By Aaron Ruby

U.S. president Donald Trump never ceases to employ the violent language of gangsters.

On December 2, 2025, Trump unleashed yet another racist attack, this time ranting against Somalis, calling them “garbage” and stating that Somalia “stinks.” A day later, he also grotesquely slandered U.S. congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born Democratic politician, repeating his false claim that she married her brother to obtain U.S. citizenship.

This comes after decades of distortions and lies about Somali piracy, which in fact emerged from the collapse of Somali government and society, a nightmare created by the intervention of the wealthy families ruling the United States and European countries in particular. Scholars and United Nations (UN) agencies link such intervention to the collapse of state authority, illegal foreign fishing, and toxic waste dumping following Somalia’s civil war.

This is a good moment to review the horrific history of U.S. imperialism^[1] in Somalia, and the decisive role of successive U.S. administrations — Democratic and Republican — in that country’s destruction.

History of Somalia’s destruction

What today is Somalia was originally two separate colonies occupied by Italian and British imperialists, Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland, until independence in 1960.

Interestingly, the U.S.-dominated United Nations allowed the same Italian imperialists who were the former fascist occupiers to continue to “administer” Italian Somaliland as a UN trusteeship from 1950 to 1960.

In 1969, a military coup brought General Mohamed Siad Barre to power. The so-called Supreme Revolutionary Council seized the reins of government, suspended the constitution, banned political parties, and identified its rule as “Scientific Socialism.”

The regime was a dictatorship from the outset, but marketed itself as modernizing and “revolutionary,” in a bid to get Soviet sponsorship by offering a strategic base. Needless to say, the Stalinist^[2] regime in Moscow had no qualms about supporting a capitalist dictatorship, in exchange for a military base.

In 1974, Somalia formally joined the “socialist camp.” Barre signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which led to a significant increase in Soviet military advisors and war materiel.

That same year the Ethiopian people rose up and overthrew the brutal monarchy and semi-feudal landlord regime of despot Haile Selassie.

Moscow for a brief time supported both Somalia and Ethiopia. However, the administration of U.S. president Jimmy Carter began encouraging Somalia to militarily invade Ethiopia. The Barre regime did that in 1977, with the full knowledge and encouragement of the Carter White House.

In the largest tank battle in Africa since WWII, the Ethiopian army defeated the Somali invasion in 1978 thanks to internationalist support from Cuba.

Somali dictatorship becomes U.S. client regime

At that point, the Somali dictatorship became Washington’s client regime. The U.S. government pushed the Barre autocracy, which brutally ruled one of the poorest countries in Africa, to make large arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers that cost more than $40 million. The deals were naturally closed through U.S.-backed loans at usurious interest rates.

Needless to say, the Carter administration had earlier denounced the same Barre dictatorship as “evil.” But that was when it was under Soviet influence.

On August 22, 1980, the Carter administration signed an Arms-for-Base-Access Agreement with the Barre regime. This 10-year military cooperation accord granted the U.S. armed forces access to the former Soviet naval base in Berbera, and to another in Mogadishu, as well as to other airfield facilities.

Because of Carter’s weapons sales to the dictatorship and other such loans, by 1977, Somalia’s external debt was around $300 million, much of that from the USSR, but it was later mostly written off. By 1984, however, under U.S. domination, it grew to $1.4 billion, representing more than 12 times the value of 1983 exports, and equivalent to over 90% of GDP. According to World Bank estimates, real public sector wages in 1989 had declined by 90% compared to the mid-1970s, and debt servicing obligations represented 195% of export earnings. By 2019, Somalia’s external debt had ballooned to an incredible $5.4 billion, or 107% of GDP, of which nearly 96 percent was in arrears.

In order to extract interest payments from such inhumane and unpayable debt, the U.S. government and the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressured Somalia to eliminate food subsidies and get rid of subsistence food crops the Somali people depended on, and instead plant cash crops for export.

IMF and World Bank structural-adjustment programs resulted in currency devaluation, subsidy cuts, and export-oriented agricultural policies, which scholars argue undermined Somalia’s food security. This included planting cotton and bananas, which require massive quantities of water that Somalia simply did not have.

