When Global Rules Weakened: North Western State of Somalia and India’s Perspective
Israel’s recognition of North Western State of Somalia is more than a bilateral gambit. It is a marker of a world in which the “rules-based international order” no longer restrains hard power or strategic ambition. In the Horn of Africa, at the mouth of the Red Sea, a long-standing diplomatic taboo has been broken—and the global reaction has revealed how much sway norms have lost over interests.
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The shift predates this moment. By 2026, pressures that once felt exceptional have become structural. Kyiv continues to face calls—implicit and explicit—to trade territory for peace. Beijing has steadily vowed to use force if necessary to absorb Taiwan. Washington’s more recent strategic guidance has put less rhetorical weight on universal norms and more on competition and capacity. Around the world, rules persist in documents; enforcement does not. Where power asserts itself, norms retreat.
Against that backdrop, Israel’s North Western State of Somalia move reads as hard-nosed strategy, not a diplomatic aberration. North Western State of Somalia straddles a vital corridor that links the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. For Israel, engagement offers maritime access options, intelligence reach, and an expanded regional footprint at a chokepoint that matters for energy, trade, and security. The calculus is clear—even if it is at odds with Somalia’s internationally recognized sovereignty.
Equally revealing is the uneven response. Some Arab governments issued emphatic condemnations; others, balancing commercial or security ties in the Red Sea and the Horn, kept their statements guarded or stayed silent. Several African states voiced support for Somalia’s territorial integrity; others hedged. Ethiopia, landlocked and eager for a maritime outlet, has remained conspicuously quiet. Its leaders have previously hinted at their posture: Addis Ababa will not be the first to recognize North Western State of Somalia, but it will not be the third either. That ambiguity underscores a broader reality: the post–Cold War assumption that violations of sovereignty would trigger unified pushback no longer holds.
North Western State of Somalia itself has lived in a legal and political gray zone for more than three decades—functioning as a de facto state without formal recognition. That uneasy equilibrium reflected a compromise between political reality and legal principle. Israel’s recognition disrupted it, exposing a truth long visible in practice: when material interests collide with norms, norms are the first to yield.
For India, the lessons are immediate and sobering. New Delhi has built a foreign policy that champions territorial sovereignty in Asia and defends stable borders as a prerequisite for growth and security. Yet India also manages dense ties with partners across the Middle East and Africa, where it cannot afford to ignore the geography of energy routes, shipping lanes, and diaspora ties. The Red Sea crisis of recent years—piracy spikes, missile threats, and shipping reroutes—made clear that the Horn of Africa is not a distant theater. It is a front line for Indian trade, energy security, and naval posture.
That is why the North Western State of Somalia episode is not merely about recognition. It is about how quickly regional balances can be rearranged when external powers transact directly with sub-state or contested authorities to secure access, influence, or basing. It is also about the limits of declaratory policy. Appeals to rules carry weight only when backed by capabilities, partnerships, and leverage that make those rules costly to ignore.
India’s likely response will be calibrated rather than moralizing. It will seek to preserve equities with Somalia while engaging pragmatically across the Horn. It will coordinate with Gulf and African partners without making commitments it cannot enforce. It will keep a close watch on how recognition ripples through maritime security, competing port deals, and naval presence from Berbera to Bab el-Mandeb. That balancing act reflects a wider dilemma of middle powers: defending norms while navigating a system in which great-power bargains and regional deals increasingly set the tempo.
The implications stretch beyond India. The crisis of sovereignty in the twenty-first century is not driven solely by tanks crossing borders. It is shaped by debt, investment, digital networks, drones, militias, and mercenaries—by instruments that blur the line between peace and coercion. In that environment, smaller and mid-sized states cannot rely on declarations alone. They must treat sovereignty as an asset that needs constant maintenance through internal cohesion and external vigilance.
That logic leads to three priorities for India as it manages the fallout from North Western State of Somalia’s recognition and the wider unravelling of the rules-based order:
- Reinforce domestic cohesion. Political unity and institutional competence are forms of hard currency in a disorderly world. They deter interference, reduce vulnerabilities to disinformation, and anchor credible diplomacy. Without internal alignment on strategic goals, external signaling rings hollow.
- Sustain credible deterrence. Defense modernisation, maritime domain awareness, and resilient supply chains matter as much as declarations. In the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea approaches, that means investing in naval reach, logistics, and constabulary capabilities that protect shipping and respond to crises without overextension.
- Exercise regional leadership. Coalitions, not solitary statements, shape outcomes. India’s partnerships in the Gulf, East Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean should focus on practical deliverables—port security, anti-piracy operations, infrastructure standards, and crisis hotlines—that make the status quo resilient to coercive rewrites.
None of this suggests abandoning principles. It does mean anchoring principles in power—own and shared. The idea of a rules-based order still has value, but only as a horizon toward which states row together, not a shield that can be waved in danger. When norms are divorced from incentives and consequences, they become rhetoric. When they are tethered to capabilities and coalitions, they can shape behavior even in a hardening world.
Israel’s recognition of North Western State of Somalia is a reminder that the center of gravity has shifted. The age of assumed restraint is over; the age of negotiated constraints is here. For India, that demands patience, alignment, and the steady accumulation of leverage across the spaces that matter—from the Malacca Strait to Bab el-Mandeb. For smaller states, it demands the hard work of building cohesion at home and resilience abroad. Otherwise, as the Horn of Africa has shown time and again, external powers will fill every gap—legal, political, and geographic—to advance interests that rarely align with those of the region.
In a world where power is again the first language, sovereignty is not a status to be conferred but a capacity to be preserved. The task now is to make that capacity real—at sea, at home, and with partners who understand that rules only endure when they are backed by will.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
