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It has now been almost a year and a half since Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh and expelled its indigenous 120,000 Armenian Christians, a community that had inhabited the region for more than 1,700 years. While US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Yuri Kim had declared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “We will not tolerate any military action. We will not tolerate any attack on the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. That is very clear,” the State Department did nothing when, just five days later, President Ilham Aliyev ordered the region’s ethnic cleansing. Not only did the United States take no meaningful action, but Mark Libby, the US ambassador to Azerbaijan, subsequently participated in a stage-managed Azerbaijani propaganda visit to Shushi, an ancient Armenian city Azerbaijani forces captured in 2020 and where they subsequently vandalized and destroyed churches and Christian artifacts.
For Azerbaijan, the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh was a success: The Aliyev dictatorship literally got away with murder and ethnic cleansing; Ilham Aliyev faced no consequence for his unilateralism either diplomatically, militarily, or economically. Quite the contrary, by exposing the United States as a paper tiger and bragging about the advantage of military unilateralism over diplomacy, Aliyev believes he has found a model for other to follow.
Enter Somalia: On February 12, 2025, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and his defense and foreign ministers traveled to Baku. They met their counterparts and signed agreements. The Somali Defense Ministry said a “key agreement in the fields of defense and defense industry cooperation… paves the way for enhanced technical support and military knowledge-sharing to bolster Somalia’s defense capabilities.”
The danger the agreement represents is the likelihood that Somalia now seeks to replicate the Azerbaijan model to resolve militarily what it cannot achieve diplomatically or morally: Forcing Somaliland back into union with Somalia.
There are certain parallels to modern Armenian and Somali history. Just as Heydar Aliyev and his son Ilham were Soviet elites, so too was Somalia a Soviet ally through the 1960s and most of the 1970s. Both countries then switched sides: Heydar Aliyev went from Azerbaijan KGB chief and Soviet Politburo member to a supposed US ally overnight, an ideological chameleon interested primarily in personal power. So too did Somali dictator Siad Barre, who switched sides in the Cold War in a fit of pique over Soviet refusal to accept his territorial ambitions.
Both Azerbaijanis and Somalis have long held irredentist dreams of expanding their country’s borders and territories, partly driven by a tendentious reading of history and more recently by their governments’ desire to distract the populace from regime corruption and poor financial stewardship. Somalia, though, has never been a single entity as some Somali nationalists claim. The five-pointed star on the Somali flag represents the five historic regions Somalis claim as their own: Djibouti, Ethiopia’s Ogaden, Somaliland, the Federal Republic of Somalia, and Kenya’s North Eastern’s province.
Somalia as maps now depict it did not exist until 1960. As decolonization swept Africa, both the British and the Italians granted independence to portions of Somalia they had colonized. All five members of the UN Security Council recognized the independence of British Somaliland as did 25 other countries. Five days later, however, British Somaliland’s leaders decided to merge with the former Italian Somaliland into a single country with Mogadishu as its capital. It was an unhappy marriage that ended in civil war and genocide as Siad Barre sought to eradicate the Isaaq clan that dominated in British Somaliland. The Somali regime killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Isaaqs, while Somali and Zimbabwean mercenary pilots pulverized one third percent of the Somaliland capital Hargeisa.
In 1991, as Somalia collapsed and Siad Barre fled into exile, Somaliland reasserted its independence. This time, the international community did not recognize it. Nevertheless, it remained secure throughout Somalia’s period of lawlessness; during COVID, my nine-year-old daughter accompanied me on a trip throughout the country without security. Multi-billion-dollar businesses call Somaliland home. It has become an environmental refuge for endangered species and recently discovered gas.
In some ways, Somaliland is like Artsakh was. While the international community recognized neither, both were democratic. Somaliland has held eight elections, all peaceful, with one election decided by just 80 votes out of almost one half million cast. Despite a lack of recognition, Somaliland even became the first country in the world to secure elections with biometric iris scans. Joseph Stalin as nationality commissar, gerrymandered the Caucasus and attached the Armenian territory to Azerbaijan, albeit as an autonomous oblast. As such, Azerbaijan never ruled Nagorno-Karabakh directly until its 2023 conquest and ethnic cleansing. Mogadishu’s attempt to rule Somaliland is equally alien. Somaliland has now been de facto independent for longer than it was part of Somalia, and three-quarters of the Somaliland population was born after Siad Barre’s dictatorship.
lieved he could build peace upon moral equivalency, but he is wrong. Not only did his policies enable ethnic cleansing, but other dictators took notice. What happens in the Caucasus does not stay in the Caucasus. Azerbaijan now appears to be taking its policy on the road for profit.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio now must show they are no Biden and Blinken. Not only should they not allow the Artsakh tragedy to replicate along the Gulf of Aden, but they should also ensure Azerbaijan and the Aliyevs cannot profit off evil. It is time sanction Aliyev for his arms dealing, warn Hasssan Sheikh Mohamud that following Aliyev’s path will likely end with him in prison, exile, or dead, and recognize that aid to Somalia, like Azerbaijan aid under every U.S. administration from George W. Bush to Joe Biden, brings not peace and democracy, but war and dictatorship.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum.)