself. No disrespect to Speed, he is massively influential online, but it is worth asking why the leader of a country is spending time meeting internet entertainers in the first place. The answer is that visibility has become economic strategy. Attention itself becomes infrastructure, virality is political because global perception directly affects investment, travel, and foreign money flows.

The country begins competing not only for capital, but for online relevance.

albania has experienced massive emigration for decades.

In 2025 alone, the country recorded a net migration loss of roughly 28,500 people, meaning more Albanians left permanently or for extended periods than returned or settled in the country. The population has now fallen to around 2.33 million.

The outflow disproportionately affects younger generations and includes educated professionals seeking opportunities elsewhere. The average age of the country is now 45. Huge numbers of young Albanians continue leaving for Germany, Italy, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. Many skilled workers simply do not believe they can build stable futures at home.

The answer Rama offers to all of it is the same single word: Europe.

EU accession is the great project of his politics and he pursues it with something closer to devotion than strategy. “We are fanatics. We are not like the others. We are the fanatics of the EU faith,” he told Euronews. For Albania, he added, there is “no Plan B, there is no alternative, there’s nothing.”

There is no alternative, because Rama won't allow one to exist. Everything he chases is about how Albania looks from the outside. None of it touches what is actually driving people out: an economy with no real base and no careers that pay.

Rama approaches politics the way an artist approaches a canvas. The image comes first. The skyline. The branding. The spectacle. The way the country appears from a drone shot, an architecture render, an investment summit, a travel vlog. Meanwhile the country underneath the picture he is painting keeps emptying out.

protests began last month in the coastal villages slated for development,

Heavy machinery and barbed-wire fencing arrived at the site, and within weeks the anger had spread to the capital. Thousands gathered in Tirana, many outside Rama’s office, holding inflatable flamingoes, a reference to the threatened lagoon, and signs reading “CANCEL THE PROJECT,” “ALBANIA IS NOT FOR SALE,” and “I DON’T WANT ALBANIA LIKE DUBAI.”

A lot of foreigners, especially Americans, assume the backlash is about Trump and Kushner. It isn’t. Albania is one of the most pro-American countries in the world. Many Albanians see the United States as an ally, tied to NATO, to Kosovo, to the support that came after communism and during the Yugoslav wars. Anti-Americanism has never been a real force in Albanian politics.

What Albania does have is a long memory of being looted by its own political class. In the 1990s, pyramid schemes swallowed people’s savings and pushed the country into near-collapse. Since then, corruption, organized crime, patronage, rigged privatizations, and shady construction have been permanent features of public life.

So when Albanians see protected land reclassified, public access fenced off, politically connected investors welcomed, and billions promised through back channels, they recognize the pattern. A country that has been cheated before is being told, once again, to trust the people managing the deal. The anger is not that the buyers are American. It is that the state appears willing to reshape parts of the country around powerful outside capital first and ask the public to trust the process afterward.

And the model it is reshaping the country around has a name. Dubai runs on imported labor: a small, oil-rich citizenry that owns and is served, while the cooking, cleaning, building, and driving are done by millions of foreign workers kept on cheap, temporary, near-rightless terms. It is an ugly arrangement, but it holds together for one reason. Oil made the citizens rich enough to sit on top of it. Emiratis do not wait the tables. The lower-status labor is outsourced to people from somewhere else.

Albania is copying that arrangement without the part that makes people tolerate it. Be honest: most people, if given the choice, would probably take the Emirati deal. Set the ethics aside and the citizen sits at the top of an extraordinarily wealthy system. Oil wealth, subsidies, state benefits, high incomes, almost no taxes. The entire structure is designed so the Emirati citizen profits from the machine even if migrant labor carries much of it on its back.

But what exactly is Rama’s version offering Albanians? Even if everything works exactly as promised, Albania does not become Dubai. It becomes a poorer country reorganized around serving wealthier outsiders. The coastline fills with villas, resorts, marinas, and investment properties priced for rich foreigners, while the actual work falls either to Albanians themselves or to imported labor from even poorer countries.

Facing a labor shortage created by its own emigration, Albania has begun importing workers from the Philippines, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Egypt to fill its hotels and resorts.

This is how it works for a developing country stuck in the middle of the ladder. The rich countries at the top only receive; the poorest at the bottom only send. Everyone in between does both at once, exporting its people upward and importing cheaper hands from below to replace them. Albanians leave for Germany to do the work Germans have moved up from, and Filipinos and Bangladeshis arrive to do the work Albanians have left behind. Albania has settled comfortably into its rung instead of trying to move up it, and selling the coast to foreign capital is how you stay there for good.

Rama’s whole approach looks like a bet. Build a Dubai of Europe, a coastline glittering with Gulf money and Trump-branded resorts, and the spectacle speaks for itself. Make the result dazzling enough and Brussels has to let him in, the rezoning and the fast-tracking forgiven as the price of a success story. And if a deal of this magnitude goes through, the precedent is set: everything is for sale on these terms, as long as it can be called “investment.”

Don’t clean up how the deals get done, just make them shine so bright nobody looks too closely. The flaw in the plan was the partner. Rama has always loved a spectacle, and for years it worked. But this time he chose to make one with the most watched, most scrutinized family on earth, and a spectacle built around the Trumps is not one anybody looks away from.

rama has not responded like a leader trying to calm a country down.

He has responded like a man defending an investment pitch.

He has refused to halt the process, framing the project as a historic opportunity to push Albania into a higher class of Mediterranean tourism. In one interview, he argued that Albania is facing a “hybrid war,” claiming that bots, fake profiles, hostile outside forces, and anti-development actors are exploiting environmental concerns and Albania’s relationship with Israel to attack the project.

Notice what Rama reached for. Defending a project that critics attack on environmental, land, and corruption grounds, he volunteered a denial of something the Albanian protesters were not even saying, that this is a secret deal with Bibi Netanyahu to resettle Palestinians on the Albanian coast. He called the idea a “total fantasy.” Maybe it is. But nobody marching with inflatable flamingoes was asking about Palestinians.

That is a tell. When the people in the street are worried about a lagoon and a no-bid land reclassification, and the prime minister answers by swatting down something unrelated, he is showing you which connection he is most anxious about.

who is the new albania being built for?

Rama also insists there is no final project to cancel yet. "There is no project yet," he says, only "a vision and a plan." The final proposal, he told parliament, has not even been submitted, and the environmental study is not finished. According to him, the development is still being worked on by major international architecture studios and will eventually be presented publicly. He has described the goal as creating an exclusive and environmentally responsible destination, not simply pouring concrete over the coast.

But that is suspicious. If there is no final project, why has the political commitment already sounded so absolute? What exactly was he discussing with Jared Kushner on Nat Rothschild's yacht five years ago? And why does the playbook already look familiar? Because the same government built Vlorë airport by starting construction inside the protected Vjosa-Narta landscape in 2021 and then redrawing the boundary to cut the site out of the protected zone afterward. Conservationists who visited the coast in early May reported excavators already digging up the beach and trucks laying gravel. There is no project, Rama says, only the heavy machinery is already on the sand.

Defending the development, Rama said it was vital that Albania not receive “the stigma of being a country where investors are met with hostility,” adding that “there is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here.” That sentence reveals the hierarchy clearly. Investment first. Questions later.

(In a CNN interview about the project, Rama grew visibly irritated under questioning, at one point snapping “let me finish” and “what’s wrong with you?” at the host, defending the development as a misunderstood opportunity rather than engaging the actual concerns.)

you can tell that it is getting to him.

The protests have not died down. What began in two coastal villages is now well into its second week in the capital, and the chants have changed. The crowds outside Rama’s office are no longer only asking him just to cancel the project. They are asking him to go. And this is not the opposition’s doing, the traditional parties have been sidelined, the demonstrators are jeering Rama and his old rivals alike, a whole political class rejected at once. They have a name for it now, the Flamingo Revolution. That is the kind of anger a government cannot simply wait out.

So he keeps explaining himself, appearance after appearance, insisting it is all a misunderstanding. At one point, in a Euronews interview, he said the quiet part aloud. Asked about the resort, he began to describe it as an elite enclave built on land that belongs to the Albanian people, then stopped and corrected himself: the land, he said, "belongs to the investors." They had bought it. For a man who built his entire career on controlling the image, it was a remarkable thing to say to a country marching under the slogan that Albania is not for sale.

The pressure has come from every direction at once. SPAK, the anti-corruption prosecutors, opened an investigation into how the land was reclassified and froze the accounts of one of the companies that bought up the Zvërnec beachfront. No wrongdoing has been proven, and the inquiry is an examination of process, not a verdict.

But notice how Rama has positioned himself. He backs the investigation, but only one half of it. Freezing money headed to the local sellers under suspicion is "welcome," he says, but blocking the transaction itself is "arbitrary and negative," because "the investors are within their rights." In other words: investigate the middlemen, protect the deal. He is not trying to stop the probe. He is trying to aim it, away from the project and toward the people who sold the land, so that some corruption can be exposed and the resort can still go ahead.

Let’s be real, though, a domestic watchdog in a country with Albania’s record is not what keeps a man like Rama up at night. What rattled him came from the one direction he could not dismiss. Not the protesters, whom he waved away as a hybrid war. Not the prosecutors he has outlasted before. But Brussels. On June 9th, the European Commission warned that the project could breach EU environmental law and put Albania’s accession, the thing Rama calls his life’s work, at risk, telling Tirana to “act without delay.”

That same day, the government that had sworn the investment would never stop announced it was suspending the project pending an environmental review. The man who said there was “absolutely no chance” it would halt while he was in charge had blinked. And what made him blink was not his own people in the street, not the bad viral PR, It was the club he is desperate to join, telling him this deal might keep him out.

The crazy and funny thing is that the bet Rama made, was almost working. The deal was moving exactly the way it was supposed to: quietly. Strategic-investor status granted, the protected map redrawn, the whole thing labeled "investment" and going through just as planned.

What blew it open was Ivanka Trump, going on a podcast to describe how she and Jared had “discovered” the island, swum ashore, hiked it barefoot, fallen in love with the view, narrating the acquisition of a protected Albanian island as a charming holiday anecdote. That tone-deaf little story is what turned a quiet local deal into a global scandal. The whole world looked, and what it saw flattered no one.

Rama knows it, too. "If it was not Jared, they would not give a shit about what is happening in Albania," he complained to Politico. He meant it as a grievance, that the world only cares because a Trump is involved. But it is also a confession. And the bitter part is that he is right: nobody outside Albania was ever going to care about another murky Albanian land deal. Corruption in Albania is a local story. Jared and Ivanka is a global one. By attaching the island and the coast to them, Rama borrowed the world's attention, and the same attention that was supposed to make the project shine is what dragged it into the light. The partner who was meant to make it dazzling is the reason nobody looked away.

So the great image-maker is left managing the worst image of his career. He once painted Tirana’s grey communist blocks in bright colors to change how the country looked. He cannot paint over this. And the cruelest part, for a man this careful, is who exposed him in the end. Not an enemy. His own partners, too rich and too far from the ground to understand that narrating the purchase of a country as a barefoot swim was the one thing guaranteed to make the world watch.

That recovery narrative continued in stages. On February 1, a Sudan Airways flight from Port Sudan brought roughly 160 passengers to Khartoum, the first scheduled commercial flight since the war began, though still a domestic one. On April 28, a Kuwait Airways flight arrived from Kuwait with about 300 passengers, marking the first direct international commercial arrival in years. For the army-led government, these flights were proof that the capital was reconnecting to the country and then to the outside world.

