The Potemkin Party: Historical Obfuscation and Geopolitical Compellence

Weldu Gebrselassie (PhD) & Amleset Negash G.Hiwet

Over the last three years, the Potemkin Party (PP) has made concerted efforts to secure sovereign maritime access by advancing a revisionist perspective on the Eritrean liberation struggle. This shortsighted argument relies on historical chicanery, asserting that the Eritrean armed struggle was instigated by external interests designed to deprive Ethiopia of its purported historical claim over Eritrea and its Red Sea ports. Such tenuous historical claims cannot withstand rigorous critical analysis.

Eritrea’s Struggle as a Decolonization Movement

The Eritrean quest for independence was fundamentally rooted in the right to decolonization. In the aftermath of World War II, the fate of Eritrea, a former Italian colony, was hijacked by dominant Western geopolitical interests that prioritized Ethiopia as a strategic ally. While acknowledging Eritreans’ inalienable right to self-rule, Western powers, in alignment with Ethiopia’s ambition for sea access, ultimately sacrificed that right by reducing Eritrea to an autonomous region within a flawed federation.

Trapped between Western geopolitical contradictions, tenuous international justifications, and Ethiopia’s unlawful historical claims, Eritreans were ultimately left to their own devices. They initiated a structured political resistance, establishing a platform that unequivocally demonstrated to the Ethiopian colonial administration that the struggle for liberation had commenced. As political resistance evolved into organized opposition, the colonial regime progressively narrowed the political space, forcing the pioneers of the movement to leave Eritrea and continue their struggle from exile.

Exile, Transnational Networks, and Revolutionary Continuity

Like anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, Eritrean political leaders operated from exile to evade imprisonment, persecution, or execution, while leveraging secure and well-connected networks to sustain the struggle. They fought Ethiopian colonial regimes from almost all corners of the world, not only from Egypt.

Contrary to the Potemkin Party’s persistent attempts to dismiss Eritrean independence as the product of an “Egyptian conspiracy,” the Eritrean struggle succeeded through its own determination, strategic leadership, sacrifice, and self-reliance. By disregarding the immense sacrifices made for independence, the party’s leadership falsely portrays Eritrean sovereignty as a gift from Egypt. Ultimately, this pretextual narrative serves to delegitimize Eritrean sovereignty in the futile pursuit of direct access to the sea.

Sovereignty Contestation Through Diplomatic Narratives

The PP’s efforts to delegitimize Eritrean sovereignty are equally evident in its reaction to Eritrea’s routine foreign relations. Within the Potemkin Party’s political calculus, Eritrea is not treated as a fully sovereign state; consequently, its independent diplomatic relations are frequently portrayed as illegitimate or threatening. Whenever Eritrea develops international ties, the ruling elite in Addis Ababa tends to interpret such routine diplomatic engagement as an existential threat to its own strategic interests.

Under established principles of international law, sovereign states possess the legal capacity to conduct their external affairs and establish diplomatic relations. Article 2(1) of the UN Charter (1945), through the principle of sovereign equality, establishes the equal legal status of states within the international system. Similarly, Article 2 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) establishes that the establishment of diplomatic relations and permanent diplomatic missions occurs by mutual consent, reflecting the sovereign capacity of states to determine their external diplomatic relations.

Hegemonic Exceptionalism vs Regime-Survival Calculations

From the perspective of the Potemkin Party regime in Addis Ababa, independent and positive engagement between Eritrea and states such as Iran is treated as an “aberration” or even an existential concern, regardless of the constructive or peaceful character of such relations. This reflects a broader pattern of geopolitical hypocrisy and strategic duplicity. While Addis Ababa repeatedly accuses neighboring states of forming dangerous alliances, evidence of Ethiopia’s own acquisition of Iranian military equipment, including Mohajer-6 combat drones, demonstrates that the regime has itself pursued external military partnerships in support of its strategic and regime-survival objectives.

