The most consequential allies in the US war on the Iranian Republic (now passing the 100-day mark) are not influential, behemoth nations, but small, agile, rising powers: a glittering city-state of 11 million and the world’s newest nation, one the world is yet to recognize.
The United Arab Emirates and Somaliland (geographically and population-wise miniature states) are bringing enormous global influence to bear.
The US must reward and strengthen these small states exercising disproportionate impact – compact nations courageously repelling Iranian influence. These are bold allies indeed.
In some senses, their impassioned, outsized defence against Islamist Iran is reminiscent of the Jewish state firmly in the eye of conflict since October 7, 2023.
Israel – home to only 10 million people (and geographically comparable to the size of New Jersey) – has long punched above its weight. That is in large part because its survival depends on it and its extraordinarily martial character.
Israel’s sense of self-preservation was moulded by its people’s history, its astute founder, David Ben-Gurion and later, by its iconic leader Ukrainian-born Golda Meier who would face the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Both maintained categorical doctrines to avoid both foreign troops on Israeli soil and foreign deployments of Israeli forces. Ben Gurion charted an unequivocally strong defence policy eschewing foreign entanglements in favour of self-defence of the nascent state which has come to define the modern Jewish State. In fact, he read and later wrote of the formative army of the United States – Washington’s Army fighting the British as he considered the new IDF.
Reportedly their shared belief was to ensure Israeli forces would always be ferociously independent, self-reliant, and averse to complacency.
In the wars since October 7, while there has been intense outrage at the ferocity with which Israel has reasserted her sovereignty, I have travelled into Israel and to Iraq and Syria, in capitals and conflict zones around the region, far from the Kirya in Tel Aviv, I have found acknowledgment – and respect – that nowhere is beyond Israel’s extraordinary reach.
The remarkable, bold responses of Somaliland and the UAE in this conflict – both defending their sovereignty and deterring their enemies – share the same psyche that decades earlier would define the nascent Jewish State.
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