The is why the drone strikes earlier this month are alarming, not because Khartoum airport had never been targeted before. It had. Not because the RSF had never used drones to disrupt the army’s recovery narrative. It had. The real shift is that Sudan is now accusing Ethiopia, which is a neighboring state and one of the Horn of Africa’s central powers, of serving as the launchpad.

On May 4, drones struck Khartoum airport, military areas and residential areas in Khartoum and Omdurman. The next day, Sudan formally accused Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates of involvement, claimed the drones had been launched from Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport, described the assault as direct aggression, recalled its ambassador from Addis Ababa, and suspended airport operations for 72 hours. On May 6, Ethiopia rejected the accusations as baseless, the UAE called them unfounded propaganda, and Ethiopia counter-accused the SAF of arming TPLF “mercenaries”.

The UAE’s role in Sudan has been discussed for years. I’ve written about it. Sudanese officials, UN experts, rights groups, journalists, and analysts have all pointed in the same direction: the RSF’s war effort has not survived on local looting and battlefield improvisation alone. It has depended on external money, weapons, logistics, and regional access. The UAE denies arming the RSF, but the allegation is now central to how Sudan’s war is understood.

The Africa Review

The U.A.E.’s Covert Role in Sudan’s Civil War

While claiming neutrality, the United Arab Emirates quietly armed a militia accused of atrocities and profited from the conflict…

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a year ago · 92 likes · 2 comments · The Africa Review

Ethiopia is different. The UAE is a power operating at a distance. Ethiopia is Sudan’s neighbor and they share a long border. It has its own unresolved disputes with Khartoum over land, water, refugees, insurgent movements, and the balance of power in the region. If Sudan’s claim is accurate, then the war is no longer only a civil war with foreign sponsors. It is beginning to look like a proxy conflict involving two of the Horn of Africa/Red Sea’s largest states.

A formal Ethiopia-Sudan war is not inevitable. But the line between Sudan’s internal conflict and the region’s state rivalries is getting thinner.

I argued last May that Sudan had become a template for a new kind of empire. One that is less about formal colonies and more about logistics, ports, militias, drones, gold routes, airstrips, political clients, and deniable violence. That was the deeper story beneath the RSF’s war. Sudan was being pulled apart by a system that rewarded fragmentation. The latest accusation against Ethiopia fits directly into that system.

According to Sudan’s military spokesperson, the army has evidence of several drone attacks since March 1 originated from Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport and involved UAE-supplied drones. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry denied the claim and, in turn, accused Sudan of supporting hostile forces, including Tigrayan rebels. The exchange reveals how both governments now see the battlefield.

From Addis Ababa’s perspective, Sudan’s war is a security problem on Ethiopia’s western flank. The SAF is aligned with Egypt, the country challenging Ethiopia over the GERD, and Eritrea, the country Abiy’s government increasingly sees as a hostile actor on its northern border. From the Ethiopian point of view, the fear is not imaginary: if the SAF consolidates power with Egyptian and Eritrean backing, Ethiopia could face pressure from the west and the north at the same time.

In February, I mapped the emerging regional alignment around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and Sudan’s war: UAE, Ethiopia, Israel, Somaliland and the RSF on one side; Egypt, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan’s army on the other. Turkey sits awkwardly around this alignment: close to Somalia, increasingly active in Sudan, and too independent to fit neatly into either camp.

That was not a neat alliance system. These states do not all agree with one another. Some barely trust one another. But their interests were beginning to line up around the same pressure points like the Nile, the Red Sea, Bab Al Mandeb Strait, Sudan’s future, Somaliland, Ethiopia’s rise, Egypt’s anxiety, Eritrea’s fear of Ethiopian expansion, and the UAE’s desire to control strategic corridors from the Gulf to Africa.

The drone accusation makes that alignment harder to dismiss. If the attacks did originate from Ethiopian territory, then the UAE-Ethiopia-RSF axis becomes a possible operational reality. Drones do not fly themselves across borders. They require launch sites, permissions, air corridors, intelligence, fuel, technicians, or at minimum a state unwilling or unable to stop its territory from being used. That leaves two possible explanations, and neither is reassuring.

Either Ethiopia actively allowed its territory to be used in attacks on Sudan, or it is too weak, fragmented, or compromised to prevent foreign-backed military activity from operating through its own airports. One explanation points to policy. The other points to loss of control. Either explanation would put Addis Ababa under serious scrutiny.

There is another reason this matters. Sudan and Ethiopia are not minor conflicts sitting at the edge of the international system. They are two of the worst war zones of the last few years. The Tigray war killed vast numbers of people, with estimates ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to as high as 600,000. Sudan’s war has also killed vast numbers of people, with estimates running well into the hundreds of thousands, displaced more than 13 million people, produced famine conditions, and turned cities and markets into battlefields. Both conflicts are treated as separate crises. Ethiopia as a troubled but still functioning state, Sudan as a collapsed neighbor. That separation could be becoming harder to sustain. The Sudan-Ethiopia dynamic now looks like a cross-border proxy system: both governments are fighting internal enemies, and both suspect the other of helping those enemies.

The sad part is that both countries may be telling the truth. Sudan has real reasons to believe Ethiopia is giving the RSF strategic depth through the UAE-linked networks now surrounding the war. Ethiopia, in turn, has real reasons to believe the SAF is leaning into ties with it’s enemies. The SAF has deepened ties with Ethiopia’s adversaries in Tigray and Eritrea, while on Ethiopia’s side, the key link is its relationship with the UAE, alleged RSF logistics, and historical relationships with armed actors near Sudan’s border, including the SPLM-N faction led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, which is aligned with the RSF and active around the Blue Nile State frontier.

That is a real danger. Not simply that Sudan’s war expands outward, but that Sudan’s war and Ethiopia’s unresolved internal conflicts begin to overlap. If that happens, the region is no longer dealing with one civil war next to another unstable state. It is dealing with the possible merger of two mass-casualty conflict systems into a single regional battlefield.

the place to watch is blue nile state.

Blue Nile sits in southeastern Sudan, directly along the border with Ethiopia and South Sudan. It borders Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region, the same region that hosts the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and it connects Sudan’s southeast to routes leading north toward Sennar, Gezira, and eventually Khartoum.

For much of the war, Blue Nile was relatively quiet compared with Khartoum or Darfur. That has started to change. Sudan is also accusing Ethiopia of allowing the RSF and its allies to use Ethiopian territory bordering Blue Nile State as rear depth. Those claims are still denied by Addis Ababa, but the fighting is largely happening exactly where SAF says the problem is. Reuters has reported that Ethiopia hosted a camp in Benishangul-Gumuz to train thousands of RSF fighters, with alleged UAE financing and logistical support, and that Asosa airport had been upgraded with infrastructure consistent with drone operations. This is why Sudan’s accusation cannot be treated as just another diplomatic spat.

the rsf’s supply network has never depended on one route.

Sudanese officials and outside observers have pointed to networks running through Chad, the Central African Republic, Libya, South Sudan, and maritime corridors connected to the UAE. I’ve previously written about how Chad and CAR as part of the RSF supply line. The Sudanese army has also accused similar drone-linked activity around Bosaso in Somalia, suggesting that the war’s logistics have stretched from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden into the Sahelian interior. Ethiopia’s naming extends that map.

But Ethiopia is not just another route on that list. Chad and Libya feed the war from Sudan’s far west, through Darfur and the desert corridors. Somalia is not that close to Sudan. The Ethiopian frontier sits much closer to Sudan’s central and eastern core and the routes lead toward Khartoum. That means an Ethiopian route brings the war closer to Sudan’s agricultural heartland, population centers, and state infrastructure.

so why now?

The first reason is military momentum. The Sudanese army has regained ground since 2025. That changed the political atmosphere around the war. The RSF’s early image as brutal, mobile, terrifying, and seemingly unstoppable has been damaged. The army has been able to present itself as the side restoring the capital, reopening roads, reviving airports, and returning state authority. Even limited recovery matters in a war of narratives.

But momentum does not mean consolidation. Sudan is increasingly becoming a checkerboard rather than a two-sided battlefield. The SAF may hold the north, east, and much of the center, while the RSF and allied forces remain entrenched in Darfur and parts of the south and southeast. The country is not simply moving toward victory by one side. It is drifting toward de facto partition.

The second reason is Ethiopia’s own pressure. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is governing a country that has never fully stabilized after the Tigray war. The Pretoria agreement ended one phase of fighting, but it did not produce a durable national settlement. Tigray remains politically fractured, and the possibility of renewed fighting there now hangs over the region. The Amhara region has been consumed by conflict with Fano militias. Oromia remains unstable. Ethiopia’s quest for sea access has alienated and sharpened tensions with Somalia and Eritrea.

For Abiy, the RSF and its allies may offer a way to create breathing room along Ethiopia’s western frontier. Not only for GERD but also for stopping Sudan from becoming a pipeline for weapons, fighters, and political support into Ethiopia’s own conflicts. The RSF has its own reasons to see Tigrayan forces as hostile, since Ethiopia and RSF-aligned readings of the war increasingly place TPLF-linked fighters on the SAF side of the conflict. So if the UAE-backed RSF weakens SAF-controlled border areas, Addis Ababa may see that as useful, even if it never says so openly.

Ethiopia does not need to invade Sudan for the two wars to begin merging. If Tigrayan or Amhara fighters, SAF-aligned networks, Eritrean-backed forces, RSF units, or eastern Sudanese militias begin moving across these borderlands with greater purpose, Sudan’s civil war will become entangled with Ethiopia’s unfinished wars. What looks like two separate conflicts on a map can become one chain reaction of proxy ties, ethnic border communities, rebel units, and state patrons pulling each other into the same battlefield.

This is also where Abiy Ahmed’s broader regional posture becomes relevant. Ethiopia is pushing for Red Sea access and managing renewed tensions with Eritrea. That does not mean Addis Ababa is acting irrationally. From an Ethiopian strategic perspective, a weakened SAF is less able to coordinate with Cairo and Asmara against Ethiopia over the Nile and the Red Sea. But it does mean Ethiopia may be attempting regional leverage from a position of internal fragility. That is a dangerous combination.

the uae is not just another foreign partner to addis ababa.

It has been one of the central external pillars of Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia from the beginning. In 2018, shortly after Abiy came to power, the UAE pledged $3 billion in aid and investment to Ethiopia, including a $1 billion deposit into the National Bank of Ethiopia to ease a severe foreign-currency shortage. That was not ordinary development finance. It was fast Emirati statecraft: direct, political, and binding.

By the end of 2022, UAE investment in Ethiopia had reportedly reached about $2.9 billion across more than 100 projects, and the relationship has since expanded through trade, energy commitments, security cooperation, and financial instruments. In July 2024, the two countries signed a currency swap agreement worth up to roughly $817 million, giving Ethiopia another buffer against its chronic hard-currency problem.

During the Tigray war, Emirati drone support was widely reported as part of the military balance that helped Abiy’s government survive one of its most dangerous periods. More recently, that relationship has moved beyond money and drones into police training, cybercrime cooperation, VIP security, counterterrorism, and defense ties. Ethiopia’s relationship with the UAE is therefore not simply diplomatic. It is financial, military, technological, and political. It is tied to Abiy’s economic survival, his security architecture, and the regional strategy that followed.

None of this proves Ethiopia helped launch drones into Sudan. It does explain why Sudan’s accusation has strategic logic. If Addis Ababa has grown dependent on Emirati security ties, and if the UAE sees Sudan as a central front in its regional project, then Ethiopia becomes a plausible platform.

