Eritrea’s Strategic Geography Has a Longer Memory

The Red Sea State the World Keeps Rediscovering—and the Historical Record It Keeps Forgetting

By Alula Frezghi and David Yeh

The world has a peculiar habit when it comes to Eritrea: it forgets the country when the Red Sea is quiet and rediscovers it whenever the Red Sea becomes dangerous.

When shipping lanes are secure, great-power rivalry recedes, and Bab el-Mandeb slips from the headlines, Eritrea is often pushed to the margins of international analysis. Then conflict intensifies in Yemen, commercial vessels come under attack, maritime insurance costs rise, Gulf powers reposition themselves, or global competition returns to the Red Sea—and suddenly Massawa matters, Assab matters, the Dahlak Archipelago matter, and Eritrea is described once again as a country of renewed strategic importance. There is little that is genuinely new about this. The ships, the weapons, the alliances and the vocabulary of geopolitics may be new, the geography, however, is ancient.

For centuries, the coastline of what is now sovereign Eritrea has occupied a consequential position at the intersection of Africa, Arabia, the Mediterranean world, and the Indian Ocean. Adulis connected commercial networks across the Red Sea between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Successive regional and imperial powers understood the value of Massawa, Assab, the offshore islands, and the surrounding coastline. The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the first two major Islamic dynasties, the Portuguese, Ottoman and Egyptian ambitions reached these shores. European powers followed.

Italy incorporated the territory into its Red Sea strategy. Britain administered it after the Second World War. Cold War powers calculated their interests around it. Ethiopia fought to retain control over it, and Eritreans fought for three decades to recover sovereignty over it. The actors changed. The strategic calculation did not.

That continuity matters because contemporary reporting can create the impression that Eritrea has only recently become important, its relevance supposedly created by the war in Yemen, disruptions to international shipping, insecurity around Bab el-Mandeb, and intensifying competition among regional and global powers. The historical record suggests almost the reverse. Eritrea is not becoming strategically important. The world is rediscovering why it has always been strategically important.

A recent Deutsche Welle analysis framing Eritrea primarily through the lens of renewed strategic relevance therefore points to a broader analytical problem: the tendency to present a historical constant as though it were a contemporary development. Strategic attention may rise and fall, but strategic geography does not.

Understanding Eritrea’s place in the Red Sea requires three things to be kept together: history, sovereignty, and perspective. History explains why this coastline has mattered for centuries. Sovereignty determines who possesses political and legal authority over it today. Perspective prevents the Horn from being interpreted exclusively through the ambitions and requirements of larger powers. Without these anchors, Eritrea becomes visible only when someone else wants something from it. That is precisely the mistake history warns against.

The Coastline Empires Never Ignored

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean, is one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints. Eritrea’s significance within this geography long predates today’s crises.

Long before the emergence of the modern state system, the Adulis corridor connected the Horn of Africa to commercial networks extending across the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean world. Successive regional and imperial powers recognized the value of Massawa, the islands, and the surrounding coastline. Umayyad and Abbasid influence, Portuguese expansion, Ottoman power, Egyptian ambitions, and later European imperial competition all touched these shores because the location mattered. Italy therefore did not discover Eritrea’s strategic value. It inherited a geopolitical reality that earlier powers had already recognized and then institutionalized it through colonial rule.

When Italy formally established the Colony of Eritrea in 1890, Massawa and Assab became central components of its Red Sea strategy. Colonial administration consolidated boundaries, infrastructure, institutions, and administrative structures that profoundly influenced the formation of modern Eritrea. But colonial rule did not create the territory’s strategic importance.

The distinction is essential: Italy did not make Eritrea’s geography important; it imposed a more clearly bounded political and administrative structure upon a geography that had already mattered for centuries. Geography came first. Imperial competition followed.

When Geography Became Sovereignty

Italy’s defeat in the Second World War did not settle Eritrea’s political future. From 1941 until 1952, the territory remained under British Military Administration while the victorious powers and the emerging United Nations debated its ultimate disposition. Those deliberations were inseparable from geography.

Eritrea’s long Red Sea coastline, the ports of Massawa and Assab, and its position along maritime routes linking the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean made the territory strategically important at precisely the moment when the postwar international order and the Cold War were taking shape. The United States and other major powers were reassessing their military, political, and communications interests across the Horn and the Red Sea. Eritrea’s future was therefore never merely a constitutional question. It was also a strategic one.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 390 A(V), adopted in December 1950, provided for a federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia that came into effect in 1952. Eritrea retained substantial internal autonomy and its own institutions, including an elected assembly and flag. The arrangement, however, did not endure. Over the following decade, Eritrean autonomy was progressively dismantled. In 1962, Emperor Haile Selassie’s government dissolved the federal arrangement and incorporated Eritrea into Ethiopia. For Eritreans, this was far more than an administrative change. It marked the destruction of an internationally established political order under which Eritrea had possessed distinct autonomous status. And once again, geography stood behind the politics.