Somalia quickly went from tenuous food self-sufficiency to having to import most of its staple grains — often via commercial imports and food aid — much of it supplied through “donor” programs from the United States and the European Union.

Imperialist-dominated food dependence

This pattern of imperialist-dominated food dependence has been repeated across most semicolonial nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America for decades.

Particularly notorious was the Carter administration’s use of Public Law 480 (“Food for Peace”) to dispose of bumper crop surpluses, purchased by the U.S. government to subsidize U.S. agribusiness and prevent lower prices in times of increased supply.

Under the guise of a “foreign assistance and agricultural surplus disposal program,” it dumped rice and wheat in Haiti in the late 1970s. This was used by subsequent administrations to further undermine and destroy the native rice producers unable to compete with “free” rice disguised as “aid” to impose food dependency.

By 1985 Haiti managed to produce 163,296 metric tons of rice while U.S. imports amounted to 7,337 metric tons, for a total of 170,663 metric tons. But by 2000, local production had decreased to 130,000 metric tons while U.S. imports mushroomed to 219,590 metric tons. That trend would only worsen to the detriment of the Haitian people.

Since 1995, over $13 billion in U.S. government subsidies have gone to rice exports.

By 2014 Haiti was forced to import 90% of its rice from the United States.

Like Somalia, U.S. big business saturated Haiti with subsidized rice to undercut domestic production. And, in the case of Somalia, according to a 1987 audit by the Agency for International Development, food deliveries from Public Law 480 were timed to arrive during harvest, which undercut local farmers’ prices, instead of during the critical hungry period of food shortages.

Somalia’s civil war

As a result of such imperialist plunder, by 1990 Somali society was in complete collapse, facing starvation and drought, with the agricultural sector having nearly disappeared, forcing millions of farmers to flee from the interior to the coast. There was little fuel for irrigation pumps, trucks to transport food, or refrigeration. The people of Somalia were living hand to mouth.

Barre was overthrown in January 1991. The forces that toppled his hated regime — rival factions of the Somali bourgeoisie — sought to impose themselves as the new sheriff in town through tribal clans they controlled in various parts of the country, dragging Somalia into a civil war. The war raged through most of the 1990s. It has had less intense outbreaks until recently.

Using the United Nations as a fig leaf, U.S. forces intervened in Somalia in 1992. Taking advantage of a historic drought and a devastating famine, they tried to install a pliant and stable regime under U.S domination. Some 37,000 “UN peacekeepers,” including more than 20,000 U.S. troops, took part in the invasion.

The brutal attacks by the U.S. military were broadly opposed by the Somali people, culminating in the October 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident, during which 18 U.S. soldiers died and 84 were wounded as they indiscriminately killed or wounded some 700 to 1,500 Somalis, most of them civilians, one-third of them women and children. Outraged Somalis dragged bodies of deceased U.S. soldiers through the streets.

As public outcry grew, the Clinton administration was forced to withdraw the U.S. troops by 1995.

In this context of collapse of centralized government, agriculture, and the broader economy, the Somali people became extremely dependent on fishing for their food supply.

European capitalists and other big business from imperialist countries and regional powers saw an easy opportunity for profit. They began sending their fishing fleets into Somali waters right off the country’s coast, illegally taking nearly all of the fish, far exceeding Somali artisanal capacity and leaving the local population without adequate food.

In addition, foreign actors — particularly European companies— began dumping garbage and toxic wastes in Somali waters to evade costs of recycling and safe disposal. This further poisoned the waters and food supply. Following a tsunami in 2004, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) confirmed that hazardous waste, including medical and industrial materials, washed ashore on Somali beaches, indicating long-term dumping.

Somalia’s 2,000-mile-long coastline and vast 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone — combined with decades of political instability — have made its waters exceptionally vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by foreign fleets for decades. Recent analyses of satellite tracking data and fisheries reconstructions describe Somali waters as among the most intensively exploited and least regulated maritime zones globally, with large, persistent incursions by foreign vessels occurring with little to no oversight or enforcement.