The third reason is the UAE’s own position. The UAE has been losing the public-relations battle over Sudan. Its denials have not erased the growing body of reporting, diplomacy, and Sudanese accusations linking it to the RSF. The more the RSF is associated with atrocities, looting, ethnic violence, and the destruction of Sudanese cities, the more toxic that relationship becomes.

This is where deniability becomes useful. A drone launched from Emirati territory would be absurd. A drone supplied through Emirati-linked networks, moved through third countries, launched from an African state such as Ethiopia, Libya, or Somalia, and then attributed to the RSF is the logic of modern proxy war. Nobody fully owns the violence. The sponsor can deny it. The host state can deny it. The militia can absorb the blame. The fog benefits the actors most invested in deniability.

Sudan’s accusation against Ethiopia is not yet independently proven in the public record. Governments use external enemies to explain internal weakness, and wartime claims need evidence. But the broader pattern is familiar: move the tools through regional corridors, launch from somewhere plausibly deniable, and force everyone else to prove what the architecture already suggests.

what will egypt do if it believes ethiopia has entered sudan’s war.

Cairo has already signaled where it stands, condemning attacks launched from the territory of a neighboring country as a violation of Sudanese sovereignty. Saudi Arabia used similar language, calling on Sudan’s neighbors not to let their territory become a launchpad for attacks. Neither statement needed to name Ethiopia directly for the message to be understood.

Cairo has every reason to see this through the lens of encirclement. Egypt has historically treated Sudan as part of its natural sphere of influence, not simply as a neighboring state. The Nile runs through both countries and their militaries, intelligence services, borders, and political histories are deeply entangled. Sudan is supposed to be the strategic depth that protects Egypt’s southern flank. Instead, Sudan has become a battlefield where Ethiopia, the UAE, and the RSF can pressure Egyptian interests from below.

That is especially dangerous because Egypt is powerful, but strategically constrained. They have a large military, a huge population, the Suez Canal, and major diplomatic weight. But it lacks the financial depth, commercial networks, deniable logistics, and indigenous defense-industrial ecosystem that allow the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey to project influence more flexibly. So Egypt is left making mostly defensive moves like deepening ties with Eritrea, expanding cooperation with Somalia and Djibouti, backing the SAF, issuing statements on Sudanese sovereignty, striking RSF supply routes, and applying diplomatic pressure about the GERD. It’s something but it’s limited. They can slow the UAE-RSF network down, but they do not give Cairo the same freedom to shape the battlefield that Abu Dhabi has built through money, logistics, and proxies.

Egypt has recently become more active, offensively. In February, Reuters reported that Turkish-made Bayraktar Akinci drones had been deployed to Egypt’s East Oweinat airbase near the Sudanese border. The New York Times also reported that Akinci drones were operating from southwestern Egypt and striking RSF convoys in western Sudan, with Egyptian officials saying Cairo’s position had hardened after the fall of El Fasher. Egypt and Saudi pressure, tighter airspace access, scrutiny on Haftar’s Libya route, and the heat around Chad have all made the old UAE-to-RSF pipeline through Libya and Chad more costly.

Chad can be pressured. Libya has been Balkanized. Ethiopia is different. It is a major Horn of Africa state with more than 120 million people, has a large army, controls the GERD, and has serious regional weight. That means it can absorb more outside criticism than a smaller transit country and still maneuver freely. That makes it harder to pressure, and more useful to Abu Dhabi, as other RSF supply routes become more visible and politically costly.

In February, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan met Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa. Officially, it was a standard diplomatic meeting about bilateral and regional issues. But the fact that nothing publicly shifted afterward is the point. Saudi Arabia does not appear to have much leverage over Ethiopia on this file. Abiy had little reason to distance himself from Abu Dhabi, because the UAE relationship is central to Ethiopia’s money, security, and regional strategy.

With Emirati money, security ties, drones, trade, and political cover behind it, Addis Ababa can push outward even while it is under severe internal pressure. Egypt, by contrast, is tied to the UAE in a very different way. Abu Dhabi was one of the outside powers that helped stabilize the post-2013 order with Gulf aid, deposits, fuel support, and political backing. A decade later, Egypt’s foreign-currency crises and deals like Ras El Hekma show how much Cairo still depends on Emirati capital. The UAE appears to benefit from a stronger, more assertive Ethiopia, while also benefiting from Egypt remaining financially dependent and strategically cautious.

Saudi Arabia shares some of Egypt’s concerns in Sudan, especially when it comes to limiting UAE influence, protecting Red Sea stability, and preventing the RSF from becoming the dominant force. But Riyadh is still a state that moves like a state. Slowly, cautiously, and only when Sudan intersects with Saudi priorities. Egypt may want faster backing, but Saudi Arabia is not Cairo’s patron or its instrument. It will move when the issue affects Saudi interests too like competition with Abu Dhabi, the future of the Red Sea, Sudanese state collapse, or the RSF becoming too powerful. That gives Egypt a useful partner, but not a force multiplier it can command.

Ethiopia’s relationship with the UAE works differently. Addis Ababa does not command Abu Dhabi either, but it does not need to. The UAE’s own regional project already benefits from a stronger, more assertive Ethiopia. Egypt gets selective Saudi support when interests overlap. Ethiopia gets Emirati backing that actively expands its room to maneuver. That is what makes the UAE’s role in Sudan humiliating for Egypt. One of the countries Cairo relies on financially is also helping shape a battlefield Cairo considers part of its own security depth.

what can happen next?

Sudan’s war and Ethiopia’s internal conflicts are already starting to feed into each other. The next stage would be worse: the crisis would no longer stay mostly inside Sudan and Ethiopia. Eritrea could be pulled in from the north. Somalia, Somaliland, and Djibouti could become part of it. South Sudan could be drawn in from the southwest. Egypt would be pulled in through the Nile.

Cairo already sees the GERD as a threat to Egypt’s survival. That does not mean Egypt is likely to enter the war directly. A direct war with Ethiopia would be enormously risky. The more realistic danger is that Cairo decides a hotter Sudan-Ethiopia front is strategically useful: a way to pressure Addis Ababa, keep Ethiopia stretched, and protect Egypt’s position on the Nile without formally going to war. That would still be dangerous. Once a state starts seeing another country’s war as useful leverage, it has an incentive to fan the flames rather than contain them.

There are now a few things to watch. Does Sudan produce drone wreckage, flight data, or other evidence tying the attacks to Bahir Dar or Asosa? Does commercial satellite imagery show new activity around Ethiopian airfields near the Sudanese border? Does Egypt move beyond diplomatic language and deepen military coordination with Eritrea, Somalia, or the SAF? Does fighting in Blue Nile push closer to Sennar, or Benishangul Gumuz? On May 23, the Sudanese army said it had shot down another hostile drone near Ed Damazin after it crossed into Blue Nile from the direction of Ethiopia. That claim is not independent proof of the entire Sudanese case, but it lands exactly in the corridor this piece is tracking.

Sudan’s war began as an internal struggle between two armed factions fighting over the state. It has since become a regional conflict in which Sudan is the battlefield, the UAE is accused of supplying the tools, Ethiopia is accused of providing the launchpad, and Egypt is forced to watch a war inside what it has long considered its own strategic depth.

Sudan has accused neighboring states before. That alone is not new. What is new is the country being named. Ethiopia is not a distant transit point or a weak, insignificant border state on the edge of the war like Chad. It is a large populous country, Egypt’s Nile rival, the host of the GERD, one of the central powers in the Horn of Africa, and a state already dealing with deep internal conflicts of its own. If Sudan is accusing Ethiopia of being the launchpad, then the war is no longer just about UAE money or RSF supply routes. It is about one major Horn of Africa/Red Sea state accusing another of helping attack its capital. That is what makes this different.

The idea of Uganda going up against Iran doesn’t just sound unrealistic, it falls apart immediately under very basic scrutiny.

Uganda has no navy, no long-range airlift, and no ability to sustain operations thousands of miles away in one of the most militarized regions in the world. Its defense industry is limited, it’s mostly assembly and modification of light armored vehicles, small arms, and basic equipment, often based on foreign designs. Iran, by contrast, runs a mature military‑industrial system. It produces ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges into the thousands of kilometers, fields large fleets of kamikaze drones, maintains layered air defense networks, and sustains domestic R&D under sanctions. This isn’t the usual insurgency Ugandan troops deal with. This is a state built to absorb and respond to sustained attack at scale.

But anyways, treating Muhoozi’s tweets as a joke misses what’s actually being revealed because this isn’t really about capability. It’s about how power is imagined by the people who hold it and how far that imagination can drift from reality.

Muhoozi’s statements sound ridiculous because they are. But they’re also useful. They show what happens when political ambition, personal ideology, and global conflict all come together in a country that doesn’t actually control any of it.

this is what delusion looks like

Muhoozi Kainerugaba isn’t just some loud figure online. He’s the head of Uganda’s military, and he is also widely seen as the potential successor to his father, the President Yoweri Museveni.

Over the past few weeks, he has expressed deep support for Israel in the Iran-Israel/USA conflict. In the first, he positioned Uganda as a potential backer: “If Israel needs help, it only need ask. Their Ugandan brothers are ready to assist,” and warned that any attempt to destroy Israel would bring Uganda “into the war on the side of Israel.” (This tweet was deleted)

Then, he pushed even further on April 10–11. He claimed to have “about 500,000 war hungry young men” who would “eat that Tehran for free,” and that all they needed was money (He deleted the tweet). He declared “You threaten Israel… you are fighting us!”, (This tweet was also deleted). He said he was ready to deploy “100,000 Ugandan soldiers in Israel. Under my command. To protect the Holy Land. The land of Jesus Christ our God!” and framed the conflict in openly religious terms: “We are coming to reclaim our land in Jerusalem… given to us by Jesus Christ,” adding that Iran is “NOTHING” until it acknowledges “the supremacy of Jesus Christ.” (Those two tweets were also, you guessed it, deleted). (NOTE: He’s offering troops to defend Israel… while also talking about “reclaiming” Jerusalem from them as Christian land. Those two don’t line up. It makes no sense I know!)

That kind of rhetoric doesn’t mean Uganda is entering the war. But it does, at least rhetorically, pull the country into a conflict it has no role in shaping. Which is of course a risky move. This starts to make more sense when you zoom out (or not, idk).

Uganda is a centralized state. Real power runs through Museveni, (the presidency) and the military chain of command. But in practice, it often speaks in two directions at once.

Museveni has taken a relatively balanced position criticizing both Iran and Israel, pointing to Western involvement, and calling for restraint. That aligns with Uganda’s broader non-aligned posture. On April 12, he met with Iran’s ambassador, Majid Saffar. It wasn’t dramatic or anything, it was just damage control. A way of telling Iran: don’t take Muhoozi’s tweets as official policy. Uganda isn’t trying to escalate anything.

Muhoozi is doing the opposite. He’s picking sides. Publicly and loudly. This probably isn’t a contradiction at all. This looks like a system where one voice maintains diplomatic flexibility, while the other tests boundaries, signals aggression, and says what the state itself cannot officially say. Father and son. Two tones. Same center of power.

And if you’ve followed Muhoozi for a while, you’ll know, this is how he operates. Push first. Say something big. Force a reaction. Almost like the system is testing its boundaries through him. Then, when it goes too far, it gets walked back. Deleted. Reframed as personal. Not official. Business as usual.

We saw it in January after the election where he publicly framed Bobi Wine as a fugitive, suggested troops had orders to bring him in “dead or alive,” and accused the U.S. Embassy of helping him escape. Within hours, the posts were deleted. An apology followed. Cooperation resumed.

We saw it with Kenya years ago, one of the earliest examples, when he threatened to capture Nairobi in two weeks, triggering a diplomatic response that forced a formal apology from the Ugandan government.

