The end of UNSOS? Takeaways from the U.S. announcement
The writing was already on the wall
The days seem numbered for the UN Support Office in Somalia. On 1 July, the U.S. Mission in Addis Ababa sent a diplomatic note to the African Union (AU) Commission informing it that
the United States will not support the continuation of the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS) beyond the current authorization for the AU Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) ending December 31, 2026.
The United States has no objection to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) renewing the Chapter VII mandate for AUSSOM when it comes up for renewal in December this year, should the AU wish to continue the mission. The United States would not, however, support the UNSC renewal of AUSSOM if it includes UNSOS or any UN logistical or operational support.1
None of this should have been a surprise. The Trump administration has long opposed the use of UN assessed contributions to directly finance AU operations, and it has been particularly critical of UN support to AUSSOM. Indeed, UNSOS was not among the handful of missions that the U.S. selectively funded last year as part of its blatantly à la carte approach to the payment of UN assessed contributions.
For a refresher on UNSOS in particular and the history of UN support to non-UN forces more broadly, I suggest reading this post from last year:
There are many lessons to be learned from the 17 years of UN-funded support to AU peace support operations in Somalia, but I want to focus on three overarching ones.
Geopolitics and AU financing
First, the debate over using UN assessed contributions to finance AU peace support operations isn’t really about improving the multilateral conflict management and resolution toolkit, or even about strengthening the UN-AU partnership. It’s about geopolitical competition. A framework resolution such as resolution 2719 (2023) has never been required for the Security Council to provide non-UN forces with access to assessed contributions, as we so clearly saw last year with the establishment of the UN Support Office in Haiti to prop up the Gang Suppression Force.
The push for a framework resolution was, in fact, part of a campaign during the final years of the Obama administration to shore up its legacy vis-à-vis engagement with Africa. After African leaders committed in January 2015 to paying 25% of the AU peace support operations budget,2 the United States began floating a proposal to finance the remaining 75% through UN assessed contributions.3 This culminated in the adoption of Security Council resolution 2320 (2016), which requested the development of options for operationalizing such a financing arrangement. For the Obama administration, championing the financing issue was a way of bolstering its credentials with African countries while leaving the bill to the next administration. But progress quickly stalled under the first Trump administration, which used the threat of a veto to block adoption of a draft resolution on financing in 2018.
China resurrected the issue during its presidency of the Security Council in August 2022. In fact, China—which became the second-largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping in 2016—had become a fiscal hawk and had no desire to increase its large and growing contributions to the UN. Taking up the mantle of AU financing, however, was a way for China to increase its standing with the African members of the Security Council while also putting political pressure on the United States, which was wary about opening the door to the broader use of UN assessed contributions.4
The need for AU financial autonomy
All of this underlines the need for the AU and subregional configurations to be able to finance their own peace and security activities and not allow the solvency of peace support operations be held hostage by the whims of donors. But many African countries and many AU Commission officials remain unwilling to take responsibility for their own continental and subregional peace and security efforts, and instead remain content to perpetuate a culture of dependence on donor countries. As stated in the 2023 AU consensus paper on financing,
the AU argues that its peace support operations are a global good undertaken on behalf of the UN Security Council which has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Accordingly, in instances where the UN authorizes the AU to undertake a peace support operation in lieu of the UN, the UN should provide the means to undertake such missions.5
This is just an excuse. The Security Council has been authorizing non-UN forces in support of the maintenance of international peace and security since the United Nations Command in 1950. There has never been an obligation for the UN to finance non-UN missions it authorizes, as the associated costs are not “expenses of the Organization” under Article 17(2) of the United Nations Charter.
