Barking at Eritrea While Ethiopia Unravels

Addis Ababa Can Expel Diplomats. It Cannot Expel Geography.

By Alula Frezghi

Ethiopia has closed its embassy in Asmara, expelled Eritrean diplomats, and dressed the escalation in the language of national security. But the timing raises the more important question: why is Addis Ababa suddenly barking so loudly at Eritrea while the political ground beneath it is shifting at home? The answer may have very little to do with Eritrea.

Ethiopia is confronting armed opposition, deep political fractures, ethnic grievances, economic pressures, and a widening struggle over the authority of the central government. Opposition forces are challenging Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government from different directions, while the possibility that some may eventually turn their sights toward Arat Kilo—the seat and symbol of political power in Addis Ababa—cannot be dismissed from Ethiopia’s increasingly volatile political landscape.

Seen against that background, the escalation against Eritrea looks less like a response to an external threat than an attempt to manage an internal crisis. Governments losing political ground at home have long discovered the usefulness of enemies abroad. Nothing manufactures temporary patriotism quite like convincing a divided population that its real problem lives across the border. Ethiopia has tried this before.

During the 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war, the TPLF-led government mobilized Ethiopian nationalism against Eritrea. The war consumed tens of thousands of lives, displaced populations, devastated communities, and imposed enormous economic costs. What it did not do was cure Ethiopia’s political contradictions. Those contradictions survived the battlefield, survived the TPLF-led government itself, and eventually helped produce the political upheaval that carried Abiy Ahmed to power.

More than two decades later, Addis Ababa appears tempted by another version of the same failed prescription.

Since 2023, Abiy has steadily elevated Ethiopia’s lack of sovereign Red Sea frontage from a practical economic challenge into an existential national cause. A problem that could be addressed through commerce, transit agreements, infrastructure, and negotiated port access has instead been wrapped in the language of history, destiny, geography, population, and national survival. The political utility is not difficult to see.

If Amhara and Tigrayans cannot be rallied around Abiy’s government, perhaps they can be rallied around the Red Sea. If Afar, Somali, Oromo, and other Ethiopians disagree about the country’s political order, perhaps a maritime cause can persuade them that their real grievance lies not in Addis Ababa but somewhere beyond Ethiopia’s borders. Turn Assab into a national obsession, portray landlocked geography as an injustice, and perhaps yesterday’s domestic adversaries can be transformed into tomorrow’s soldiers for a common cause. There is only one problem: it has not worked.

The Amhara conflict did not disappear when Abiy began talking about the Red Sea. Tigray’s crisis did not evaporate when Ethiopian officials and commentators began invoking Assab. Afar political interests cannot simply be assumed to align with Addis Ababa’s maritime ambitions. The Somali Region has interests and calculations of its own. Even among Abiy’s own Oromo constituency, grand visions of a Cushitic destiny stretching from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean have not erased profound political divisions. If the Red Sea was supposed to become the glue holding Ethiopia together, it has proved to be remarkably poor adhesive.

And so Eritrea becomes useful again. The louder Ethiopia’s domestic crisis becomes, the louder the accusations against Asmara. The more difficult Ethiopia’s internal contradictions become to explain, the more attractive the foreign culprit. Eritrea today, perhaps Egypt tomorrow, Somalia the day after, Sudan or some Arab state whenever convenient. There always seems to be someone outside Ethiopia available to explain what is happening inside Ethiopia. At some point, however, the mirror has to face inward.

Eritrea did not create the Amhara conflict. It did not create Tigray’s political divisions, Oromo grievances, tensions in the Somali Region, arguments over ethnic federalism, disputes over political representation, economic discontent, or Ethiopia’s century-old struggle over the character of the state itself. These are Ethiopian problems.

Indeed, the search for foreign culprits has become so predictable that one is tempted to ask, with only slight exaggeration, how long it will be before Eritrea is blamed for Ethiopia’s droughts, food insecurity, or the next El Niño.