And now, recently we saw it again with Türkiye. In a single day, he demanded $1 billion, threatened to cut diplomatic ties, talked about shutting embassies and warned Ugandans not to travel there, then added a bizarre personal demand for “the most beautiful woman in that country for a wife.” He also claimed Turkey had “no chance” against Uganda and framed it in religious-military language “We are an army inspired by Jesus Christ and Muhammad Ali… Let them surrender my wives!”, before walking parts of it back and deleting posts after backlash (like usual).

The next day, the government moved to contain it. Uganda’s foreign minister, Gen. Jeje Odongo, met Turkey’s ambassador in Kampala and stressed that relations remain strong, with plans to keep cooperation going. In other words, tweets on one side, cleanup on the other.

That cycle of push, backlash, retreat, isn’t random. That’s the Muhoozi pattern.

The problem isn’t just that the statements are unrealistic and disturbing. The problem is that they’re coming from someone who controls the army and could one day control the state. Right now, there’s a ceiling above him that contains it. But that ceiling is tied to Museveni, and Museveni won’t be there forever (he is an old guy). If that restraint disappears, Uganda is left with the same behavior but fewer limits, and that’s when it stops being just erratic tweets and becomes actual policy.

Maybe it doesn’t happen. Maybe Museveni doesn’t hand power to his son. But it wouldn’t be surprising if he did. A lot of these long‑serving leaders don’t think much about what comes after them, as long as they get what they consider “theirs”.

You could read Muhoozi’s behavior as something calculated. You could say he is pushing boundaries, testing reactions, then walking things back, like he and his dad are playing 5D chess or something.

But that reading is probably giving it way too much credit. The simpler explanation fits better, it’s tolerated. Many Ugandans believe Muhoozi’s impulsive and chaotic posting style is linked to drinking, even though he has publicly said he no longer drinks. Museveni may just not care enough to deal with it or he doesn’t want to publicly (or even privately) check his own son.

but the bigger issue right now isn’t just muhoozi. it’s exposure, and uganda isn’t unique.

Every country feels shocks from conflicts like this. Uganda can’t project power into the Middle East, but the effects of the Middle East can still hit Uganda directly and they will, whether Muhoozi says anything or not.

Uganda depends heavily on global energy and shipping. It spends about $2 billion a year on fuel, and it’s byproducts. A lot of that supply comes from, or is linked to, the Persian Gulf.

Fertilizer is another dependency. Uganda imports tens of millions of dollars’ worth each year, much of it connected to Gulf producers and remember Uganda is at the very end of this supply chain because it’s landlocked. Everything comes in through ports like Mombasa or Dar Es Salaam, then moves inland by road. Every step adds cost and delay. If the Strait of Hormuz is disrupted, fuel prices jump. Shipping gets more expensive. Transport costs rise. Fertilizer gets more expensive too. Everything follows. Then, over time, food production drops. That’s the real risk. Not war. Exposure.

Let’s say Muhoozi and Museveni are actually playing some kind of 5D chess. Then the thinking probably looks like this: siding with Israel, and by extension the United States, brings real, tangible gains like elite training, weapons access, intelligence, protection, and money. For a military like the UPDF, that is a solid deal. It could be a lot. When some countries are stepping back right now with their cooperation with the US and Israel, stepping in can look like a smart move. A profitable one. The risk is though, you could be hitching a ride on a losing side. That’s why others are stepping back. Sure, there’s a “big risk, big reward” logic to it. But if it fails, it fails badly. Good luck.

Also, It’s kinda ironic that Muhoozi talks in religious terms but what he’s actually chasing is power, money, influence, women… all very earthly stuff.

iran’s reaction to all of this has been mockery.

Iran hasn’t responded with threats. It’s responded with sarcasm. After Muhoozi claimed a Ugandan brigade could take Tehran in 72 hours, Iran’s embassy in South Africa posted: “Ladies and gentlemen, the latest phenomenon to entertain you on Africa’s Got Talent.” That pretty much set the tone.

Across diplomatic channels and pro-Iran accounts, the reaction has been the same, treating his statements as comedy. The claims about 100,000 troops or “eating Tehran for free” aren’t being debated. They’re being laughed at.

Even Iran’s ambassador in Kampala took a calm, measured approach. He made it clear Iran has no intention of bringing the conflict to East Africa and that its focus remains on Israel and the United States.

So on one side, you have Muhoozi talking like Uganda is stepping into a global war. On the other, you have Iran treating it like background noise. That gap says everything. Because it shows how Uganda is actually seen in this equation. They are not seen as a player, not even as a threat, but as something that doesn’t need to be taken seriously.

muhoozi in israel

Muhoozi is or was in Tel Aviv. He confirmed it himself on X (but then he deleted the tweet, so maybe he isn’t in Tel Aviv??). From the moment he began tweeting about this war, Israeli media and pro-Israel outlets were already picking him up, amplifying him, and praising him on his stances. Muhoozi being in Tel Aviv also doesn’t exactly mean Uganda is entering the war now. At minimum, this is symbolic, just a show of alignment, a way for Israel to point to global support at a time when many countries are more cautious.

At the same time, it raises a different question. Why entertain him at all?

You would think a military power like Israel wouldn’t need Ugandan troops. There can’t (or shouldn’t) really be a serious military scenario where Uganda takes on Iran.

But the situation isn’t completely normal right now. Israel’s own military leadership has warned about manpower shortages. And history shows that when things get tight, the question stops being “does this make sense?” and becomes “what is even available?”. For Netanyahu, staying in power means avoiding drafting the Haredim, who are the last large pool of untapped manpower. That’s politically off-limits for him. But staying in power also means keeping all the wars going, which requires a steady supply of troops. In a worst-case scenario (which they are in now!), it wouldn’t be surprising if Israel borrowed from the UAE playbook of using foreign fighters or even contracting whole units of other national armies. Bibi would look for manpower anywhere else before touching the Haredim, even something as unlikely as Ugandan troops.

It probably would not be 100,000 troops. That’s unrealistic. But a smaller number? Probably not against Iran directly but in places like Lebanon against Hezbollah, or even in Gaza in secondary roles. Holding positions, freeing up Israeli units, taking pressure somewhere else? In a bad enough scenario, you can at least see how it could be possible.

That doesn’t mean it will happen because the problems are obvious. Moving thousands of troops across continents in the middle of a war is extremely difficult. Coordinating them is even harder. Realistically, only the United States has the strategic airlift and logistics network to move and sustain forces at that scale. And these aren’t exactly US-level forces, you’d be dealing with gaps in training, equipment, communication, and command. Language, command structure, training, all of it quickly turns into a problem instead of an advantage.

Then there’s the optics. Using foreign troops like that would signal weakness, both militarily and diplomatically. Militarily, it suggests they don’t have enough people to sustain the fight on their own. Diplomatically, it shows that stronger allies either couldn’t or wouldn’t step in, and that Israel had to look much further afield for support. And militarily, it’s not clean. You’re putting underprepared soldiers into a very complex war. So no, it’s not likely. But it’s also not impossible if things get worse.

However, even if Ugandan troops aren’t used against Iran, they could still be used elsewhere, which is far more likely. They could be redirected into nearby conflicts. Supporting Israeli allies like the RSF in Sudan or Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia, Ugandan troops could expand their footprint in Somalia aiming to cause problems, or operate in the DRC in ways that bring in money tied to Israeli interests. Those moves are simpler, quieter, and much easier to deny.

So it might not look like Uganda joining the Israel–Iran war. It could just look like Uganda getting pulled deeper into the wars already happening around it.

uganda isn’t shaping this conflict in any meaningful way. but this conflict will probably shape landlocked uganda.

They will feel every shock. From fuel, shipping, transportation costs, fertilizer, food prices, electricity all without having any control over how those shocks start or where they go and that is a problem for them.

One of its most powerful figures is acting like Uganda is a key player in this Middle East conflict, but it’s not. Uganda is not in control, but it is firmly in the blast radius. That is not strategy. It is reckless grandstanding. You don’t have to be religious to see how this usually plays out. People in power who act like Muhoozi, who are loud, impulsive, convinced they’re bigger than they are, and using religion in a pretentious, dishonest, and corrupted way to justify their politics, tend to push things too far. And when that happens, reality (or God, depends how you look at it) steps in. Usually fast. And usually in a way that costs the country, not just the person. Can Uganda afford that right now?

That reading doesn’t hold up anymore.

What we’re seeing now makes something much clearer, that this pact was never about Israel. It was always about Iran. And more specifically, it was about a war Saudi Arabia fears it cannot fight on its own.

a war riyadh hoped others would fight for it

Saudi Arabia didn’t want to be stuck in a long regional war with Iran. Over the past few years, the kingdom has been trying to stabilize, not escalate. Vision 2030, foreign investment, tourism, megaprojects, none of that works in a region where missiles are flying over Riyadh.

They even tried diplomacy. In 2023, Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to restore relations in a deal brokered by China, reopening embassies and committing to non-interference after years of hostility. That alone tells you where Saudi thinking was: avoid this exact scenario if possible. But avoiding a war and wanting your main rival weakened aren’t the same thing.

There are reports that Mohammed bin Salman saw this conflict as a chance for the U.S. and Israel to weaken Iran, while Saudi Arabia stayed out of the main fighting and avoided paying the biggest price.

That contradiction is the point.

Riyadh didn’t want a prolonged war on its own territory. But it may have wanted Iran hit hard enough that the problem is solved by someone else. But now that scenario it didn’t want, is here.

Iran has been hitting bases and infrastructure in Saudi Arabia tied to U.S. interests. But if it can do that, it can obviously hit Saudi Arabia directly. Fighter jets, bases, infrastructure, government buildings. The vulnerability isn’t theoretical anymore.

But the even bigger fear in Riyadh isn’t just being attacked. It’s something worse. A war where the United States and Israel strike Iran, but don’t actually end the threat. A scenario where Washington pulls back, avoids regime change, and eventually disengages, leaving the region to absorb the consequences. In that scenario, Iran is wounded, angry, and still fully capable of targeting Gulf infrastructure, shipping routes, and economic lifelines. And Saudi Arabia and the GCC (and of course, Israel) wouldn’t have the same level of cover. They would be left to deal with it largely on their own. That’s the nightmare scenario.

Saudi Arabia’s economy still runs on oil, but it also runs on the perception of stability. Investors have to believe it’s a safe place to put money. The strategy now is to use that oil wealth to build something bigger. Under MBS, Saudi is leaning into a Dubai-style model, which means, attract foreign investment, grow tourism, and turn the country into a regional hub. In Arab countries, that’s the benchmark everyone is chasing. But that only works if the country is stable and that sense of stability doesn’t come only from inside Saudi Arabia. It relies heavily, arguably fundamentally, on U.S. security guarantees.

Saudi Arabia as a modern state has never really existed without backing from a superpower, first Britain and then the United States. If that guarantee weakens or disappears, the entire equation changes. It’s no longer just about markets or investment, it’s about whether the state can survive. Strip away that external protection, and what looks like strength starts to look a lot more fragile. Saudi Arabia can fund a war. It can influence a war. It can host a war. But it cannot sustain or fight one like this alone.

It has one of the most advanced air forces in the region, built with top-tier American equipment, deep funding, and long-standing partnerships. But a prolonged, ground-heavy confrontation with Iran is a completely different kind of war.

Saudi Arabia’s strength is in the air. Its weakness is on the ground. Structurally, the military has long relied on foreign contractors, advanced systems, and a smaller professional force instead of mass mobilization. But there’s also a cultural side to this. The Saudis of today are not the Saudis of 100 years ago, and definitely not the ones from 1,500 years ago. Decades of oil wealth have reshaped society, creating a system where many citizens are insulated from hardship, with the state providing jobs, benefits, and security. That doesn’t translate into a population ready for long, brutal wars that require endurance and sacrifice.

