When Foreign Policy Becomes Vendetta: Eritrea and the Hijacking of America’s Africa Policy

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

America is not ultimately judged by the size of its economy, the reach of its military, or the polished rhetoric of its diplomats. It is judged by something far more enduring: whether its foreign policy is guided by evidence, strategic clarity, and institutional integrity—or whether it can be quietly captured by personal loyalties, ideological fashions, and the private grievances of unelected officials. Few modern cases expose that danger more clearly, or more uncomfortably, than Washington’s long, punitive, and deeply politicized approach toward Eritrea.

For more than three-quarters of a century, Eritrea has repeatedly found itself in the crosshairs of policies shaped, directly or indirectly, by Washington’s strategic calculations. The first—and arguably the most consequential—sanction imposed on Eritrea was neither economic, diplomatic, nor military. It was political: the denial of its internationally recognized right to decolonization. Among the more than fifty African states whose modern borders emerged from European colonial treaties, Eritrea stands virtually alone as the one whose path to independence was deliberately obstructed in service of outside geopolitical interests. In the opening decades of the Cold War, Eritrea’s destiny was subordinated to Washington’s strategic ambitions in the Red Sea, its legitimate claim to sovereign statehood sacrificed to secure military access, regional leverage, and the perceived necessities of great-power competition.

But was this truly an example of strategic foresight? Hardly. It was not vision; it was geopolitical myopia masquerading as statecraft. In the end, it served neither America’s long-term interests nor those of its chosen ally, Ethiopia. Policies built on shallow calculations, short-term expediency, and borrowed assumptions rarely endure, and even more rarely produce meaningful returns. Washington’s near-blind alignment with successive Ethiopian regimes stands as a case in point. For nearly eight decades, America invested diplomatic capital, military assistance, political cover, and strategic trust in a partnership repeatedly consumed by internal upheaval, famine, civil war, repression, revolution, state collapse, and recurring conflict. And after all that investment—after generations of instability, billions in aid, and countless diplomatic interventions—one uncomfortable question remains: what lasting strategic return did America actually secure? The honest answer is painfully simple: very little. If anything at all.

Even after Ethiopia crossed decisively into the Soviet camp, transforming itself into one of Moscow’s most heavily armed clients on the African continent, Washington and its allies never fundamentally reassessed their approach. Logic would have suggested a strategic recalibration. Instead, the opposite occurred. The diplomatic cover continued, the political indulgence remained, and Eritrea’s struggle for liberation was treated not as a legitimate anti-colonial cause, but as an inconvenience to be contained.

As Soviet-made MiGs rained napalm, cluster munitions, and relentless aerial bombardments on Eritrean towns, villages, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure, many of the weapons, spare parts, logistical channels, and diplomatic protections that kept Ethiopia’s war machine functioning came through governments aligned with the West, often with little more than a nod, a wink, or calculated silence from Washington. These bombs did not fall in a geopolitical vacuum. They fell within an international order in which Western powers were willing—not merely to look away—but at times to quietly enable Eritrea’s devastation, so long as their broader strategic interests in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa remained undisturbed.

If Eritreans hoped independence in 1991 would finally close that chapter, they quickly discovered that the methods had changed, but the pressure had not. The battlefield shifted from trenches and air raids to sanctions regimes, diplomatic isolation, financial restrictions, and coordinated political campaigns emanating from Washington. On paper, these measures were wrapped in the familiar language of international diplomacy: peace, accountability, regional stability, humanitarian concern, counterterrorism. Yet when one follows the chronology, examines the personalities involved, and traces the political networks behind the decisions, a far less comfortable reality emerges: one in which U.S. policy toward Eritrea appears less the product of objective analysis or consistent principle than of entrenched relationships, ideological affinities, and unfinished political battles whose roots stretch back decades, and whose most visible architects emerged during the Clinton years.