Control of Eritrea also meant control of an extensive Red Sea coastline, Massawa, Assab, and a strategic position along one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. What diplomacy treated as a question of political status was therefore inseparable from questions of access, power, and control. The struggle over Eritrea was never only about the land. It was also about the sea to which that land opened.

Thirty Years to Reclaim Sovereignty

The Eritrean armed struggle for independence, launched in 1961 and culminating in liberation in 1991, became Africa’s longest liberation wars. It spanned radically different Ethiopian political systems—from the imperial government of Haile Selassie to the Marxist-Leninist Derg—and unfolded against the shifting alliances of the Cold War. Governments, ideologies and international patrons changed, on the other hand, the geography did not.

For Eritreans, the struggle represented more than political self-determination in the abstract. It was also a struggle to recover sovereign authority over a territory whose coastline, ports, islands, and strategic position had repeatedly been treated as assets to be controlled, allocated, or exploited by others. Seen in that context, Eritrea’s sensitivity to questions of sovereignty is neither mysterious nor irrational. It is rooted in a long historical experience in which decisions about Eritrean territory were repeatedly made by outside powers.

In April 1993, Eritreans voted in a United Nations-observed referendum on independence. The result was overwhelmingly in favor of sovereignty. Eritrea formally declared independence on May 24, 1993, and subsequently joined the United Nations. Whatever opinion outsiders have about Eritrea’s post-independence political trajectory, the sequence through which its sovereignty emerged is difficult to erase: colonial consolidation, international administration, federation, annexation, three decades of armed struggle, liberation, referendum, and internationally recognized statehood. Eritrea did not suddenly appear on the political map in 1993. It was born in its current internationally recognized borders in 1890, was denied the right to decolonization in the 1940s and fought for three decades to reclaim its rightful sovereign place.

Access Is Not Ownership

The 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war demonstrated again how territorial disputes can destabilize not only two neighboring states but the wider Horn. The Algiers Agreement established the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, whose 2002 delimitation decision was designated final and binding. That legal history remains relevant because contemporary debates about Ethiopia’s maritime ambitions increasingly risk collapsing two very different concepts into one.

Landlocked states routinely secure access to ports through bilateral agreements, transit arrangements, infrastructure partnerships, and other negotiated mechanisms with coastal states. Such arrangements are normal features of international commerce and regional cooperation. But access to a port does not confer sovereignty over that port. Economic necessity does not create territorial title. Commercial interest does not establish a right to another state’s coastline, islands, territorial waters, or sovereign jurisdiction. Ethiopia’s interest in reliable and diversified access to the sea is understandable. But that is a matter for negotiation and cooperation, not territorial entitlement. The distinction is foundational. Once economic access is recast as a sovereign right, a solvable commercial question becomes a potentially dangerous territorial dispute. The Horn has already paid too high a price for such conflations.

Eritrea Is a Country, Not a Corridor

One of the most persistent analytical problems in discussions of Eritrea is the tendency to describe the country primarily through what others want from its territory. A logistical node for international shipping. A military position for a Gulf power. A port for Ethiopia. A security platform for Western states. A strategic counterweight in the Red Sea. Each description may contain an element of geopolitical truth. None defines Eritrea.

Eritrea is not a corridor waiting for a user, a coastline awaiting allocation, or a collection of ports detached from political sovereignty. Its islands are not geopolitical abstractions, and its borders are not provisional lines to be adjusted whenever an external actor develops a strategic requirement.

This is where historical memory becomes a strategic variable. For a state whose modern history has repeatedly involved outside powers deciding what should happen to its territory, sovereignty is not a technicality. It is central to national political consciousness. That reality must be understood before Eritrea’s foreign policy behavior can be interpreted seriously.

Beyond the Ethiopia-Centric Lens

Western analysis of the Horn of Africa has long been heavily Ethio-centric. Part of this is understandable. Ethiopia is Africa’s second-most populous country, and a seat of the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa making it an influential diplomatic actor.

But history has also supplied another lens. Ethiopia has often been portrayed in Western political thought as a predominantly Christian state surrounded by largely Muslim societies—an “island of Christianity in a sea of Islam.” At various moments, this image, reinforced by Western anxieties about Islam and later by counterterrorism priorities, helped sustain the perception of Ethiopia as a natural regional ally.

The result has often been an analytical framework that views the Horn primarily through the prism of Western interests—interests that a dependent Ethiopia is presumed willing to serve in exchange for political favor and modest rewards—while relegating the histories, security concerns, and strategic perspectives of neighboring states to the margins. Yet analytical prominence should never be mistaken for geographic or strategic centrality. The Red Sea cannot be understood through an Ethiopia-centric lens, nor can Eritrea—with its distinct history, sovereignty, coastline, and strategic interests—be reduced to an appendage of Ethiopian politics.

Eritrea’s non-alignment, for example, is frequently characterized as isolation. It may be more accurately understood as a form of strategic autonomy—a preference for preserving room for maneuver rather than subordinating national policy to competing regional or global blocs. Likewise, Eritrea’s diplomatic restraint is often interpreted as opacity, while resistance to external pressure is cast as abnormal behavior.

