A foreign policy is a major component of any country’s national infrastructure and statehood. It is a guide to a government’s relations with other states and the international community, and usually not only represents the values of a country and what drives it, but also its political and economic goals in a global space.

It may involve security matters, social matters, and economic matters and how a country contributes to the general wellbeing of earth, people, and life in general. It defines the behavior of states in an international context and relations among them. The intention of the article is not to present a lecture on the art and science of foreign policy but to review and perhaps define Somalia’s foreign policy while attempting to add on to its thought processes in the future, both the distant and the not-too-distant.

In its modern setting, Somalia joined the world’s nations in 1960, when it was uniquely created by Somalis through the merger of Ex-British Somaliland and the Italian administered UN Trust Territory of Somalia to create the Somali Republic, with all the paraphernalia of what is today known as Federal Republic of Somalia, including its flag, its emblem, its anthem, its map and geography and location as the easternmost country of Africa jutting into the Arabian/Somali Sea and the northern Indian Ocean. It is bound on the north by the Gulf of Aden, on the west by Ethiopia , on the northwest by Djibouti, on the south by Kenya and on the east by the Indian Ocean.

The foreign policy of the country, in the 30 years the state existed before its collapse in 1991, was mostly devoted to the liberation struggles of the continent of Africa, including the Somali territories in neighboring countries of Ethiopia and Kenya and the French-colony of Ex-French Somaliland, which became Djibouti on independence in 1977.

Many argue that its foreign policy, in this regard, was mostly responsible for or a major contributing factor to the collapse of the Somali state. It created so many enemies across a large spectrum in the process, even antagonizing previous friends or joining unrelated and unsupportive organizations, like the Arab League, which had no interest in the wellbeing of the country. It could well have been the single most factor that led to the collapse, but its internal idiosyncrasies have also had a........

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