COLD WAR ON THE HORN OF AFRICA

Abstract

THE HORN OF AFRICA, an area comprising Ethiopia, Somalia, and Djibouti, is an area of the world whose strategic location has thrust it into the international arena as a potential crisis zone. Overlapping the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, it flanks the oil-rich states of Arabia, controls the Bab el Mandeb Straits which in turn is one of the narrow arteries of Israel's lifeline (a 'chokepoint' William H. Lewis calls it'), dominates a part of the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean through which oil tankers are constantly moving, and overlooks the passages where the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean converge. These aspects alone would define it as a major geopolitical area of the world. But the internal political dynamics in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Djibouti have combined with the wider geographic importance of the area to thrust the Horn of Africa into the international limelight. It is the argument of this paper that the recent radicalization of political systems in Ethiopia and Somalia has generated a response amongst a multiplicity of states in and out of Africa that has led to the crisis that presently brews on the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. Radicalization first opened up for the Soviet Union a large presence in Somalia and South Yemen, and the result of this was then a response by the United States believing its own international strategic interests weakened and threatened thereby. Superpower rivalry on the Horn of Africa, on this view, has become intense principally because of political changes taking place among African states.