Always Betting on the Wrong Horse: America’s Myopic Policy in the Horn

The Sanctions Theater

Washington’s latest visa restrictions on so-called “hardline TPLF” leaders are being sold as a contribution to peace. They are not. They are not strategy, not conflict prevention, and not serious diplomacy. They are another performance from Foggy Bottom: a gesture dressed in the language of moral clarity while concealing a policy record defined by confusion, selective outrage, and repeated failure.

The problem is not merely the visa ban. The deeper problem is the worldview behind it. Washington’s Horn policy has long rested on a crude instinct: punish those who refuse to bend, reward those pliable enough to serve, and then call the result diplomacy.

For decades, the United States has mistaken clients for stabilizers, aggressors for partners, and collapsing political projects for anchors of regional order. In the Horn of Africa, Washington has not merely bet on the wrong horse. It has often doubled down on a horse already limping toward collapse.

The latest announcement confirms the pattern. Washington claims to restrain hardliners and encourage peace, but even its framing is fraudulent. The old American distinction between “moderates” and “hardliners” inside the TPLF, dating back to the 1998–2000 Ethiopian war against Eritrea, was always artificial. The TPLF had no meaningful division between principled moderates and reckless extremists. Its political culture was built on opportunism, manipulation, deception, and treachery.

Meanwhile, the people of Tigray, like the rest of Ethiopia, remain exhausted by war, militarization, propaganda, and elite power struggles. Addis Ababa continues its centralizing campaign against regional autonomy while reviving dangerous expansionist fantasies toward the coastline of neighboring states. That obsession with access to the sea has haunted the Horn for generations: under the emperor, under the Derg, under the TPLF, and now under the Prosperity Party. The regime names have changed. The imperial appetite has not.

For Eritreans, therefore, Foggy Bottom’s latest announcement does not signal seriousness. It confirms a familiar fraud. Washington claims neutrality while taking sides. It claims to prevent war while empowering those who manufacture instability. It claims to support peace while refusing to confront the expansionist habits that have repeatedly plunged the region into conflict.

A Long Record of Misreading the Horn

This is not new. Eritreans have seen this script before.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Washington sided with a decaying Ethiopian monarchy and helped trample the Eritrean people’s right to decolonization. That decision did not produce peace. It produced annexation, repression, armed struggle, and decades of bloodshed. The monarchy eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, only to be replaced by the Derg, a brutal pseudo-Communist dictatorship that drenched Ethiopia and Eritrea in terror.

Even after the Derg openly declared its Marxist orientation, Washington continued to provide diplomatic cover for Ethiopia’s crimes in Eritrea and provided cluster and napalm bombs through its middle east ally. Strategic blindness was rationalized as geopolitical necessity. Eritrean suffering was treated as expendable so long as the preferred horse in Addis Ababa remained useful, or at least recoverable.

Then came the TPLF, an Enver Hoxha-worshiping movement that reinvented itself for Western consumption as democratic, reformist, and reliable. Washington, with all its intelligence networks, diplomatic channels, and decades of access, still chose to embrace it. For nearly three decades, the TPLF was treated as a favored partner despite its authoritarian rule, manipulation of ethnic federalism, regional destabilization, and hostility toward Eritrea.

The 1998–2000 war exposed the rot in this relationship. Washington played a central role in brokering the June 18, 2000 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement and the subsequent Algiers Agreement. Yet when the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission issued its final and binding decision, and the TPLF-led Ethiopian government refused to implement it, Washington did not uphold the agreement it had helped broker. Instead, it tried to reopen, soften, or revise a delimitation and demarcation decision that was supposed to be final, binding, and non-negotiable.

That failure helped freeze the region in two decades of “no war, no peace.” Washington misread the EEBC ruling. It misread Eritrea’s security doctrine. It misread the dangers of ethnic federalism and demographic entitlement politics inside Ethiopia. It misread the 2018 peace agreement, treating it more as a diplomatic spectacle than as a binding correction to a long-standing injustice. Again and again, it chose the same path: pressure the independent actor; indulge the subservient and unstable one; and call it conflict management.

This is not principled diplomacy. It is coercion dressed up as peace.

From TPLF Patronage to Abiy’s Gamble

The same logic reappeared during the 2020–2022 TPLF war. When the TPLF lost power in 2018 and retreated to Mekelle, Washington again misread history. Rather than accepting that its favored client had collapsed, it behaved as if the old guard could be resurrected.

Before and during the war, Washington placed its bet on the TPLF, convinced that it could defeat Abiy Ahmed politically or militarily and return to relevance. TPLF narratives were amplified with missionary zeal. Its political relevance was shielded. Its propaganda was laundered through media, diplomatic channels, and selectively activated human-rights language.

TPLF leaders understood the script. Figures such as Seyoum Mesfin and Siye Abraha spoke openly they will internationalize the war once it began. They were coached what the pressure points are. They were told how Washington’s machinery worked. The choreography was familiar: manufacture outrage, mobilize sympathetic media, weaponize humanitarian language, and pressure the region until the defeated client is restored. They raised the slogan of “Tigray Genocide” before the first bullet was even fired. Eritrea was selected in advance as the convenient scapegoat. What followed was not reporting, but a propaganda operation so shameless and synchronized that even Goebbels would have recognized the method: repeat the lie, amplify the emotion, bury the facts, and turn accusation into evidence.