Political theorists and foreign-policy analysts may characterize such behavior as a combination of geopolitical hypocrisy, strategic paranoia, and hegemonic exceptionalism. Under this approach, the regime seeks to establish rules for the region while treating independent actions by neighboring states as automatic threats. The ruling party behaves as though it alone possesses the prerogative to build foreign alliances and acquire military capabilities, while expecting its neighbors to remain passive and strategically constrained. At the same time, its foreign policy appears increasingly driven by short-term regime-survival calculations, with limited regard for consistent principles or international norms.

From Historical Obfuscation to Geopolitical Compellence

Taken together, these historical and contemporary narratives reveal a broader convergence between revisionist historiography and coercive geopolitics. The attempt to recast Eritrea’s liberation struggle as an externally manufactured conspiracy is not merely an effort to reinterpret the past; it functions as a political instrument for contesting Eritrea’s sovereign legitimacy in the present. Historical obfuscation therefore provides ideological cover for strategic machinations, while the pursuit of maritime access supplies the geopolitical objective toward which that narrative is directed.

The Regional Threat Matrix and Maritime Imperatives

In Addis Ababa, this geopolitical calculus reflects a broader postulated threat matrix in the region, within which sovereign maritime access has become a strategic imperative for the PP. The PP’s military posture increasingly functions as a mechanism of power projection toward neighboring states, particularly Eritrea. At the diplomatic level, the PP has employed diplomatic brinkmanship and coercive signaling that invoke the prospect of regional confrontation. Despite these extreme thresholds, the PP has encountered limited international opprobrium, potentially encouraging the continued use of compellence under the guise of deterrence.

At the same time, while covertly and overtly contributing to regional destabilization, Eritrea’s efforts to build confidence-building measures with neighboring states and pursue regional diplomacy generate a security dilemma for Addis Ababa. Eritrea’s long-standing foreign policy has reinforced its diplomatic maneuvering after years of exposure to sanctions and isolation policies. Consequently, attempts to frame Eritrea as a proxy entity for external powers, or to portray it as interfering through proxy warfare in Ethiopia’s internal conflicts, risk exacerbating regional political polarization and highlighting the increasing governance deficit of the PP.

Asymmetric Warfare and Patronage Networks

Conversely, the PP has become involved in protracted asymmetric warfare within and beyond its jurisdiction, while maintaining proxy alliances with external powers. This has contributed to Ethiopia’s increasing fragility and generated significant risks of regional spillover. The military buildup in the Somali region increases the risk of broader instability involving Sudan and contributes to the militarization of Ethiopia’s territory, potentially turning strategic locations into conflict-contagion military stations. The PP’s reliance on plausible deniability regarding alleged proxy-warfare support further fuels strategic vulnerability in the region and demonstrates the weakness of its risk-calculus mechanisms.

The PP’s failure to implement political settlements within Ethiopia over multiple years, combined with its aggressive foreign-policy posture and limited recalibration, reveals the influence of entrenched patronage networks. Its political clientelism strategy has ultimately generated material resources for political gains while simultaneously fracturing Ethiopia’s political, social, economic, and diplomatic institutions.

Collective Security: Eritrea’s Constructive Regional Role

Nevertheless, Eritrea’s role in the Horn of Africa remains constructive, not only in mitigating the consequences of significant security externalities but also in promoting the normalization of interstate relations in the region and beyond. Rather than interpreting Eritrea’s diplomatic engagement and strategic signaling as a threat, Addis Ababa should understand these efforts as mechanisms for situational awareness, confidence-building, and the reduction of possible miscalculation.

In addressing the security vacuum in the region, Eritrea’s diplomatic endeavors signal a priority for collective security measures and a preference for limiting destabilizing external intervention. Recalibrating relations with neighboring states therefore reinforce Eritrea’s constructive role in restoring peace, security, prosperity, and stability in the Horn of Africa. In this context, Eritrea’s sovereign diplomacy should not be interpreted as a challenge to regional order, but as an expression of its sovereign agency and a potential contribution to a more stable regional security architecture.

Eritrean sovereignty, rooted in its own popular determination, leadership and sacrifice, should not be viewed as a source of instability for Addis Ababa, but rather as exercise of national agency that can strengthen regional security.