Date: Monday, 01 December 2025
The political landscape of the Horn of Africa was jolted in late 2023 by the resurgence of a decades-old ambition emanating from Addis Ababa. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government began a concerted campaign, articulating what it framed as Ethiopia’s historical and economic entitlement to sovereign access on the Red Sea (Abiy Ahmed, Address to Parliament, October 2023). This rhetoric, presented as a national imperative for a landlocked state, was not a novel diplomatic position but the latest activation of a persistent imperial ghost—a claim that has been used to mobilize for conflict and internal consolidation for over a century.
To analyse this claim through the lens of Addis Ababa’s narrative is to misunderstand it entirely. This three-part article posits that Ethiopia’s pursuit of the Red Sea is a political instrument, strategically deployed at a moment of profound internal fragmentation (International Crisis Group, The Red Sea Rising: Ethiopia’s Port Push and Regional Rivalry, 2024). It is a diversionary tactic, built upon a carefully curated but fundamentally flawed historical narrative, and it exists in direct violation of the modern legal principles that uphold African sovereignty (African Union, Constitutive Act, Article 4(b)). Furthermore, this belligerence has catalysed a fundamental regional realignment, inadvertently elevating Eritrea from a nation under constant threat to the pivotal, indispensable power in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea basin. Asmara’s strategic response, rooted in sovereign integrity and military deterrence, has made it the linchpin of a new counter-hegemonic bloc that stretches from the Nile to the Gulf of Aden, permanently altering the Horn’s geopolitical calculus.
A. The Fabricated Historical Pedigree
The cornerstone of Ethiopia’s claim is the invocation of the Axumite Kingdom as a direct and sole predecessor state. This is a profound historical manipulation. The Axumite Kingdom was a shared civilization of the region, a nexus of African and Semitic cultures that encompassed territories in modern-day Sudan, Eritrea, parts of northern Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia), and Yemen (Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity, 1991) and far from being a state. Its impressive achievements were built upon even earlier indigenous civilizations, including the Belew-Kelew, D’mit (Da’amat), Punt, and the vibrant port city state of Adulis, located squarely in modern-day Eritrea (Connah, African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective, 2001). The modern Ethiopian state’s attempt to claim Axum as its exclusive inheritance is an anachronistic political project, designed to construct a national mythos of perpetual coastal dominion that simply did not exist.
A clear-eyed examination of the subsequent centuries further dismantles this narrative. The Abyssinian Empire’s forays towards the coast in the 19th century were fleeting and militarily focused, never resulting in the control of the Red Sea coastline, limited to the sand dunes of Semhar (Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991, 2001). For over 400 years, this coast was under the firm control of the Ottoman Empire, followed by a period of Egyptian rule before a complete colonial control was established by Italy on the southern Red Sea coast (Erlich, The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Nile, 2002). Therefore, the notion of a European colonial conspiracy to severing a pre-existing Abyssinian/Ethiopian coastal state is a deliberate desire by Ethiopian rulers to create a convenient fiction.
Indeed, Emperor Menelik II, following his historic victory at Adwa in 1896, made a calculated strategic choice: he prioritized the conquest and incorporation of the fertile lands to the south of Shoa, which would become the core of modern Ethiopia’s territory, over a costly and uncertain push to the sea (Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, 1994).
The period from 1952 to 1991, when Ethiopia exercised control over the Eritrean ports of Massawa and Assab, is the most emotionally charged and deliberately misrepresented chapter. This control did not arise from a natural or historical right. It began with an UN-mandated federation that explicitly linked the autonomous state of Eritrea to the Sovereign Ethiopian Crown (under Emperor Haile Selassie), and not with the Ethiopian government (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 390 A(V), 1950). The emperor’s illegal dissolution of the Eritrean parliament and full annexation in 1962 was a brutal act that violated the UN Resolution 390 A(V), international law and extinguished Eritrean autonomy. This justified the armed struggle Eritreans started in 1961, a year before the annulment of the federal arrangement and annexation of Eritrea by the Ethiopian Emperor. The Eritrean war of independence lasted for 30 years (Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Domination, Resistance, Nationalism, 1941-1993, 1995). Therefore, Ethiopia’s subsequent loss of the coastline in 1991, after being defeated by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Army (EPLA of EPLF), was not a colonial amputation but the direct result of a successful liberation struggle, culminating in a UN-supervised referendum in 1993 where the Eritrean people overwhelmingly affirmed their sovereignty—the final, lawful chapter in the long process of decolonisation (UN Observer Mission for the Eritrean Referendum, Report of the Secretary-General, 1993).