If President Donald Trump now moves to lift the 2021 sanctions imposed on Eritrea, he will be taking the right step. But correcting Eritrea policy should not be mistaken for closure. It should mark the beginning of something far more important: a long overdue reckoning with how America’s Africa policy was allowed, for nearly a generation, to drift from strategy into grievance, from principle into personal politics.

The Architects of Alignment

Too often, U.S. policy toward Africa has not been guided by statespeople with historical depth, strategic vision, or respect for African sovereignty. Instead, it has been outsourced to second-tier diplomats, ideological operators, and officials whose personal attachments gradually hardened into official doctrine. Few individuals better illustrate this phenomenon than Susan Rice and Gayle Smith, two figures who helped shape Washington’s Horn of Africa policy from the Clinton years onward.

During the 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war, Rice, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Smith, later Senior Director for Africa at the National Security Council, managed what Washington described as a “two-and-a-half-year peace process,” built around shuttle diplomacy and sustained engagement. Yet from Eritrea’s vantage point, that process increasingly resembled not neutral mediation, but a diplomatic architecture tilted toward Ethiopia’s TPLF-led government.

That perception did not emerge in a vacuum. Gayle Smith’s ties to the TPLF reached back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Horn as a journalist, humanitarian worker, and policy analyst. She developed unusually close relationships with TPLF-linked structures, including the Relief Society of Tigray, spending years behind TPLF lines—working, eating, and sleeping alongside its leadership. By the time she entered senior policymaking circles in Washington, she was not merely analyzing the TPLF from afar; she had developed a deep personal connections with its leaders.

Susan Rice’s trajectory followed a similar path. During the Clinton administration, she championed what Washington called a “new generation” of African leaders, a category that prominently included Meles Zenawi. Over time, Rice developed a close and influential working relationship with Meles, viewing his government as a cornerstone of American strategy in the Horn. That relationship remained unmistakably visible years later, most notably in her deeply personal eulogy at Meles’s funeral in 2012, where she praised him in glowing terms despite his government’s widely documented record of repression and authoritarian rule.

None of this requires conspiracy to be significant. Personal relationships do not automatically make policy corrupt. But when policymakers cultivate decades-long ties with one regional actor, and then repeatedly adopt positions that align with that actor’s interests, serious questions must be asked about neutrality, judgment, and institutional accountability.

From Diplomacy to Sanctions

Those questions became unavoidable in 2009, when the United Nations Security Council imposed US engineered sanctions on Eritrea over allegations related to Somalia and regional destabilization. Eritrea rejected the accusations as false, politically motivated, and unsupported by credible evidence. Yet Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, emerged as one of the strongest advocates for sanctions.

Diplomatic cables later released through WikiLeaks paint a revealing picture. They show Rice actively coordinating messaging, lobbying reluctant governments, and carefully orchestrating the diplomatic choreography required to secure support. Ethiopian officials supplied allegations and political framing, while the machinery moved through New York, IGAD, the African Union, and UN Security Council.

In one cable, Rice discussed with Meles Zenawi the possibility of creating a stand-alone sanctions regime targeting Eritrea. In another, she pushed European allies to fall in line and argued for incorporating the Djibouti-Eritrea border dispute to strengthen the case. She also pressed African leaders, including Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, to present the campaign under the banner of an “African initiative.”

To Eritreans, it was obvious that this was not an impartial multilateral process. It was sanctions campaign scripted elsewhere and performed through regional institutions.

Even more troubling was the evidentiary foundation on which the sanctions case was built. Much of the material cited relied on testimony from individuals held in Ethiopian custody, witness chains tainted by obvious political interests, and intelligence claims whose own footnotes often raised more questions than the dramatic conclusions presented in the headlines. To Eritrea and many independent observers, large portions of this so-called evidence bore all the hallmarks of manipulation, embellishment, and outright fabrication. The reports produced by the Somalia-Eritrea Monitoring Group appeared, at times, less like the product of impartial investigation than dossiers assembled around allegations supplied by Ethiopia and then repackaged with the appearance of multilateral legitimacy. Yet these glaring weaknesses did nothing to slow the momentum. By that stage, the process seemed increasingly less concerned with establishing objective truth than with assembling a politically usable case—one that could justify a decision that, for some, appeared to have been made long before the evidence was ever collected.