A 2005 report by the Marine Resources Assessment Group for the UK government estimated that nearly 700 foreign vessels were fishing illegally in Somali waters annually.

Origins of Somali piracy

Lacking a centralized government or navy, Somali fishermen tried to scare off the foreign fishing and garbage vessels. However, they faced armed thugs hired by the fishing companies. In response, Somali fishermen also began shooting at the vessels and boarded some of them to demand they leave Somali waters and pay compensation.

UN Monitoring Group reports document that early armed Somali bands initially described themselves as “people’s coast guards,” seeking to deter illegal fishing, before ransom-based piracy emerged.

A report on the devastation of Somali fisheries concluded, “One could argue that it was the plundering of Somali fish stocks by illegal foreign vessels that should be considered the initial acts of piracy.”

Eventually, local capitalists began taking over these self-defense actions by the Somali fishermen, seeing an opportunity to make money by hijacking vessels for ransom.

Thus, it was the U.S. and European colonial plunder of the country and its resources and profiteering by other regional powers that actually engendered Somali piracy.

Far from being “criminals,” many early “pirates” were literally trying to keep their families alive, as European capitalists and the regimes in the Arab Persian Gulf looted their waters and dumped poison in them. In recent years, Asian trawlers have been increasingly involved in the illegal fishing in Somali waters.

For decades naval forces of the United States and Europe have prowled the waters of Somalia purportedly to stop pirate attacks. These included the European Union Naval Force Somalia – Operation ATALANTA, the European Union’s first maritime military operation, launched in December 2008 allegedly to combat piracy. But at no time did they stop foreign fishing trawlers from invading Somali waters to deprive the Somali people of vital food. The European imperialists’ only concern was the unimpeded movement of their commerce for their profits.

By 2010, the UN Refugee Agency reported that nearly 2 million Somalis, or 16% of the country’s population of 12.3 million at the time, were refugees or internally displaced due to military conflict, famine, and economic collapse.

So, Trump’s racist remarks about Somalia being full of “garbage” are accurate in a twisted sense. But naturally the U.S. president hides the record of U.S. imperialism and its allies that propped up the Barre dictatorship, imposed debt bondage, fueled the civil war, dropped their bombs, stole natural resources, and dumped their garbage in the country’s coastal waters, forcing millions of Somalis — like Ilhan Omar’s family — to emigrate.

What really “stinks” is imperialism, of the American and the European variety.

NOTES

[1] Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. It became predominant at the dawn of the 20^th century. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin gave this economic system the most apt definition in his famous work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. Imperialism is marked by five basic features, Lenin said: “(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital,’ of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”

At the second congress of the Communist International in July 1920, a report on the work of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions summarized the further development of imperialism this way: “The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The vast majority of the world’s population…belong to the oppressed nations…This idea of distinction, of dividing the nations into oppressor and oppressed, runs through the theses.

[2] Stalinism originated as the political and ideological justification for the policies of the privileged social caste that developed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.  In 1917, the working class and peasantry of Russia carried out one of the most deep-going revolutions in world history. In a matter of months, the revolution led to an unprecedented leap in the country from a semi-feudal monarchy to a republic run by working people of city and countryside, opening the possibility of the socialist transformation of society in the former Tsarist empire and around the world. But the new workers and peasants’ republic remained isolated internationally when opportunities to extend the revolution in Germany and other advanced capitalist countries in Europe were lost. Under the pressure of unrelenting hostility from the capitalist powers, reaction set in within 10 years. A privileged bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin violently crushed the opposition to its policies in the Bolshevik Party, which had led the revolution, and drove workers and peasants from political power. 

Stalinism replaced internationalism, which is fundamental to Marxism, with the idea of “socialism in one country.” It used thuggery and outright murder against those who defended Marxism around the world. It transformed the parties of the Communist International into subservient appendages of Stalin’s regime in the USSR. Over decades, it became the cumulative expression of the corruption of communism and Marxism, in the name of communism and Marxism. 

In his book, The Revolution Betrayed, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who was exiled by Stalin’s regime and eventually assassinated by its agents, gives the clearest and most detailed explanation of how and why this bureaucratic social layer was able to take and hold political power in the USSR.

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