Just hours after Secretary Pompeo’s critical comments of the Chinese presence in Africa, the U.S. National Security Council followed up with a provocative tweet that praised Taiwan’s recent agreement with the self-declared state of Somaliland.
On July 1, Taiwan and Somaliland announced that they had entered into negotiations to set up representative offices in each other’s capital cities. That sparked a predictable wave of denunciations by both the Chinese and Somali governments who see both as renegade territories within their own countries.