Iran is built differently. Its system is decentralized, hardened, and designed for long-term conflict. Its fighters, and its allied networks, are shaped by ideology and a culture that accepts heavy losses and keeps going. That difference shows up clearly in readiness for high-intensity war.

Even Saudi Arabia’s biggest advantage, its air force, has limits. Years of air campaigns in Yemen struggled to decisively defeat the Houthis, an opponent far less complex than Iran. And then there’s the vulnerability on the ground. Saudi Arabia does have hardened aircraft shelters, but they’re limited and not built for modern precision ballistic missiles. A direct hit can destroy them, and many high-value aircraft can’t be sheltered at all, they sit exposed. But if even U.S. and Israeli airpower hasn’t been able to quickly break Iran, it raises a simple question: what exactly could Saudi Arabia do on its own? The answer is uncomfortable, that’s not the kind of war its military is built to fight. And they know it.

So instead of trying to fix that weakness directly, they’ve done what they’ve always done. They’ve thrown money at the situation and outsourced it. That’s what the pact with Pakistan actually is.

Pakistan brings something Saudi Arabia doesn’t have: manpower, military depth and, crucially, a nuclear shadow. As Bob Woodward reports in his book War (2024), MBS told Senator Lindsey Graham: “I don’t need uranium to make a bomb. I will just buy one from Pakistan.” For Riyadh, that fills a gap. At least on paper.

But right now, Iran seems to be calling that bluff. The assumption in Riyadh is that Pakistan would ultimately step in if things escalated far enough. Iran appears to be betting the opposite, that Pakistan will keep refusing to intervene in any meaningful way, no matter how much pressure builds. And so far, Pakistan’s behavior lines up more with that second scenario than the first.

Because in reality, Pakistan is a much more complicated partner than it looks. Yes, it has one of the largest militaries in the world. Yes, it has long-standing ties with Saudi Arabia. Yes, it has historically deployed troops to the kingdom. But none of that means it will fight Iran. Pakistan doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It shares a border with Iran. It has its own internal security challenges. It’s balancing tensions with India and Afghanistan, ongoing instability in regions like Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and a fragile political and economic system.

Opening a serious front with Iran is a strategic gamble with consequences at home and that’s before you even get into public sentiment, because inside Pakistan, this wouldn’t just be seen as a clean geopolitical decision. There’s strong opposition to fighting Iran, and many people view it as a “brother” country or at least not an enemy worth going to war with. For a significant segment of the population, Iran is seen as standing up to the U.S. and Israel, while Saudi Arabia is viewed as too closely aligned with them.

This isn’t just abstract sentiment. Pakistan’s Shia population, roughly 10–15% of the country, or tens of millions of people, making it the second-largest Shia population in the world, is large enough to matter politically and socially, and has reacted strongly in moments of escalation involving Iran.

Iran has, over the years, built connections with Shia fighters from other countries, including Pakistanis who fought in Syria in groups like the Zainabiyoun Brigade. After Assad’s fall, many of them went back to Pakistan. This doesn’t mean Iran can just destabilize Pakistan, the state is still strong, and these groups are banned and watched closely. But it does mean there are people inside the country with real combat experience and past links to Iran. So any direct confrontation carries internal risks. Sectarian tensions could rise, protests could escalate, and smaller militant networks could re-emerge or reorganize under pressure.

There’s also a widespread belief that the Saudi pact is transactional. Pakistan’s economy has been under constant pressure for years, relying on IMF programs and repeated support from Saudi Arabia and the UAE just to stay afloat. Recently the UAE even demanded early repayment of billions in loans it had been rolling over for years, putting serious strain on Pakistan’s reserves. The timing wasn’t random, it came amid frustration that Pakistan stayed neutral, refused to support Gulf positions against Iran, and instead helped push for ceasefire talks that they didn’t actually want.

From Riyadh’s perspective, though, Pakistan still functions as a form of deterrence. The implicit message is supposed to be if Saudi Arabia is pushed into a direct confrontation with Iran, it has the option to pull Pakistan into it. That threat alone is meant to complicate Iran’s calculations because it introduces the risk of a broader war, one that stretches into South Asia. Iran wouldn’t just be fighting on their western side, it could face huge pressure on their eastern side, forcing it to divide attention and resources. Even if that scenario is unlikely, the possibility itself is part of what Saudi Arabia is trying to leverage.

at the top level, this relationship is simpler than it looks.

Gulf states don’t really deal with Pakistan as a whole. They deal directly with its military and especially the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), the military’s powerful intelligence arm that plays a central role in security, foreign policy, and behind-the-scenes decision-making, because that’s the only part of the country they trust to actually follow through on anything they want.

Civilian governments in Pakistan change all the time. Policies shift. Public opinion moves fast. But the military stays. It’s the real center of power, it’s the closest thing or it basically is Pakistan’s deep state. Field Marshal Asim Munir, the Chief of Defense Forces, holds far more real power than Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The military is the only institution that can consistently deliver.

We saw this during Imran Khan’s time in power. His foreign policy was more independent, and that created tension with Gulf leaders. Support was more cautious. After he was removed, things warmed up again pretty quickly. So when Saudi Arabia thinks about this pact, it’s not really thinking about Pakistan as a whole. It’s thinking about the generals. This creates a gap. The leadership is aligned, but a lot of the public isn’t and this gap will matter when things get serious, because decisions made at the top don’t just stay there, they hit the street.

Things can get unstable in Pakistan. Protests around Imran Khan have repeatedly escalated quickly and right now, there’s a real reason for that pressure to keep building. His health has become a serious issue as he’s been dealing with a major eye condition that has already left him with severe vision loss in one eye. His party has been warning that without proper treatment, it could become permanent, while his family and lawyers have been raising concerns about delays in care and limited access to doctors.

Imran Khan’s popularity hasn’t collapsed, in many ways it’s held or even strengthened. Despite being jailed and restricted, Imran Khan still commands a large, loyal base, especially among younger voters and urban populations. That’s why every update about his condition immediately turns political.

At the same time, his party, PTI, is in a strange position. It’s still one of the most popular political forces in the country and remains a central opposition bloc, but its leadership is fragmented, under pressure, and often restricted. Many of its senior figures have faced arrests, legal cases, or limitations on organizing, which has slowed momentum even when public support is clearly there.

So you have this mix: a leader in jail whose health is deteriorating, a base that’s still angry and mobilizable, and a party that can’t fully operate the way it used to. That doesn’t create stability, it creates uncertainty that can explode at any moment.

This all matters for one reason, it tells you Pakistan is not operating from a calm, controlled position. It’s under external pressure from Gulf partners who assume they’ve effectively bought influence and expect Pakistan to step up if things escalate. But if Pakistan were to step into a war with Iran, that internal uncertainty wouldn’t stay contained. Every time this kind of pressure has built up before, they’ve managed to control it, but a war with Iran could be the moment that finally breaks that pattern. This wouldn’t just be a foreign policy decision happening far away. It would hit inside the country through protests, political backlash, and potentially unrest.

Saudi Arabia’s entire strategy assumes Pakistan is a reliable, mostly united and stable, and it all could work if it were aimed at Israel, because public opinion, religion, and political pressure inside Pakistan would all push in the same direction. But this is different. This is Iran.

And in this case, Pakistan isn’t something Saudi Arabia can just use whenever it wants. The country has its own problems, its own public opinion, and its own limits. So instead of stepping in automatically, it has now decided to basically become unpredictable. It’s already dealing with real instability and that’s before even getting into the current conflict with Afghanistan and internal conflicts like the TTP insurgency and Baloch militancy.

Pakistan is not in a position right now to fight a war with a strong regional country like Iran for someone else, especially when Iran already has influence, connections, and ways to create pressure inside Pakistan itself.

And that makes the cost of fully aligning with Saudi Arabia much higher than it looks from Riyadh, because Saudi Arabia doesn’t mind sacrificing Pakistan to protect itself. And remember, Pakistan’s biggest long-term rival is still India, and tensions between them can escalate quickly. If Pakistan gets dragged into a draining war with Iran and starts losing manpower, resources, and starts taking hits to its infrastructure, along with potential triggering of unrest at home, this all creates an opening for India to step in. It doesn’t necessarily mean a full invasion, but pressure, interference, limited escalation, and other moves to take advantage of a weakened opponent.

That’s the kind of risk Pakistani leadership is definitely thinking about.

pakistan doesn’t actually want to be pulled into this war,

and you can see that in how they’ve been behaving. Instead of preparing for a confrontation with Iran, they’ve been trying to position themselves as a mediator, by passing messages, hosting talks, and trying to slow things down rather than escalate them.

Just within the last day, those efforts actually produced a short pause: a roughly 14-day ceasefire. This came after Trump had escalated things hard with at one point even threatening civilizational death (basically genocide), before suddenly pulling back and agreeing to suspend strikes after talks with Pakistan’s leadership.

But the situation didn’t stabilize. Almost immediately, there were disagreements over what the ceasefire actually covered, especially Lebanon. Israel continued heavy strikes there, which Iran saw as a violation of the deal, and things started unraveling fast. So even though a ceasefire was announced, it already looks fragile and unstable and by the time this article is published, there’s a real chance it’s already broken.

For Pakistan’s leadership, this approach makes more sense. It keeps Pakistan relevant and avoids getting dragged into a war it doesn’t want. It puts Pakistan in the position of a mediator and a mediator can’t take sides. It might risk relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but those aren’t the most important relationships right now. The real balance Pakistan is trying to manage is between Iran and the United States. But that balancing act is fragile.

If diplomacy collapses, Pakistan could still get pulled from both sides, seen by Iran as too close to Washington, while also facing pressure from Saudi Arabia (and also maybe even Washington) to follow through on the pact. So instead of choosing a side outright, Pakistan is trying to stay in the middle.

And that tells you everything you need to know: the pact might exist on paper, but actually activating it is a completely different story.

There’s also another assumption built into Saudi strategy that doesn’t hold up. The idea of a unified Sunni bloc.

On paper, it makes sense. Saudi Arabia sees itself as a central player in the Sunni world, with the financial and political weight to bring others along. However in reality, that bloc doesn’t really exist. Turkey and the UAE has their own ambitions. Qatar has its own policies. Egypt and Pakistan takes Saudi support but don’t rush into its wars. Muslim countries across Asia and Africa prioritize their own stability over regional alignment.

Part of the reason is simple, Saudi Arabia hasn’t really united the Sunni world in any way. If anything, a lot of its actions over the past decade have split it further. The idea seemed to be that dividing the region would make it easier to control and lead, but that never fully worked. And now those same divisions are limiting how much support Riyadh can actually count on.

There’s also a gap between governments and the public. If you look at social media, at posts from users from Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Turkey, Somalia, Algeria etc and even among Muslims living in the diaspora, in western countries, you’ll see many Sunnis leaning toward Iran over Saudi Arabia. Because it’s not really about sects. Most Sunnis still see Shias as Muslims, even if they disagree with them. But in stricter circles, like those influenced by Wahhabi thinking, that’s not always the case.

Wahhabism comes from the Najd region of Saudi Arabia in the 1700s, when Muhammad ibn Abd al‑Wahhab formed an alliance with the House of Saud. At its core, this interpretation puts a heavy focus on strict monotheism (tawhid). Practices like visiting shrines, asking saints or imams for help, or certain mourning rituals are seen as crossing that line. They’re labeled as shirk, meaning associating partners with God. Because of that, they don’t see Shias as just mistaken. They see them as outside Islam altogether, as kuffar (non‑believers).