Therein lies the absurdity. Externalizing responsibility may produce speeches, headlines, diplomatic expulsions, and temporary nationalist excitement. It does not produce solutions.

Closing an embassy does not defeat an insurgency. Expelling Eritrean diplomats does not reconcile Amhara opposition with Addis Ababa. Accusing Asmara does not resolve Tigray’s political crisis. Red Sea speeches do not settle Oromo grievances or determine the political direction of the Somali Region. And none of it moves Ethiopia one inch closer to sovereign territory on the Red Sea. That last point matters because Ethiopia’s domestic crisis has increasingly become entangled with its maritime rhetoric. Eritrea is a sovereign Red Sea state. Its independence is not provisional, its coastline is not conditional, and Assab and Massawa do not become Ethiopian because Ethiopia is larger, more populous, landlocked, or economically dependent on maritime trade. There is nothing complicated about this.

Ethiopia can negotiate access. It cannot negotiate Eritrea’s sovereignty. Assab and Massawa can serve Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic, or any other country with which commercially viable arrangements can be reached. Ports exist to facilitate commerce. Roads, railways, transit corridors, customs arrangements, storage facilities, tariffs, and long-term commercial agreements can all be negotiated. But a customer does not become the owner of the shop because it needs what the shop sells.

Economic necessity does not create territorial title. Dependence does not confer sovereignty. Landlocked geography does not give one country a deed to its neighbor’s coastline. That distinction should be elementary. Yet maritime nationalism becomes politically tempting when domestic politics become unmanageable. If Addis Ababa cannot reconcile Amhara and Tigrayan opposition, consolidate Oromo support, count confidently on Afar or Somali backing, or build a durable national consensus, pointing toward Eritrea offers an easier political script. It is also a dangerous one.

Ethiopia already tested the proposition that confrontation with Eritrea could manufacture national unity. The 1998–2000 war demonstrated the limits of that strategy. War may temporarily rally a population around a flag, but it cannot resolve the contradictions that produced the divisions in the first place. Another confrontation would be even more reckless. Ethiopia would not be replacing its domestic conflicts with an external one. It would merely be adding another war to those it already has.

That is why the embassy closure should not distract from the larger story. Addis Ababa faces a choice. It can confront the reasons so many Ethiopians are alienated from the central government, which requires compromise, political imagination, dialogue, reconciliation, and an honest examination of the Ethiopian state. Or it can look for an enemy. The first course is difficult. The second merely requires pointing north. But Eritrea cannot serve as the emergency exit from Ethiopia’s political crisis. Nor can the Red Sea.

Ethiopia has every right to seek dependable maritime access through Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Somaliland, Kenya, or any other commercially and politically feasible route. What it does not possess is a right to sovereign ownership or control of somebody else’s coastline. Recognizing that distinction is not anti-Ethiopian. It is the minimum requirement for peaceful relations between sovereign states.

Addis Ababa may close its embassy in Asmara. It may expel diplomats, issue accusations, invoke national security, resurrect historical grievances, and turn up the volume of its Red Sea rhetoric. But volume is not strategy. None of it will settle Amhara. None of it will reconcile Tigray. None of it will resolve Oromo discontent. None of it will determine the future of the Somali Region. And none of it will turn Assab into Ethiopian territory. Most importantly, none of it can change geography.

Ethiopia cannot relocate the Red Sea. It cannot wish Eritrea out of existence. It cannot convert commercial necessity into sovereign entitlement. And it cannot repair a fractured political order by blaming the country next door.

The embassy may close and the diplomats may leave. Addis Ababa may bark even louder at Asmara as its troubles at home deepen. But eventually the noise must stop, and when it does, Ethiopia will still be standing before the same problems it was trying to escape. Those problems are not in Asmara. They are not in Assab. They are not in Massawa. They are inside Ethiopia. And that is where they will have to be solved.