Big-power jockeying over Italy forced a ten-year Italian trusteeship on Somalia.

Evidence

The West was interested in retaining Italy as a member of their bloc; the Soviets hoped that Italian communists might win the forthcoming election, which would put Italy in the Soviet camp; and the Arabs were silenced by the resolution that assured Libyan independence. Somalia fell victim to this expedient coalition, and Italian return to the country for ten years was assured. The irony of the Soviet support for Italy is that the communists failed to win the elections, and the Soviets became one of the most critical voices against the Italian colonial administration in Somalia during the 1950s. Turkey and Iran were among the abstentions; being the West’s client states they could not oppose the West. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 1230

Categorization

• XREF: This tradeoff logic resembles the power-broker dynamics in the Champagne Fairs and other institutional-emergence readings. Readers interested in how small polities get caught between great powers should compare with Cold War histories of other trust territories.
• CANDY: The detail that the Soviets backed Italy’s return then became its loudest critic after their Italian proxies lost the election is a wonderfully ironic tidbit.