Saudi leadership has acknowledged how this ideology spread beyond its borders. In a 2018 interview, Mohammed bin Salman said Saudi Arabia had promoted this form of Islam globally during the Cold War at the request of Western allies, as part of a broader effort to counter rival ideological movements. That admission shows this wasn’t just a purely organic religious spread, it was also tied to geopolitical strategy.

But there is a split because most Sunnis still see Iran as a Muslim country, one that’s pushing back against the U.S., Israel, Zionism, and imperialism. But within that stricter Wahhabi-influenced framework, Iran is often seen as a threat to Sunni Islam itself. Some believe Iran is trying to expand its influence across Sunni countries or even force conversion. Others go further, claiming Iran is secretly aligned with the U.S. or Israel to weaken Sunnis from within.

But this is where it starts to look contradictory. The same Gulf states promoting this view are the ones hosting American military bases, working closely with Washington, and in some cases coordinating with Israel. They were also aligned with the U.S. during major regional interventions like Iraq and Syria.

In Islamic tradition, Jews and Christians are considered “People of the Book,” meaning they’re recognized as monotheists even if they’re not Muslim. So from that perspective, working with them politically isn’t seen as crossing a red line. That reasoning is often used to justify close alignment with the U.S. and, increasingly, coordination with Israel, while taking a much harder line against Shia Iran.

But outside the Gulf, a lot of people don’t see it that way. To them, Saudi Arabia talks a lot about leadership and independence, but its actions keep lining up with U.S. interests. Iran’s image comes from a very different place. It’s been under heavy sanctions for years, constantly pressured and destabilized from the outside (and inside), and its people have paid the price, but the state hasn’t folded. It’s still standing and still pushing back. That contrast is what shapes perception.

And that difference becomes even clearer when you look at recent years. Saudi Arabia was moving toward normalization with Israel while the Palestinian issue stayed unresolved and sidelined, something that only really stalled or stopped after Yahya Sinwar’s launching of Operation Aqsa Flood. In a 2019 speech, Yahya Sinwar openly said that without Iran’s support, Hamas would not have developed its military capabilities, while accusing Arab governments of abandoning them in critical moments.

For a lot of people, not just Shias, but Sunnis too, that is all the evidence needed. Iran is seen as a country that’s been squeezed economically and still didn’t give in, and still provides tangible support to its allies. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is often seen as having grown wealthy under U.S. protection while becoming more removed from the struggles of the wider Muslim world.

That doesn’t mean people agree with everything Iran does. But it does shape how it’s perceived and why, in many places, it’s seen with a level of respect that Saudi Arabia doesn’t always get. Leadership isn’t just about money or status, it’s about credibility. In a lot of places, Saudi Arabia’s credibility is questioned.

So while governments can still cooperate politically or economically when convenient, the idea of a unified Sunni front against Iran is much harder to actually turn into reality.

There’s also a battle over narrative. Saudi Arabia frames the conflict around stability and security. Iran frames itself as resistance. When the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) first began preaching in Makkah, he and his followers faced rejection, pressure, and persecution, but they didn’t back down or compromise the core message. That early period is often remembered as a moment of resistance against power, wealth, and social pressure.

Today, you could kind of see that same contrast playing out in a modern way. Saudi Arabia can be seen as prioritizing stability, wealth, and alignment with global powers, while Iran can be seen as standing up to pressure and refusing to fold, and as a defender of ordinary Muslims who feel they’ve been pushed around for decades by outside powers, from European empires to modern U.S.-backed regional systems. This conflict is basically about who gets to define what resistance, leadership, and even defending Islam actually means. That message lands in some places. In others, people are skeptical. It won’t decide the war by itself. But it shapes who lines up with who, and how strong those alliances really are.

This narrative clash isn’t new. It’s been building for years. In 2017, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described Saudi Arabia as a “milking cow” for the United States, arguing that Washington extracts its wealth and would eventually discard it once it’s no longer useful. The remark reflected a broader Iranian view of the Gulf monarchies as strategically dependent on Western power. A year later, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responded with equally stark language, warning that Iran’s leadership was pursuing a regional project “very much like Hitler,” and stating that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia would follow “as soon as possible.” Those exchanges captured how both sides see each other: not as normal rivals, but as systemic threats, one seen as dependent on outside power, the other as trying to reshape the region.

At the core, their goals clash in a deeper way. Saudi Arabia wants Iran removed as a threat to the Gulf order. Iran, on the other hand, wants the United States pushed out of the region entirely. But that creates a contradiction: if the U.S. leaves, Iran’s main enemy disappears, but so does the security system Saudi Arabia depends on.

That means Iran removing the U.S. from the region doesn’t just weaken American influence, it also weakens Saudi Arabia’s position, because the kingdom relies heavily on U.S. protection to balance Iran.

the saudi–pakistan agreement makes sense now in a way it didn’t before.

It’s not about projecting strength. It’s about managing a weakness.

Saudi Arabia is trying to build a structure where it doesn’t have to carry the full burden of a conflict with Iran. Where the United States provides firepower, Israel applies pressure, and Pakistan fills the manpower gap if things escalate, especially if the U.S. continues to want to avoid a full ground war. In that scenario, Pakistani ground forces would likely be central to any serious attempt to actually defeat or contain Iran on the ground.

But, none of this really locks in the way it looks on paper. These kinds of coalitions sound strong until pressure hits. Then the cracks show. Countries don’t move as one. They move based on their own interests. So the whole strategy Saudi Arabia is relying on only works if everyone else shows up and that’s far from guaranteed.

That’s what I got wrong the first time. I thought the pact was about projecting strength outward. But it’s actually about managing a vulnerability. It’s Saudi Arabia quietly acknowledging that if a real, full-scale war with Iran happens, it can’t handle it alone.

So instead of preparing to fight that war on its own, Saudi Arabia is building a setup where others do the heavy lifting, the U.S. in the air, Pakistan on the ground, so it never has to face Iran directly.

On paper, that looks smart. In reality, it only works if everyone shows up.

If the war intensifies and the U.S. holds back, or Pakistan continues to hesitate, that whole plan falls apart and then Saudi Arabia is left exactly where it didn’t want to be: facing Iran without the cover it depends on.

GERD sits in Benishangul-Gumuz, which is the same western Ethiopian region now being referenced in allegations about cross-border activity tied to Sudan’s war.

This overlap between Sudan’s battlefield and Ethiopia’s most strategically sensitive infrastructure zone highlights a strategic reality, that a stronger Ethiopia benefits actors who are seeking to completely reshape the balance of power along the Nile and the Red Sea.

Setting aside the United Arab Emirates, whose material and logistical interests in the Red Sea corridor are evident, Israel has long treated Nile politics and Red Sea dynamics as strategically relevant. Under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia and Israel have expanded economic, technological, and diplomatic cooperation. At the same time, the conflict in Sudan shows little sign of ending soon; Eritrea remains strategically vulnerable (with a population of roughly 3–4 million compared to Ethiopia’s more than 120 million); Somaliland’s legal status remains unsettled, with Israel publicly and the UAE more quietly pushing for changes to that status; Egypt continues to frame Nile water security as existential while warming relations with Turkey, a key partner of Somalia’s federal government.

At the same time, Cairo has deepened security coordination with Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, deployed forces to Somalia under an African Union mandate, and signed port and security agreements with Eritrea (in Assab, a port of strategic interest to Ethiopia) and Djibouti (in Doraleh, a key commercial port Ethiopia currently relies on, as a landlocked country) that expand Egyptian naval access along the Red Sea corridor. Egypt has also strengthened ties with Saudi Arabia, forming a loose alignment of states whose interests increasingly converge around counterbalancing Ethiopia’s regional ambitions. While these arrangements stop short of a large permanent Egyptian base, they signal a deliberate effort to position military access points around Ethiopia’s maritime flank.

None of these developments exist in isolation.

A stronger Ethiopia, with consolidated western borders, potential influence over a Sudan led by the RSF, a Red Sea coastline with a navy, and full operational control over the Nile’s most consequential upstream project, would significantly affect the balance of power in the Horn of Africa and the strategic pressure on Egypt would likely intensify south and east of its borders.

The document below, published in August 2020 by the Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations in Beirut, examines the argument that Israel has strategic interests in how this regional balance evolves.

Whether one agrees with all of its conclusions or not, it offers a framework for understanding why GERD is not merely an infrastructure project and why developments in Blue Nile State in Sudan, Egyptian–Ethiopian tensions over the Nile, and the broader Red Sea power contest involving Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel, the Gulf states, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, Turkey, Houthis/Iran and the U.S. cannot be treated as separate files. They interact, overlap, and increasingly shape one another.

Pa Walid Abdalhay Israel Ethiopian Dam 8 20 Eng

6.23MB ∙ PDF file

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The answer was interesting, not because I believed it literally, but because it avoided the trap the journalist was attempting to put him in. Exactly a year later, on Feb 3rd 2026, in a speech, Kagame explained that a more direct response could have been used in legal or diplomatic proceedings. Ambiguity was safer. It reduced exposure. It kept control.

For years, that approach worked for Rwanda. The country mastered the art of operating in gray zones, saying little, committing less, and framing everything through the language of security.

But the Washington Accords changed the terrain.

Read more

“A rebel without a gun,” he wrote. “Hiding in plain sight and yet you can’t find me because I’m concealed by the people. Catch me if you can.”

By that point, the country’s chief of defence forces had already escalated the confrontation. Muhoozi had described Wine as a fugitive, suggested troops had orders to bring him in “dead or alive,” accused the U.S. Embassy of helping him escape, and publicly announced a suspension of military cooperation with Washington, including coordination linked to operations in Somalia.

Within hours, the accusation against the US was deleted. An apology followed. The suspension was walked back. Military cooperation, he said, would continue as usual.

And both men were still posting.

If the episode reads like parody, it is only because it unfolded in full public view. But this was not theater. It was a contest over the direction Uganda would head towards. A possible turn toward a Bobi Wine-led alternative, or continued rule under Museveni in the short term and, in the long term, under his chosen successor, his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba.

the two realities

Uganda’s January 15 election returned President Yoweri Museveni to office for a seventh term. He has ruled the country since taking power through a military takeover in 1986. The Electoral Commission announced a decisive result, roughly 71.65% of the vote for the incumbent and 24.7% for Wine. The opposition rejected the outcome, citing ballot irregularities, intimidation, and suppression.

An internet blackout preceded the vote and lingered afterward. The shutdown was justified as a measure against misinformation. It also limited public visibility during the most sensitive phase of counting and enforcement.

In the days after the results were declared, two official narratives began circulating simultaneously.

In one, government ministers insisted the country was calm. They said the opposition leader was not being pursued. They dismissed talk of a manhunt as “drama.”

In the other, the country’s top military officer announced arrests, labeled opposition supporters “terrorists,” claimed dozens had been killed in post-election operations, and openly threatened Wine.

The contradiction was not subtle.

It showed that the civilian government and the military were operating in tandem, pursuing the same objective but through different tones, one was projecting reassurance, the other projecting force.

the raid

On the night of January 23, soldiers raided Wine’s residence in Magere, outside Kampala.

The following day, Barbie Kyagulanyi spoke to the media from the hospital. She said soldiers had forced their way into the home late at night, pointed guns at her, demanded access to her phones, and filmed her during the encounter. She described the experience as humiliating and said she lost consciousness before being taken for medical treatment.

On January 25, Gen. Kainerugaba responded on X.