B. The Legal and Moral Vacuum
In the context of contemporary international law, Ethiopia’s claim is not merely weak; it is non-existent. The very foundation of the post-colonial African order rests on two sacrosanct principles: ‘uti possidetis juris,’ which sanctifies the inherited colonial borders as the borders of modern states, and the right to self-determination (Organisation of African Unity, Cairo Declaration, 1964). Eritrea’s sovereignty, born from this process, is universally recognized by the United Nations, the African Union, and is explicitly accepted by the government of Ethiopia for over three decades to date. To now speak of a “right” to another nation’s territory is to advocate for a revisionist and illegal doctrine that threatens the stability of every state on the continent.
This legal void forces a critical question: what is the true motive for resurrecting this claim now? The answer lies not in foreign policy, but in the internal disintegration of the Ethiopian state. The country is reeling from an atrocious war in Tigray that may have claimed over two million lives (EFSDC, The Destruction of Tigray: A Comprehensive Analysis, 2023), with catastrophic conflicts now raging in Amhara and Oromia. Its economy is in freefall, with close to 90% of the population facing severe food insecurity (World Bank, Ethiopia Economic Update, 2024). For a regime presiding over this collapse, the “Red Sea threat” is a classic and desperate tool of diversionary politics—an attempt to manufacture a national crisis to unite a fractured populace against an external enemy, thereby diverting attention from catastrophic governance failures and internal ethnic strife (Tronvoll, K. The Ethiopia-Eritrea Nexus: From War to Peace and Back Again? 2024).
Crucially, this is not a unified Ethiopian national project. The current regime is dominated by former Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) now calling itself Prosperity Party of Oromia elite that has itself promoted a “Kush Empire” ideology, a vision of historical dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean (Jalata, Cultural Capital and the Crisis of Identity: The Oromo National Movement in Ethiopia, 2023). This reveals the port ambition not as a pan-Ethiopian cause, but as a sub-national, ethnocentric agenda of the ruling clique. It is precisely why the claim fails to resonate with other major ethnic groups like the Amharas, Tigrayans, Somalis, and Oromo intellectuals affiliated with Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) who rightly see it as a dangerous gambit that exacerbates their own immediate struggles for survival and political representation.
C. The Deliberate Deception of “Access” versus “Annexation”
The Abiy government’s strategy relies on a deliberate and cynical manipulation of language, a diplomatic sleight of hand designed to mislead different audiences. In English, for international consumption, Ethiopian officials speak of “peaceful access” and “dialogue,” terms that align with the rights of landlocked states under international law (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Part X). However, in Amharic and other local languages, the rhetoric from military commanders and affiliated media is starkly different, featuring overt threats, declarations of taking what is “rightfully ours,” and promises to secure a port “by any means necessary” (Amharic-language speeches by senior Ethiopian officials, compiled by the Eritrean Ministry of Information, 2023-2024). And in Oromiffa discourse, it is framed as a project of ‘our time to rule’, an attempt to assert Oromo domination over Ethiopia and the region. This trilingual duplicity is a calculated strategy to placate the international community while simultaneously inflaming nationalist and expansionist passions at home. The core of the deception is the intentional conflation of the lawful concept of “access” with the illegal act of “annexation.”
The muted response from the broader international community to Ethiopia’s overt threats is not an endorsement of its position, but a reflection of a cynical and fragmented global order where strategic interests consistently trump the defence of sovereignty, justice, and equality of nations under international law.
The United States, the historical architect of the failed “anchor state” policy in the Horn of Africa, finds itself paralyzed by the consequences of its own past actions. For decades, Washington anointed Ethiopia as its primary regional partner, channelling billions of dollars in aid and military support while willfully ignoring its internal repressions and its acts of aggression against Eritrea (Harry Verhoeven & Michael Woldemariam -2022: Who lost Ethiopia? The unmaking of an African anchor state and U.S. foreign policy, Contemporary Security Policy). This policy reached its moral and strategic nadir in 2002 when the U.S., along with the international community, stood passively by as Ethiopia rejected the “final and binding” ruling of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission – EEBC (EEBC, Decision Regarding Delimitation of the Border, 2002). This was not a mere diplomatic failure; it was a catastrophic abdication that taught the region a brutal lesson: international law was malleable, and the sovereignty of smaller nations was negotiable when it conflicted with the interests of powerful states and their chosen proxies.
