ABSTRACT
The intensifying Cold War meant that American support for colonial independence in Africa increasingly took second place to the needs for European support, and in the same way the US would support the French in Indochina, it also supported Italy in its demands for trustee status in Somalia. Although competition for the newly independent nations of the developing world would become a major theme of Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, in the immediate aftermath of the war there was no ‘inevitability’ of the conflict to come. The United States had emerged from the war relatively unscathed, and a dominant question in geopolitical circles was the role that the United States would play in this new world order. While the United States was supportive of Italian claims for trusteeship of Somaliland, the situation when it came to the future of Eritrea was complicated by the competing claim from the Ethiopian emperor.