Washington did everything possible to save the TPLF politically and diplomatically. It applied pressure asymmetrically, looked away from inconvenient facts, tolerated the weaponization of humanitarian corridors, and entertained backdoor maneuvers that deepened mistrust rather than resolved conflict. The TPLF had ignited the war. Abiy Ahmed was the principal Ethiopian actor who carried it forward. Yet Eritrea alone was scapegoated and punished in 2021 for the transgressions of both.

Now that it looks the TPLF is splintered and sinking into the abyss, Washington appears ready to shift its chips to another failing horse: Colonel Abiy Ahmed. The rotation is called policy recalibration. In reality, it is the same old arrogance with a new mask. When one proxy collapses, Washington searches for another. The names change. The habit does not.

This is why the latest visa restrictions are not a correction. They are part of the same disease: selective blindness, punishment of independent states, indulgence of reckless clients, and refusal to confront the real sources of instability in the Horn.

The consequences are predictable. Abiy will read Washington’s ambiguity as permission. The region will become more militarized, not less. Communities will conclude that diplomacy is a slogan and survival is their own responsibility. The Horn will drift further into mistrust, fragmentation, and preemptive defense.

The Broken Reed of Foreign Patronage

No one should romanticize the TPLF’s current predicament. Its desperation is not principle. It is the panic of a political class that spent decades mistaking foreign patronage for permanent power.

For years, the same TPLF elites accused Eritrea of crimes they knew it had not committed. They lobbied foreign capitals, assembled false witnesses, celebrated sanctions, and worked through regional forums and international corridors to isolate Eritrea. They leaned on Washington, on sympathetic officials, on friendly media, and on the machinery of selective outrage. They believed Foggy Bottom would always shield them, endorse them, and rescue them.

History has delivered its verdict.

As the Tigrinya saying goes, ኢድ ሸናሒት ጸናሒት: the hand that strikes eventually remains to receive the blow in return. The instruments the TPLF once helped wield against Eritrea now hang over its own head. One day it was praised as an indispensable partner. The next, it became a liability to be managed. Such is the fate of those who reduce themselves to proxies and puppets.

To paraphrase an Old Testament prophet: In whom do you now trust, oh TPLF? Behold, you trusted in Foggy Bottom, that broken reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans upon it. Such is the fate of all who place their faith in foreign favor.

The TPLF had a neighbor in Eritrea that once nurtured it and helped carry it all the way to 4 Kilo. Yet gratitude gave way to arrogance, and arrogance to mischief. It worked tirelessly through Sanaa and Khartoum, Nairobi and Kampala, Djibouti and Baidoa. It cultivated friends in powerful corridors, lobbied against Eritrea, and mistook temporary usefulness for lasting friendship. But great powers have interests, not permanent loyalties. Those who build their house on foreign favor should not be surprised when the landlord changes the locks.

Eritrea, by contrast, learned these lessons the hard and honest way decades ago. It endured sanctions, distortions, and diplomatic hostility not because it was weak, but because it refused to be owned. It understood, long before others did, that survival in the Horn requires clarity, memory, sovereignty, and the discipline to see through the fog of international hypocrisy.

Washington’s visa bans will not bring peace. They will not discipline those who believe they are indispensable, nor will they revive those already abandoned. They are the gestures of a superpower that keeps confusing motion with strategy, pressure with principle, and proxies with stability.

The Horn of Africa deserves better than this tired cycle of misreading and misalignment. It deserves diplomacy rooted in reality, respect for sovereignty, rejection of expansionism, consistency in principle, and an end to the habit of rewarding whichever faction appears most useful to Washington at the moment.

Until that day comes, the region will continue to navigate its own path, guided not by lectures from distant capitals but by the hard lessons of its own history. And those who once leaned on the broken reed of foreign patronage will be forced to confront the truth Eritrea understood long ago: in the Horn of Africa, sovereignty is not granted. It is earned, defended, and remembered.

Conclusion

If Washington is serious about promoting peace and stability in the Horn of Africa, it must first free itself from the echo chambers and policy distortions created by narrow interest groups and well-funded lobbying networks that often prioritize their own agendas over regional realities. A tiny state with outsized influence and deep pockets should not be allowed to steer American policy toward endless crises, selective outrage, and strategic distractions.

The Horn does not need more proxy politics, more favored clients, or another cycle of manufactured enemies and temporary allies. It needs a policy grounded in facts, respect for sovereignty, consistency, and a genuine understanding of the region’s history and dynamics. Great powers should be guided by long-term strategic wisdom, not by lobbyists, ideological fashions, or the interests of those who profit from perpetual instability.

America’s challenge is not a lack of power, but a lack of clarity. Until Washington learns to distinguish between sound counsel and self-serving advice, it will continue to confuse motion with strategy and find itself, once again, betting on the wrong horse.