This history has left Washington strategically neutered. It is unable to condone Ethiopia’s threats without betraying its own stated principles, unwilling to impose meaningful sanctions for fear of triggering a total state collapse—the “too big to fail” dilemma—and utterly incapable of engaging Eritrea as a constructive partner after decades of hostility and isolation (Magu, S. US Foreign Policy in the Horn of Africa: From Realism to Reversal, 2023). The result is a policy of impotence, reduced to issuing weak diplomatic statements urging “restraint” while the architecture of its regional strategy lies in ruins.
This Western paralysis is compounded by the active engagement of other global powers, each with its own agenda. China, with massive infrastructure investments in Ethiopia under its Belt and Road Initiative, would inevitably veto any UN Security Council sanctions to protect its economic stakes (China Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China’s Policy Paper on Africa, 2021). Russia, seeking to expand its global influence, is actively courting the Abiy government, offering diplomatic cover and military partnerships without political conditions, positioning itself as a counter to Western “interference” (Russia-Africa Summit, Joint Declaration, 2023). Meanwhile, Middle Eastern powers, particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are playing a complex and often destructive game. The UAE’s “unholy alliance” with Ethiopia is driven by its desire to secure port access and vast agricultural land for its own food security, using Ethiopia as a proxy to advance its interests in Somalia (through the Somaliland gambit) and to pressure Eritrea for concessions on Assab (International Crisis Group, The Gulf’s Scramble for Africa, 2023).
Confronted with this existential threat and a vacillating international community, Eritrea has not remained passive. It has executed a masterful strategic pivot, transforming itself from a nation under siege into the pivotal, indispensable power in the Red Sea basin. This ascendancy, which can be termed the “Asmara Doctrine,” is built upon four immutable pillars.
A. The Primacy of Strategic Sovereignty:
In a region often characterized by clientelism, Eritrea’s fierce commitment to non-alignment is its greatest strength. It is not beholden to any single external patron—be it the U.S., China, or Russia. This allows Asmara to form flexible, tactical alliances based solely on a cold-eyed calculation of its own national interest, making it an unpredictable and crucial independent actor that all others must court or contend with (Tedesros, F. Eritrea’s Foreign Policy: The Logic of Self-Reliance, Journal of Modern African Studies, 2022).
B. The Credibility of Military Deterrence:
Eritrea maintains a large, battle-hardened military in a permanent state of readiness, forged in a three-decade struggle for independence. This is not an offensive force, but a profoundly credible deterrent. It makes the cost of any military aggression by Ethiopia prohibitively high, forming the unshakeable bedrock of its national security and granting it immense strategic leverage (International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2024).
C. Command of the Maritime Crossroads:
Eritrea’s geography is its geopolitical destiny. Its sovereign control over the strategic Dahlak Archipelago and its commanding position over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—a vital chokepoint for global shipping—grants it a vital role in international maritime security (Chalk, P. The Bab el-Mandeb: A Maritime Chokepoint of Global Significance, RAND Corporation, 2023). This is not just a military asset; it is the gateway to the $4 trillion Blue Economy, a source of immense future economic power that far surpasses the landlocked dilemmas of its rivals (World Bank, The Potential of the Blue Economy, 2017).
D. Architect of the Counter-Hegemonic Bloc:
Eritrea is no longer just a player; it is the strategic nexus of a new regional order. It has moved to the centre of a network of states united by their wariness of Ethiopian and UAE dominance. This is not a random collection of allies but a deliberate architecture. Its deep, historical alliance with Somalia, rooted in shared struggles, provides a strategic partner on Ethiopia’s eastern flank (Hashi, A. The Unbreakable Bond: A History of Eritrean-Somali Relations, 2021). Its critical security partnerships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia create a powerful northern and maritime front (Mekonnen, Y. The Egypt-Eritrea-Saudi Axis: Reshaping Red Sea Security, Sada Journal, Carnegie Endowment, 2024). And its long-standing ties with Sudan, deepened amidst the latter’s internal conflict, secure its western border. This bloc is not merely bilateral; it represents a fundamental recalibration of power aimed at checking expansionist ambitions and enforcing a regional balance.
This pivotal status now projects Eritrea’s influence beyond the Red Sea, directly into the heart of the Nile Basin geopolitics. By forming a strategic bloc with the downstream states of Egypt and Sudan, Eritrea has effectively merged the two most critical security theatres in North-East Africa (Mekonnen, Y. The Egypt-Eritrea-Saudi Axis: Reshaping Red Sea Security, Sada Journal, Carnegie Endowment, 2024). This creates a second, northern front of strategic pressure on Ethiopia, complicating Addis Ababa’s calculus and forcing it to confront a multi-front diplomatic and security challenge. The hegemonic campaign has decisively shifted “from the Dam to the Port,” and in this new, expanded arena, Eritrea is no longer a peripheral figure but an unavoidable and decisive power broker.