More broadly, the African Union also needs to be clearer-eyed about the funding landscape at the UN, including both the fiscal hawkishness of major donors and the magnitude of the ongoing financial crisis. During last year’s negotiations over the financing of AUSSOM, the AU Commission failed to appreciate the fact that resolution 2719 was a delicately negotiated compromise. The Commission tried to be clever and get more than 75% of the costs of AU operations in Somalia paid using UN assessed contributions by presenting what it euphemistically called a “hybrid” application of resolution 2719, an approach which neither reflected the letter nor the spirit of the compromise.6 As the U.S. ambassador pointed out during the Security Council meeting on 27 December 2024,
the hybrid model proposed…implies that the United Nations would continue to fully fund UNSOS through United Nations-assessed contributions and that resolution 2719 (2023) would apply solely to troop reimbursements. That arrangement would result in United Nations-assessed contributions effectively funding more than 90 per cent of the aggregate Mission cost. That is clearly not what resolution 2719 (2023) envisioned.7
The heavy-handed approach by the AU ultimately backfired when the (second) Trump administration blocked the proposed funding arrangement for AUSSOM. That should have been a wake-up call for the AU to get its finances in order.
Take seriously the stabilization dilemma
The implications of the U.S. announcement go beyond the fate of UNSOS, as—without the support provided by UNSOS—AUSSOM is itself unlikely to survive unless considerable bilateral support is mobilized in the coming months. But is it worth saving in its current form and function?
Despite nearly twenty years of AU peace support operations in Somalia, sustainable peace remains elusive. The militarized nature of AU interventions has much to blame for the current state of affairs. Given the security provided by AU forces, there has been little incentive either for host state authorities to prioritize the investments in the Somali National Army required to allow it to take on responsibility for security or for political elites to engage in the dialogue required to resolve the underlying social, political, and economic drivers of conflict in the country.
The scheduled departure of the UN political mission later this year certainly doesn’t help. When the Somali government first requested the departure of the political mission in May 2024, the UN—including both the Secretariat and the Security Council—should have pushed back and conditioned the continued presence of UNSOS on the continued presence of the special political mission. As I’ve previously argued, support to non-UN forces should ideally be provided through the UN entity with responsibility for political engagement to ensure coherence between military efforts and an overall political strategy for the resolution of a conflict. The presence of a UN support office in Somalia separate from the UN political mission is not best practice, but rather a consequence of circumstances specific to the Somalia context.
Final thoughts
Somalia provides yet another case study that shows that there is no military solution to conflict. Military interventions may seem to be a more straightforward and less expensive alternative to multidimensional peace operations, but we know from experience that military interventions can, at best, manage symptoms of conflict such as civilian casualties; they do not address the underlying social, economic, and political drivers of conflict and indeed reduce the incentives for doing so. As such, military interventions often end up being far more costly in the longer term.
The ability of militarized interventions—whether by the UN, the AU, a subregional configuration, or ad hoc coalition—to prevent a crisis from escalating out of control depends on the continued willingness of donors to indefinitely finance an intervention. We are now in a time when multilateral peace operations are increasingly likely to be expelled despite ongoing fragility, conflict and violence. A new approach is required, one where the UN and its member states recommit to peacemaking, ensure that missions return to the fundamental principles that allow them to play a credible role in diplomacy and mediation, and refocus the implementation and coordination of mandated tasks in a manner that supports political—rather than military—strategies for resolving conflict.
© 2026 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations University.
U.S. Mission to the African Union. (2026, July 1). Diplomatic note 118-26 addressed to the African Union Commission[Note Verbale].
The AU has traditionally relied upon donors to finance its activities, particularly those related to peace and security.
U.S. Mission to the United Nations. (2015). Non-Paper: Institutionalizing UN Support for AU Peace Operations.
For a historical overview of deliberations in the Security Council on the financing issue, see Security Council Report. (2023). The Financing of AU Peace Support Operations: Prospects for Progress in the Security Council? https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/au_financing_2023.pdf
African Union Commission. (2023). Consensus Paper on Predictable, Adequate, and Sustainable Financing for African Union Peace and Security Activities.
United Nations. (2024). Letter dated 26 November from the Secretary-General to the President of the Security Council.
United Nations Security Council. (2024). 9828th meeting, Friday, 27 December 2024, 10 a.m. (S/PV.9828). https://undocs.org/en/S/PV.9828