By 2018, the contradiction could no longer be ignored. When Eritrea and Ethiopia normalized relations after two decades of hostility, the very sanctions architecture presented for years as essential to international peace began to unravel almost overnight. Most revealingly, Ethiopia itself actively supported the lifting of sanctions on Eritrea.

That development exposed a devastating contradiction. If Eritrea had truly been the destabilizing force Washington had claimed for nearly a decade, why would the supposedly threatened neighbor become one of the strongest voices calling for sanctions to be removed?

For many, the answer was obvious: the sanctions had never been rooted in consistent legal standards. They had been political instruments, tied to a specific regional order. Once that order changed, the policy became indefensible.

To its credit, President Donald Trump’s administration recognized that reality and supported the lifting of sanctions in 2018. It was not a favor to Eritrea. It was a correction.

The Return of Old Habits

Yet the promise of 2018 proved short-lived. When war erupted in northern Ethiopia in 2020, Washington under President Joe Biden returned to familiar habits. Different conflict. Different headlines. But beneath the surface, many Eritreans saw the same networks, the same assumptions, and the same selective outrage.

In 2021, Eritrea was unilaterally sanctioned once again, while the principal domestic belligerents: the Ethiopian federal government and the TPLF-led regional authorities, escaped comparable treatment. To many observers, this did not look like accountability. It looked like continuity.

Samantha Power’s role during the conflict added another layer to this pattern. As USAID Administrator, she adopted a highly interventionist posture focused on rhetoric echoing the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine she had long championed. Her approach aligned closely with the broader worldview associated with Rice and Smith: humanitarian language, interventionist instincts, and a tendency to treat sovereignty as conditional when Washington’s preferred narrative demanded it.

Critics noted that Power’s outrage often appeared selective, intense when directed at federal or allied actors, noticeably muted when TPLF offensives devastated Amhara and Afar. Whether intentional or not, the perception reinforced a belief already deeply rooted in Eritrea: that Washington’s policy was once again being filtered through the same ideological networks that had shaped it for decades.

And that is precisely why lifting the 2021 sanctions, important as it would be, cannot be the end of the conversation.

Conclusion

Correcting the wrongs of Eritrea’s sanctions should only be the beginning. If President Trump now lifts the 2021 sanctions on Eritrea, he will be doing more than correcting a flawed policy. He will be exposing a deeper institutional failure; one that allowed America’s policy toward an African nation to be shaped for nearly a generation by personal loyalties, ideological attachments, and bureaucratic grievance masquerading as moral clarity.

But the real test will come afterward. Will Washington simply reverse one bad decision, or will it finally confront the larger problem that made such decisions possible in the first place?

Africa in the twenty-first century is not a peripheral theater. It is a strategic center of gravity; home to the world’s fastest-growing populations, critical mineral reserves, emerging energy corridors, vital maritime chokepoints, and some of the most consequential geopolitical real estate on earth. American policy toward such a continent cannot be left to old rebel friendships, recycled Cold War assumptions, or the private vendettas of a handful of unelected officials.

One can only hope the Trump administration has drawn the right lessons from the Obama and Biden debacles in their handling of Eritrea, because the lesson of Eritrea was never just about Eritrea. It is a far broader warning about what happens when America’s Africa policy drifts from strategy into ideology, from national interest into personal grievance, and from principled diplomacy into politicized punishment.

And if the United States truly seeks a credible, durable, and strategic partnership with Africa in the decades ahead, it must ensure that never again can an entire sovereign nation be made the casualty of one or two embittered individuals operating behind the language of principle.

Africa is simply too important for anything less.