The burden of this complex and dangerous inheritance now falls upon the younger generations of Eritrea and Ethiopia. For the Ethiopian youth, their task is not to re-fight the battles of their grandparents but to deconstruct the nationalist myths and state propaganda they have been fed. This requires a conscious movement of critical education, seeking out alternative histories and primary sources that challenge official curricula. It demands digital literacy to identify and counter state-sponsored disinformation designed to inflame tensions. Most importantly, it requires building direct, people-to-people bridges—through social media, cultural exchange, cross-border community engagements and academic collaboration—that bypass the hostile narratives of their government.
For Eritrean youth, the task ahead is to help build a deeper foundation for unity and regional security. They must serve as a collective constituency for peace, championing a future in which stability in the Horn of Africa rests on respect for national identity and territorial integrity. Their role includes advancing economic cooperation with Red Sea neighbors, fostering a shared Blue Economy, and pushing the region toward a mindset that abandons the zero-sum impulses of Ethiopia’s elites in favor of a sober acceptance of reality and a commitment to genuine coexistence.
The ultimate trajectory of the region, however, hinges entirely on the political evolution of Ethiopia itself. The post-Abiy era, whenever it arrives, will represent a critical juncture, presenting three starkly divergent scenarios for the future (International Crisis Group, The Red Sea Rising: Ethiopia’s Port Push and Regional Rivalry, 2024):
I. The Collapse and Regional Contagion (The Highest Risk Scenario):
If Abiy’s fall triggers a violent, unmanaged disintegration of the Ethiopian state into warring ethnic fiefdoms, the entire Horn will be consumed by a firestorm. The consequences would be catastrophic: millions of refugees flooding into Eritrea, Sudan, Kenya, and Djibouti; rampant conflict spilling across borders as militias clash; and a vast ungoverned space becoming a perfect breeding ground for terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab. In this scenario, Eritrea would have no choice but to adopt a “strong border doctrine,” sealing its frontiers and engaging in decisive military strikes to protect its sovereignty from the emanating chaos.
II. The Rise of a New Hegemon (The High-Risk Continuation):
If the power vacuum in Addis Ababa is filled by another ethno-nationalist-militaristic regime, whether from a dominant ethnic faction or the federal army itself, the current cold war will simply intensify. The “port obsession” would remain a central tool for nationalist mobilization. In response, Eritrea would maintain and intensify its deterrence and alliance strategy. The existing counter-hegemonic bloc would likely formalize into a more explicit military-security pact, locking the region into a costly and protracted arms race and a permanent state of high tension.
III. The Fragile Opportunity for a Regional Reset (The Guarded Possibility):
The only path to sustainable stability is a negotiated, inclusive political transition in Ethiopia that leads to a government which acknowledges the catastrophic failure of the hegemonic model. Such a government, potentially built on a genuine federal compact or confederation within Ethiopia, would renounce expansionism, and prioritize internal stability and good-neighbourly relations out of sheer necessity. This is the only scenario that would allow Eritrea to fundamentally shift its role from a pivotal deterrent to a pivotal partner for development. It would enable Asmara to demobilize parts of its military, focus on its own economic development, and engage as a respected stakeholder in regional forums focused on shared infrastructure, trade corridors, and collective security. It would avert the collapse of the Ethiopian state and unlock the immense potential of the region.
The Indispensable Nation
The Red Sea gambit is a high-stake confrontation where the first casualty has been the truth. Ethiopia’s claim is exposed as a dangerous political diversion, a phantom limb of a lost empire invoked to salvage a regime drowning in its own domestic failures. In response, Eritrea, through strategic clarity, military preparedness, and diplomatic acumen, has cemented its role as the indispensable nation in the Horn of Africa’s geopolitical equilibrium. Therefore, the future of this volatile region is no longer a story dictated solely from the halls of power in Addis Ababa (Arat Kilo). It is now a narrative being shaped, decisively, from Asmara, in concert with a coalition of regional powers who have staked their security on a simple, non-negotiable principle: that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations is the only legitimate foundation upon which lasting peace and prosperity can be built. The world must look past the noise of Ethiopian propaganda and vintage ambitions of regional imperial hegemony to recognize this new, decisive reality. The stability of the Red Sea and the Horn depend on it.
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