Such judgments may reveal as much about the expectations of the observer as about Eritrea itself. They describe how Eritrea is expected to behave, not necessarily why it behaves as it does. A serious analysis must therefore ask not only what Eritrea does, but what historical experiences and strategic assumptions inform those choices.

When History Becomes a Weapon

One of the most troubling features of contemporary regional discourse is the growing effort to convert selective or revisionist readings of history into claims of present-day territorial entitlement.

The historical relationships among the peoples of the Horn are undeniably deep and complex. Communities crossed boundaries long before modern borders existed. Trade, warfare, migration, intermarriage, religion, language, and cultural exchange shaped the region over centuries. Kingdoms expanded and contracted. Political centers shifted. Populations moved. That history deserves serious study. It does not constitute a title deed.

Ancient interaction cannot simply be converted into modern legal ownership. A similar-sounding place name is not proof of territorial inheritance. The historical movement or presence of a community does not extinguish modern sovereignty. Cultural, linguistic, religious, or ethnic affinity across a border does not confer a legal right to redraw it. Nor can the territorial reach of a kingdom centuries ago be selectively resurrected to invalidate internationally recognized boundaries today. The distinction between historical connection and territorial entitlement is therefore fundamental.

Once that line disappears, history ceases to be a discipline for understanding the past and becomes an instrument for manufacturing claims in the present. Maps, memories, migrations, dynasties, and place names then become ammunition for political ambition. Historical scholarship becomes strategic weaponry.

The Cost of Historical Amnesia

Forgetting Eritrea’s history is not merely an academic mistake. It carries practical consequences. Historical amnesia encourages policymakers to underestimate Eritrea’s red lines. It allows analysts to blur the distinction between commercial access and territorial entitlement. It makes accumulated grievances appear sudden, and it encourages renewed maritime competition to be treated as though it were unfolding on an empty geopolitical canvas. It is not.

The Red Sea is layered with history. Every port carries memory. Every border has a political history. Every territorial claim can awaken an older dispute. The Horn of Africa has already experienced the consequences of confusing strategic aspiration with sovereign right, economic necessity with legal entitlement, and historical narrative with modern international boundaries. Those lessons were written in decades of war and extraordinary human sacrifice. The region should not have to learn them again.

The Strategic Constant

The renewed global focus on the Red Sea has once again placed Eritrea in the headlines. The war in Yemen, attacks on commercial shipping, insecurity around Bab el-Mandeb, competition among Gulf and global powers, and anxiety over vulnerable maritime routes have intensified attention to the western shore of the Red Sea.

But Massawa and Assab did not become important because international shipping became vulnerable. The Dahlak Archipelago did not become significant because military planners rediscovered the map. Eritrea’s coastline did not acquire strategic meaning because outside powers returned to the region. Their importance derives from geography itself. That is the strategic constant.

The critical question is therefore not whether Eritrea matters to the Red Sea. Geography has already answered that. The question is whether that geography will be interpreted through the principles of sovereignty and international law or through the more dangerous logic of strategic convenience and geopolitical entitlement.

Nothing prevents Ethiopia and Eritrea from building mutually beneficial economic relationships. Nothing prevents Ethiopia from negotiating access to multiple ports. Nothing prevents Red Sea states from developing deeper systems of trade, infrastructure, transportation, energy, and security cooperation.

Indeed, geography gives them powerful reasons to do so. But durable cooperation begins where territorial entitlement ends. A port reached by agreement can become a bridge between nations. A port pursued as a sovereign right can become a battlefield between them. That distinction lies at the heart of today’s maritime debate.

Stop Rediscovering Eritrea

The Red Sea does not suffer from a shortage of history. It suffers from a shortage of memory. Again and again, outside powers arrive at the same coastline, calculate the same maritime advantages, recognize the same ports, and describe the same geography as though it had suddenly become important. Empires did it. Colonial powers did it. Cold War strategists did it. Regional and global powers are doing it again. But Eritrea is not strategically reborn each time someone notices Massawa or Assab. It was there all along.

The lesson of Eritrea’s history is not that geography is destiny. It is that geography creates enduring interests, while sovereignty determines the lawful limits of those interests. Economic need can justify negotiation; it cannot confer ownership. Historical connection can enrich understanding; it cannot function as a deed of title. Strategic ambition can explain state behavior; it cannot erase internationally recognized sovereignty. The Horn has already tested the proposition that strategic necessity can override sovereign right.

The Red Sea will remain consequential long after today’s crises fade from the headlines. Governments will change. Alliances will realign. Wars will end. New rivalries will emerge. Technologies will evolve. Great powers will come and go. Massawa will still face the Red Sea. Assab will still stand near one of the world’s most consequential maritime corridors. The Dahlak Islands will still lie offshore. Bab el-Mandeb will still connect the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. And Eritrea will still occupy the geography that has shaped every cycle of international attention and neglect.

So the real question is not why Eritrea has suddenly become important. It is why the world keeps forgetting that it always was. Eritrea does not need to be rediscovered. Its history needs to be remembered. Its sovereignty needs to be respected. Its geography needs to be understood without turning it into somebody else’s entitlement. The world has rediscovered Eritrea often enough. This time, it should remember it.