“My soldiers did not beat up Barbie,” he wrote. “We do not beat up women. They are not worth our time. We are looking for her cowardly husband.”

On January 29, he escalated. He posted a photograph of Barbie seated on the floor during the raid and wrote: “This is when our soldiers captured and then released Kabobi’s wife Barbie. She was very helpful in helping us find her husband.”. He has since deleted that post. In another post, he mocked Wine directly: “Kabobi is next… The definition of an IDIOT!” and “As far as I’m concerned we captured the man, Barbie… The fugitive on the run is the wife… Kabobi” .

• “Kabobi” is a nickname made up by Muhoozi to mock Wine’s stage name “Bobi.” In the Luganda language, it suggests something small or unimportant, like calling him a “little Bobi” to make fun of his poor background and make him seem weak in politics.

• He has deleted these posts from Jan 29.

In the early hours of January 30, Muhoozi added: “Barbie was a decent lady. Whatever she said later was probably for the benefit of her castrated husband.” (he deleted this tweet). Minutes later, he insisted that any soldier who had “attempted to touch Barbie” would be punished and inviting details.

Later that morning, Wine posted his own account. He alleged that soldiers had held his wife at gunpoint, demanded her phone passwords and his whereabouts, torn her nightdress while filming her, lifted her by the torn fabric, and that she later lost consciousness due to high blood pressure and was rushed to hospital.

The raid shifted the crisis from the electoral sphere into the domestic sphere. Whatever the precise details of the encounter, the search had extended into private space. And the argument over what happened was now being conducted in public, in real time.

The assault allegation was not handled through formal channels. It was contested through posts, screenshots, and taunts. Each message drew hundreds of thousands of views.

Political power was being exercised and contested through social media.

the general as narrator

Gen. Kainerugaba uses his personal X account as a channel for operational updates and political commentary.

Since the contest election results, he announced arrests of opposition figures, including MP Muwanga Kivumbi. He declared that over 2,000 opposition supporters had been detained. He banned Wine, as chief of defence forces (and presumed heir to his father), from future participation in Uganda’s electoral exercises.

He alternated between declaring peace and issuing new threats.

At one point, he warned that any foreign power assisting Wine’s escape would create a “serious rupture” in relations. Shortly afterward, he accused the U.S. Embassy in Kampala of aiding Wine and announced that the Uganda People’s Defence Forces were suspending all cooperation with the current U.S. administration in Kampala, explicitly including joint work in Somalia, where Ugandan troops make up one of the largest contingents in regional security operations in that country, making any suspension strategically significant beyond Uganda’s borders.

“We, as UPDF, suspend all cooperation with the current administration at the US Embassy in Kampala. This includes our work in Somalia,” he wrote.

Within an hour, the posts were deleted. A public apology followed.

“I was being fed wrong information,” he wrote at 04:42 GMT, adding that military cooperation with the United States would continue as usual.

The rapid reversal revealed a boundary.

Internal coercion could be publicly displayed. External escalation required recalibration.

Muhoozi’s social media behavior is not impulsive, it is characteristic. This is how he has always consistently operated. Back in May, I wrote about his online threats, public taunts, and open displays of coercive authority, including a now-infamous post boasting that an aide to Bobi Wine was “in my basement”.

This is also the same pattern that saw him previously threaten to capture Nairobi in two weeks, forcing a diplomatic apology to Kenya.

the american reaction

The episode drew immediate attention in Washington.

The following day, U.S. Senator Jim Risch, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, responded… on X. Muhoozi, he said, had “crossed a red line,” and the United States would reevaluate its security partnership with Uganda, including sanctions and military cooperation. Deleting tweets and issuing what he called “hollow apologies” would not be enough. The U.S., he warned, would not tolerate instability and recklessness where American personnel and interests were at stake.

The warning carries weight. Uganda receives hundreds of millions of dollars annually in U.S. assistance spanning health, development, security cooperation, and military training programs. Washington supports Uganda’s regional deployments and counterterrorism role, and Kampala relies on that partnership for funding, training, and diplomatic cover.

Soon after, Muhoozi tweeted that after nearly eleven years on X and more than a million followers, he would reduce his interactions and return to fasting and praying.

The sequence of threat of rupture, suspension, deletion, apology, diplomatic reassurance, unfolded in hours and whatever the motivation behind the reversal, the scale of U.S. assistance and security cooperation helps explain why the accusation against the embassy could not stand for long.

hiding in plain sight

Meanwhile, Wine continued posting.

His strategy was simple: proof of life, proof of movement, proof of support.

He framed himself as protected by “the people.” He described security operatives searching for him in Busabala and Gomba. He suggested the military’s inability to locate him was evidence of weakness.

The dynamic created an unusual spectacle: the army searching for one man, and the man narrating the search.

On February 3, Wine posted another update. Military forces, he said, had re-entered his Magere residence the previous night and were now occupying it fully. No family member had been allowed access since the initial January 23 raid. He said he had not even been able to assess what had been taken, damaged, or vandalized.

Hours later, Gen. Kainerugaba posted again. He had earlier claimed he would reduce his activity on X but then deleted that announcement as well. Quoting criticism from the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he corrected his title and dismissed the suggestion that he had crossed any “red line.” The United States, he wrote, was free to reassess relations, but it would “never DEMEAN and DEGRADE us” or reduce Uganda to “slaves.”

In the forty-eight hours leading up to that post, he amplified a coordinated defense instead of taking a break from X like he said he would. He retweeted allies who framed the U.S. rebuke as colonial overreach. One compared him to anti-colonial figures like Mandela and Lumumba. Another insisted the election had been “free and fair” and that Washington had no authority to question it. A cabinet minister suggested the American criticism was merely a distraction from the Epstein Files controversy at home.

The message was that sovereignty was under threat, foreign interference was real, and national pride demanded resistance. The tone ranged from defiant to conspiratorial. It also carried a certain irony. Uganda is largely insignificant to the United States beyond serving as a pool of boots on the ground for regional security operations in places like Somalia, South Sudan and the DRC and even in that role, they can be replaced. Yet the framing cast the dispute as part of a grand global confrontation.

On February 4, he escalated again. “I still demand $1 billion from the USA for the UPDF annually. And they will pay it,” he wrote, and (of course deleted after). The audacity was striking. After threatening to suspend cooperation, apologizing, and recalibrating, he pivoted to demanding tribute-level funding in public. Whether meant as provocation, leverage, or performance, the post reinforced the pattern: confrontation first, calculation later.

It is easy to read all of this as theater. It is not.

The stakes are real.

the succession question

President Museveni is 81. This term is widely expected to be his last, although Paul Biya was reelected in Cameroon at 92, making it premature to rule out another Museveni run if he remains politically and physically able too, or, at minimum, still breathing.

His son, Gen. Kainerugaba, is frequently discussed as a potential successor. Whether or not succession is imminent, the politics of positioning are visible.

Muhoozi has long treated Bobi Wine not as a routine opponent but as a threat to regime continuity. In 2022, he wrote plainly: “Kabobi should know that we will never allow him to be President of this country.” Last month, he declared Wine “wanted” and giving ultimatums that framed him as a destabilizing force. Muhoozi has always been consistent, a Wine presidency was not an acceptable outcome.

Inside ruling coalitions, public displays of loyalty, toughness, and ideological clarity are signals. They show commitment to continuity. They warn potential rivals. They reassure military elites and party loyalists that power will not drift.

Seen in that light, the general’s posts were not only aimed at Bobi Wine. They were messages to the security establishment, the National Resistance Movement hierarchy, and anyone inside the system calculating the future. They signaled that succession, when it comes, will be managed and that dissent, even at the margins, will be contained.

The performance of control can be as important as control.

But performance carries risk. It introduces volatility. It compresses decision cycles. It invites international reaction.

The accusation against the U.S. Embassy, which was at first quickly withdrawn is a case study in that risk.

the precedent

The immediate crisis may subside. Wine may reappear publicly. He may be arrested. He may leave the country. The security operations may recede from headlines.

What will remain is the method.

Post-electoral consolidation in Uganda is no longer conducted solely through quiet detentions and closed-door directives. It is narrated in real time. It is argued online. It is retracted, reframed, reposted.

The absurdity of the spectacle should not obscure its function.

Power is being exercised. It is simply being exercised loudly and uniquely.

And in the background of the noise sits the central reality: Uganda has not experienced a peaceful presidential transfer of power ever and that Yoweri Museveni has led the country for nearly 40 fucking years.

editor’s note

At the time of this article’s publication, Bobi Wine remains in hiding, with his most recent public update posted on February 3. Gen. Kainerugaba continues to post actively on X, still deleting his more diplomatically volatile posts shortly after posting them.

On December 28, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi went further than vague warnings. In a televised address, he said the Houthis would treat any Israeli presence in Somaliland as a military target, calling Israel’s recognition an act of aggression against Somalia and Yemen, and a threat to the Red Sea and regional security. He rejected the move outright as illegitimate, arguing that Israel was seeking to turn part of Somalia into a foothold for its own regional war.

This is what I mentioned in my last article:

“Israel’s biggest Red Sea threat right now is coming from Yemen. A foothold on the African side of the Gulf of Aden is a different kind of leverage than diplomacy in Europe or lobbying in Washington because it’s geography. And if Somaliland becomes part of Israel’s military or intelligence posture against the Houthis, it also becomes a legitimate target in that conflict, with all the risks that come with being within missile range of Yemen.”

The Houthis did not wait for an Israeli base to be announced. They did not ask whether Somaliland intended to host military or intelligence assets. They responded to trajectory. From their perspective, Israel’s recognition signals they have access to ports, intelligence reach, and a closer position across the Gulf of Aden.

That reading is not fringe, it’s basically the default, “look-at-a-map” interpretation. Somaliland sits on the Gulf of Aden, across from Yemen, near the Bab el‑Mandeb, and Israeli analysts have explicitly argued it could function as a forward position for things like intelligence monitoring and other operations linked to the Houthi problem.

And that angle isn’t the only reason this recognition is triggering wider reactions. There’s also the Gaza displacement subtext hanging over it.

In a December 28 X Space, Dr. Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs claimed that Somaliland privately approved resettling up to 1.5 million Palestinians from Gaza on December 20, just days before Israel’s recognition on December 26. He framed it as a “generous offer” tied to stability.

I’m including this not because it’s confirmed, but because even the idea of dumping Gaza’s population elsewhere is radioactive and because, if Diker is right, it explains another reason why the Houthis would see Somaliland not as neutral territory but as something they are obligated to confront, given their long‑stated claim that their war with Israel is being fought on behalf of Palestinians.

Somalia’s federal government framed the recognition as a direct attack on its sovereignty and territorial integrity. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud warned that Somali territory would not be used to launch attacks against other countries or be dragged into external wars, a line later reinforced by the foreign ministry and parliament. Somalia’s Federal Parliament passed a resolution declaring Israel’s recognition unlawful, null, and void, reaffirming that Somaliland remains an inseparable part of the Federal Republic.

That position was echoed regionally. Turkey and Egypt condemned the move as unlawful and destabilizing. Across the wider region, a bloc of Arab, Islamic, and African states, including Saudi Arabia, rejected both the recognition itself and any attempt to link Somaliland to schemes involving the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, reaffirming support for Somalia’s unity and internationally recognized borders. South Africa called Israel’s move a “direct threat” to peace in the Horn of Africa, even China publicly reaffirmed its support for Somalia’s territorial integrity.

INTERESTING FACT: Over 20 mostly Muslim countries signed a joint statement condemning Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, three Muslim‑majority states stood out for saying nothing, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. All three are Abraham Accords signatories with close ties to Israel. The silence was especially notable in the UAE’s case, given its deep investment in Somaliland, long‑standing presence in Berbera, and role as one of Israel’s closest regional partners. Factors that help explain why Abu Dhabi has been widely seen as instrumental in pushing this recognition forward.

