Many years ago, a budding decentralist and anarcho-capitalist suggested to a pair of highly paid Pentagon area specialist contractors that instead of what we were doing in the horn of Africa, we might gain credibility by recognizing Somaliland, which at the time was peaceful, free trading, and a rare example of an organic government, not at war, nor seeking war.

The sincere suggestion was greeted by at least one dropped jaw, and two blank stares. Later, I had not changed my mind, and in the three intervening decades, Somaliland has endured. I wrote in 2003, at LRC:

The Miracle-Gro for tender young countries is culture-driven self-government, absent outside military interference and manipulation from great powers and entangling alliances. It's kind of like what the founding fathers envisioned for this country.

Born on a Cold War battlefield, what is today Somaliland suffered a genocide conducted by the US-backed government in Mogadishu of Said Barre, from which independence sprang. 35 years later, US genocidal capability seems to have scaled up, as the massive reduction of Ukraine's prewar population in four years and the literal decimation of Gaza in two years illustrates.

Libertarians around the world were and should still be interested in the Somaliland experience thus far. Now, suddenly Somaliland has become important.

The Netanyahu government of Israel – tone deaf and calculating – has officially recognized an independent Muslim Republic that has a Constitution, a dual banking system satisfying the needs and preferences of both Western and Islamic models, and has publicly embraced self-determination and economic freedom since its independence. Israel and the US have been looking for a weak, nonaligned and un-militarized country into which to forcibly and permanently transfer any surviving Gazans. Candidate Trump said he would recognize Somaliland, presumably to strategically improve the US fleet and air foothold on the Horn, and as always, to better support our bestest ally with a new place from which to spy on and bomb Israel's neighbors.

A US recognition of Somaliland – in 1991 or today – would be easily justifiable on the basis of dignity, a shared history of independence, and long-standing US propaganda of its role in spreading peace, democracy and self-determination around the world. But Washington has no dignity, no memory, and has never believed its own propaganda. There exists only a hierarchy of allies and interests to be threatened, comforted, manipulated, punished or rewarded. The state, wherever it is found to be even slightly powerful, proves itself nothing more than an instrument wholly monopolized and grotesquely shaped by low imagination sociopaths.