Isaias is the perfect player in today’s shifting world order — a leader with few scruples who has diversified and hedged his bets across different actors.

Source: Sahan – The Ethiopian Cable Team Issue 329 | 28 April, 2026

Last week, a bombshell Wall Street Journal article revealed that Washington was exploring a reset in relations with Eritrea, with US envoy for Africa Massad Boulos having met privately with senior regime officials in Egypt. Any normalisation of ties now appears to be on ice, with the reaction to Boulos’s meetings — facilitated by Egypt — having been met with short shrift. But the episode speaks to broader issues about American foreign policy in the Horn and the accelerating reconfiguration of the Red Sea political order, which will not go away simply because this particular overture may have stalled.

Boulos framed the meetings as part of a broader policy shift for the region, with Eritrea’s strategic Red Sea coastline — even before the Middle Eastern conflagration — seemingly drawing Washington toward considering lifting sanctions on Asmara, the hermit kingdom of the Horn of Africa. It is an embarrassing revelation for Washington, and particularly for Boulos, who has been floundering in his envoy role for several months. On the face of it, the calculation appeared straightforward, with Eritrea controlling roughly 1,200 kilometres of Red Sea coastline, the waterway now among the most strategically contested geography on earth.

But the US, albeit a fading global hegemon, is just one of several powers jostling for a toehold on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Cameron Hudson, a former US State Department and intelligence official, succinctly captured the problem in the Wall Street Journal, stating that “normally, when we lift sanctions, the country has done something to merit it” — yet Eritrea remains, in his words, “the exact same militarised, autocratic state that it has been since 1993.” As Hudson further warned in Foreign Policy, it is not at all clear what the US would be receiving in return for the normalisation of ties.

For decades, Asmara — or rather President Isaias Afwerki — has aspired to the security guarantees of the US, with much of its railing and posturing against “American hegemony” designed precisely for Washington’s ears. But isolated from the Horn by its own aggressive regional foreign policy — Eritrea has stoked war with each of its neighbours — and by Ethiopian domination, Asmara has been out in the diplomatic cold for much of the 21st century. Isaias’s own militarised shell-state has hardly helped, with indefinite military conscription, endemic poverty, and an ageing cabal of People’s Front for Democracy and Justice figures defining the country. Its forces were responsible for some of the grimmest war crimes during the Tigray war, including the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Axum in November 2020. What has not changed is the nature of Eritrea’s body politic, which remains sealed off and a shell-state.

But Eritrea’s position in the region changed, partially, in 2018, and there is a grim irony for Addis that Washington’s recent entreaties to Asmara — backed by Cairo — come as Eritrean-Ethiopian relations are at their lowest ebb since the border conflict of 1998-2000. Eight years ago, the breaking of bread between the new Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Isaias — facilitated by the Gulf and particularly the UAE — restored Eritrea into the regional fold, lifted sanctions on the ageing dictator, and won the reforming Ethiopian leader the Nobel Peace Prize. That moment simultaneously represented the fracturing of African Union-centred, multilateral normative peacemaking into the transactionalist deal-making of the Gulf. Much has changed in the intervening years– the destructive war in Tigray, the metastasising of insurgencies in Oromia and Amhara, and a new regional order shaped by the pulling of the Horn of Africa into the politics of the Arabian Peninsula, with divisions between Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia spilling onto the shores of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden with calamitous consequences.

In the past months, though, relations between Addis and Asmara have deteriorated to their most dangerous point since the border wars of the late 1990s. Abiy, facing severe domestic pressure from multiple insurgencies and economic fragility, has repeatedly invoked Ethiopia’s claim to Red Sea access — specifically identifying Eritrea’s port of Assab, just 60 kilometres from the Ethiopian border, as a historic right to be restored. Military parades in Hawassa have featured banners proclaiming Ethiopia would not remain landlocked “whether you like it or not,” with imagery of a soldier breaking a wall toward the port. And the geostrategic real estate value of Assab — despite its decrepit state — is soaring further still with US-Israeli adventurism into Iran, revealing in grim clarity the shaky ground upon which the globalised energy industry is built, and the renewed significance of chokepoints.

Isaias is the perfect player in today’s shifting world order — a leader with few scruples who has diversified and hedged his bets across different actors. Cairo and Riyadh, particularly, have forged closer relations with Asmara in the past eighteen months, with Egypt set on denying Ethiopia access to Assab and Saudi Arabia motivated by its own rivalries with Abu Dhabi. The Red Sea is dominated by the Saudi-Egyptian axis, but the Gulf of Aden is a more complex prospect, with DP World-run ports at Bosaaso and Berbera reflecting Emirati ambitions that cut across Riyadh’s. Eritrea has been hosting Sudanese aircraft following a barrage of RSF drones that struck Port Sudan in May 2025. Moreover, Asmara has imported vast quantities of armaments from its allies, restoring its military supplies in preparation for a renewed conflict with Ethiopia that, thankfully, has not yet materialised.

Cairo has been at the centre of facilitating the move to restore Eritrean-US ties, and this should be understood within the broader attempt to diplomatically — and potentially militarily — isolate Addis. Particularly since the inauguration of the GERD last September, Egypt has sought to encircle Ethiopia, signing a raft of bilateral agreements with Eritrea and Djibouti whilst furthering its ties with Somalia. Addis has struggled to make headway with the US administration, with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi a particularly close Trump ally. El-Sisi is pushing Washington toward a maximalist approach, but the question is how far Cairo is willing to go — whether Egyptian pressure will remain diplomatic and economic, or whether some form of limited strike at the GERD, direct or proxied, remains on the table.

All of this would suggest the need for a holistic, region-wide strategy from Washington — one in which the reverberations of possible sanctions-lifting on Eritrean-Ethiopian relations, the Sudan war, the GERD negotiations, and more besides are carefully considered. There is perhaps a broader deal to be done, but those with the heft to broker it are looking at the conflagration in the Middle East. Instead, this would be the third intervention by the Trump administration in the Horn that could be read as aligning Washington with the Egyptian-Saudi axis against Ethiopia and the Emirates. Trump has previously waded into the GERD dispute at Cairo’s direct request, applying pressure on Addis over a dam that Egypt regards as existential, and the second was Washington’s posture on the Quad and Sudan, where Saudi Arabia’s interests have broadly shaped the parameters of American engagement. Now comes Eritrea — facilitated once again by Cairo — completing what looks more like a pattern of deference to the Gulf-Egyptian axis than a coherent Horn of Africa strategy. 

It would perhaps be better if the US’s explicitly transactional foreign policy had a broader underlying vision for the region. Instead, the Africa file has been relegated to a mixture of domestic grievances — Minnesota and Ilhan Omar for Somalia, rare earth minerals for the DRC-Rwanda peace deal, some counter-terror policy, and a broader delegation of authority to allies in the Gulf. Interventions from the White House on Sudan and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam have come only from direct requests, not from any coherent regional vision. A US rapprochement with Eritrea, unsupported by any Sudan framework, would simultaneously embolden Asmara on two fronts — against Addis and in its alignment with the Sudanese Armed Forces — at a moment when the collision course is most live.

Isaias has sought American security guarantees for 30 years. That aspiration was always, at some level, a negotiating position. The rough sketches of today’s transactional world order may finally allow him to cash it in — on terms that suit Asmara, Cairo, and Riyadh far more than they suit Addis, or ultimately, Washington itself.