All of that context is why the Houthi response matters. They’re not responding to a signed deal or an announced base, they’re responding to where this is clearly heading. Recognition makes the “what if” feel less hypothetical and if you’re within missile range of Yemen, the Houthis don’t need proof of an Israeli base to decide that a new front has opened.

What’s different now is that the Houthis aren’t the only ones raising the alarm. Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all for their own reasons and with their own red lines, have moved to defend Somalia’s territorial integrity and warn against turning the Somaliland coast into a new platform in a wider Red Sea fight.

And that’s the twist: Cairo, Riyadh, and Ankara are in the same “no” camp as Sanaa (and by extension Tehran) on this specific issue, which creates the closest thing to a shared front against the Israel–UAE security project in the Red Sea, Middle East and Africa.

What’s surprising though is not the Houthi response to Israel’s recognition, but Somaliland’s posture to the Houthis.

As of now, Somaliland’s current leadership has made no public statement addressing the Houthis’ warning. Official messaging has focused on sovereignty, legitimacy, and diplomatic breakthrough. The security implications, especially the risk of being dragged into an active regional conflict, have been left unaddressed.

That silence says something important, that recognition has become the overriding objective, and other risks are being treated as secondary (that is, if they are being thought about at all!). After three decades of being ignored, it becomes tempting to treat any recognition as a win, even when it comes with obvious strategic costs.

Somaliland’s location has always been its leverage, and its risk. Even before this, Somaliland’s leadership was already talking in security terms. In late May 2024, former Somaliland president, Muse Bihi publicly argued that the Ethiopia–Somaliland deal could help secure “freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden corridor and deter Houthi attacks on shipping. Translation: recognize us and we’ll help you “secure the Red Sea” against the Houthis.

So when Israel recognizes Somaliland, the Houthis don’t read it as diplomacy. They read it as positioning, a signal that a new location has just been drawn into the conflict.

From their point of view, that makes Somaliland fair game.

They have already shown they are willing to internationalize their conflict, disrupt global trade, and absorb retaliation. They have also been explicit: any Israeli footprint near their theater of operations is unacceptable. Whether that footprint is real today is beside the point.

Put simply, recognition from Israel doesn’t add legitimacy. It just changes how Somaliland is seen and that shift alone is enough to turn it into a potential target.

The Houthis did not misunderstand Israel’s move. They interpreted it exactly as they were meant to. Somaliland is no longer just an unresolved African question. It is now part of a live Red Sea/Middle Eastern conflict map.

That is probably not what Somaliland’s people were promised when recognition was sold as a diplomatic win. But it may be the reality their government has chosen to risk.

But recognition is not the same as legitimacy and this recognition in particular, raises an uncomfortable question:

Is this actually good for Somaliland?

a historic first, with an asterisk

There is no minimizing the significance of what happened. Somaliland has spent more than three decades lobbying African states, Western capitals, and international institutions for recognition. Every attempt ran into the same wall: the African Union’s commitment to Somalia’s territorial integrity and the fear of opening a precedent for secession across the continent.

Israel’s decision breaks that deadlock. It proves that recognition is possible, that it does not require African consensus, and that it can be achieved through bilateral, transactional diplomacy. For Somaliland’s leadership, this is validation. This is proof that the independence project was not futile.

But it also comes with an asterisk. Israel is not just the first country to recognize Somaliland. It is the first and only one and it has done so at a moment when Israel is diplomatically isolated across much of the Global South.

That matters.

optics matter

Somali society, including Somaliland, is overwhelmingly pro‑Palestinian. This is not a fringe position; it is rooted in religion and anti‑colonial solidarity. Israel’s war in Gaza has intensified those sentiments, not weakened them. Against that backdrop, Israel being the first country to recognize Somaliland reads as alignment.

Fair or not, the optics are unavoidable, Somaliland’s first recognition appears tied to Israel’s security agenda in the Red Sea rather than to African self‑determination or democratic merit. That perception will shape how this move is understood by the world and across Somali communities at home and in the diaspora.

And there’s a second optics problem that’s easy to miss if you only look at Somaliland–Somalia.

African states have spent decades treating secession as a red‑line question because the continent is full of unresolved separatist pressures. From long‑running insurgencies to political autonomy movements that flare up when central authority weakens. That is precisely why the African Union has historically leaned so hard on territorial integrity and colonial borders. Not because every border is fair, but because changing them is a contagion risk.

So when Somaliland gets its first recognition through a high‑profile, politically charged partner like Israel, and doing it outside African consensus, outside AU mediation, and outside any negotiated settlement with Mogadishu, it does two things at once.

First, it makes other African capitals more hesitant to touch Somaliland’s recognition file, because they can see the precedent, recognition can be pursued through external bargains rather than regional process. Even governments that privately sympathize with Somaliland’s case will worry about what it legitimizes.

Second, it advertises a playbook that other separatist or autonomy movements could try to copy: bypass the continent, cut a deal with an outside power, and turn recognition into a transactional exchange. That is the nightmare scenario for states sitting on their own internal fractures. The last two African countries to win internationally recognized independence were Eritrea and South Sudan and whatever you think of the outcomes, it was done through a long, formal process tied to war, negotiations, referendums, and internationally managed agreements.

A one‑off recognition secured through external bargaining, outside a continent-led framework looks like a shortcut and that is exactly why many African governments will want to discourage it. Once that perception takes hold, Somaliland doesn’t just face pushback from Somalia, it faces a wider instinct across African governments to shut the door before the precedent spreads.

Recognition that arrives through controversial alignment can cost more legitimacy than it creates.

why this is a clear win for israel

For Israel, the benefits are immediate and largely uncontested.

Somaliland sits astride the Gulf of Aden, near the Bab al‑Mandeb chokepoint. A vital artery for global trade and energy flows. Access, cooperation, or even quiet intelligence presence in Somaliland expands Israel’s strategic depth at a time when Red Sea shipping has been repeatedly disrupted and militarized.

And the hard reality is that recognition can open doors that informal ties cannot. Even if no base is announced today or tomorrow, Somaliland offers Israel the option of forward positioning with intelligence collection, maritime domain awareness, logistics, and, in the most escalatory scenario, a future military footprint that can watch the Bab al‑Mandeb and shorten response times if the Red Sea re-enters a high-intensity phase.

Israel’s biggest Red Sea threat right now is coming from Yemen. A foothold on the African side of the Gulf of Aden is a different kind of leverage than diplomacy in Europe or lobbying in Washington because it is geography. However, If Somaliland becomes part of Israel’s military or intelligence posture against the Houthis, it also becomes a legitimate target in that conflict, with all the risks that come with being within missile range of Yemen.

Israel did not have to compromise its position on Gaza, concede territory, or alter policy. It gained diplomatic access, potential basing options, and a friendly authority in a sensitive region, all without significant cost.

When one side gains immediate benefits while the other absorbs long‑term political risk, recognition begins to resemble leverage rather than a partnership.

a move born of desperation

This recognition did not come at the start of Somaliland’s diplomatic campaign. It came at the end. Only after years of trying (and failing) to win recognition through the routes Somaliland has traditionally pursued like African Union diplomacy, Western capitals, and the argument that Somaliland is “stable enough” to be treated as a state.

Over time, and especially after the Ethiopia–Somaliland MoU triggered regional backlash and internal unrest, Somaliland’s leadership appears to have shifted toward a more transactional approach: get one recognition first, then use it to pressure others. That can work tactically but it also raises the risk of overpaying.

Because when recognition becomes the primary objective, it becomes easier for outside partners to demand high-cost concessions (security access, diplomatic alignment, controversial policy commitments) in exchange for a symbolic breakthrough. At that point, it’s no longer about the terms, but the price.

the gaza resettlement rumors

Unconfirmed reports that Somaliland may accept displaced Palestinians in connection with this recognition are politically radioactive. These rumors emerged in early this year as international media reported that U.S. and Israeli officials had explored, at least at the level of internal discussion and outreach, whether governments in East Africa, including Somaliland, Somalia, and Sudan, could be approached about hosting displaced Palestinians as part of post‑Gaza planning. No agreement was reached, and Somaliland’s government publicly denied holding any such talks.

Even if false, the fact that these rumors are plausible enough to circulate widely tells us something important, that Somaliland’s leadership is now perceived as willing to trade sensitive political ground for diplomatic gain. That perception alone carries political cost.

Any move that frames Somaliland as a solution to Israel’s Gaza problem, even indirectly, or merely through association, would trigger even more backlash across Somali society and the wider Muslim world. It would collapse domestic legitimacy for Somaliland overnight and hand opponents of recognition an unassailable argument, regardless of the legal merits of statehood.

Some deals are too costly to even appear to consider.

recognition does not fix internal fractures

If you’ve been reading CIVIL INTEREST this year, you’ve basically watched the runway get built in real time. An outside-recognition push on one side, and a slow internal erosion of Somaliland’s territorial and political story on the other.

But if you are new, rather than re‑explain all of that here, I’m going to point you to the two pieces that were written before for this exact moment ⬇️

1️⃣ the somaliland recognition roadshow (aug 12, 2025)

The PR campaign and policy pitch that tried to package Israel–Somaliland recognition as “stability” and “maritime security,” when the real deal was access, leverage, and a Red Sea security bargain.

2️⃣ firdhiye’s election and the collapse of somaliland’s independence narrative (sep 03, 2025)

The internal map problem: SSC‑Khaatumo/Northeastern State, effective control, and why foreign recognition does not resolve a state that is losing political consent and territorial authority.

a fragile win, or a strategic trap?

Israel’s recognition could be the first domino Somaliland hopes will trigger a bigger wave of recognition, ideally from the UAE, the United States, and Ethiopia.

That bet only works if other governments move soon. Israel’s recognition by itself does not change Somaliland’s status inside Africa, at the UN, or with major international institutions. The idea in Hargeisa seems to be, once one strategically important country breaks the taboo, others with similar interests will feel less scared to do the same.

There’s also important context for why Israel moved first. The UAE has spent years building deep leverage in Somaliland. There is no public proof that Abu Dhabi officially brokered Israel’s recognition but the UAE’s footprint helps explain why Israel may see Somaliland as usable strategic ground.

But that plan immediately ran into a problem. Within hours of Israel’s announcement, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly signaled that Washington is not ready to follow Israel’s lead. Asked about the move, Trump dismissed the idea of automatic U.S. recognition, saying the issue was “under study” and even questioning Somaliland’s relevance by asking whether anyone really knows where it is. For a strategy built around momentum, that kind of reaction from Washington is a big blow. Without U.S. recognition, it becomes much harder to imagine quick follow‑through from other cautious players, especially those who tend to wait for U.S. political cover before taking risks.

And if recognition becomes tied, in people’s minds, to foreign bases, a more militarized Red Sea, or Gaza politics, Somaliland could trade one kind of isolation for another by being boxed into a narrow security lane instead of gaining broad legitimacy.

Either way, this is a real diplomatic milestone. It shouldn’t be brushed off. But it is also a gamble because it prioritizes symbolic recognition over internal cohesion, and short‑term breakthroughs over long‑term legitimacy.

A state built around outside agendas is fragile. It relies on patrons staying interested, and on publics staying quiet. Neither is guaranteed.

Recognition can strengthen a state. It can also put a spotlight on its weak points. For Somaliland, the question now isn’t whether recognition is possible, it’s whether the way it’s being achieved actually strengthens Somaliland, or quietly weakens it.

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