Ethiopia’s Quest for the Red Sea: Why Abiy Ahmed is Eyeing Eritrea

For the past couple of years, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been arguing that Ethiopia, the world's most populous landlocked country, needs better port access and that he's willing to go to war for it. Having tried and failed to secure better access to the Kenyan port of Lamu and then the Somaliland port of Berbera, Abiy has now turned his attention to the Eritrean port of Assab, with both Abiy and other senior Ethiopian officials talking up the prospect of annexation in recent months.

The story really kicked off in early September when Abiy essentially floated the idea of invading Eritrea, warning in a public speech that Ethiopia's "mistake" of losing access to the Red Sea as a result of Eritrean secession would be "corrected." For context, Eritrea was a federal part of Ethiopia until 1993, when it peacefully seceded following a UN-supervised referendum. Relations between Ethiopia and the newly formed Eritrea were originally pretty friendly, and Eritrea continued to allow Ethiopia, which had thus become landlocked, to use its ports. However, in 1998, a border dispute spiraled into a brutal war that killed something like 100,000 people over two years, and Ethiopia's access to Eritrea's ports has been restricted ever since.

Anyway, a couple of weeks after Abiy's comments about correcting the so-called mistake, an Ethiopian army chief told soldiers that they would fight a country that had denied Ethiopia access to the sea—a clear reference to Eritrea. In early November, Ethiopia's ambassador to Kenya, who also happens to be a retired general, said that Eritrea's Assab port, which lies in Eritrea's southeast, only a few miles from the Ethiopian border, was "Ethiopia's wealth," and that it would be returned by force. Then in mid-November, Ethiopia's foreign minister gave a slightly astonishing speech in Addis Ababa, arguing that Eritrea was the root cause of recent regional tensions and accusing Eritrea's political class of trying to "destabilize Ethiopia" and interfering in Ethiopia's internal affairs. In that speech, the foreign minister also cast doubt on whether Eritrea was even a legitimate state and claimed that Ethiopia already had sufficient cause for a war on grounds of self-defense.

Ethiopia's state media has also been amplifying the government's narrative, running some pretty colorful pieces framing Eritrea's secession in 1993 as illegitimate. They've also come up with their own slogan, apparently inspired by Palestine: "Ethiopia needs to be free from the dam to the sea." The "sea" bit is clearly a reference to the Assab port, while the "dam" is a reference to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, which is one of Abiy's hallmark infrastructure projects and has, like Abiy's dogged pursuit of port access, proved controversial with Ethiopia's neighbors, especially Egypt and Sudan.

Unsurprisingly, none of this has gone down well in Eritrea. Eritrea's information minister has accused Ethiopia of irredentism on X. And in mid-November, the Eritrean army put out a statement warning that any attempt at invasion would "plunge Ethiopia into an abyss from which they will never have a second chance to learn."

So, what's motivating this rhetorical escalation on Abiy's part? Well, there are broadly two reasons. The first is that Abiy does seem to be genuinely set on securing access to a port. This isn't a new concern. Ethiopia's political class has been worried about its lack of port access since Eritrea's secession. This is sort of unsurprising given that before 1993, the Assab port accounted for something like 70% of all Ethiopia's external trade. And Ethiopia is today the world's most populous landlocked country by quite a margin. After the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, Ethiopia signed a deal with Djibouti to use the port of Djibouti, which now handles over 90% of Ethiopia's external trade. But this is a suboptimal arrangement from Ethiopia's point of view, both because it costs Ethiopia something like $1.5 billion dollars a year in port fees and because it makes Ethiopia's entire economy dangerously reliant on the A1 motorway, which runs from Djibouti through the Afar region down to Addis Ababa. If a belligerent were to cut off access to the port or even just the A1 highway, then Ethiopia would immediately be deprived of most of its imports and export revenues. This became apparent during the Tigray war when the Ethiopian government became anxious about Tigrayan rebels reaching and blockading the A1 highway, knowing the damage it could do to Ethiopia's economy and government.

This is why, since 2023, Abiy has been trying to negotiate access to other Red Sea ports. He's been trying to build a transport corridor to the Lamu port in Kenya. And early last year, Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with the autonomous but internationally unrecognized Republic of Somaliland, giving Ethiopia a 50-year lease to Somaliland's Berbera port in exchange for tacit recognition of Somaliland and a stake in Ethiopian Airlines. Unfortunately for Abiy, neither of these efforts have really come to fruition. The Lamu Transport Corridor has suffered recurring delays, while the Somaliland deal sort of fell apart after a furious reaction from Somalia.

Having apparently failed to negotiate functional port access with Somalia and Kenya, Abiy has now apparently turned his strategic attention to Eritrea. So that's the first reason: Abiy just really wants access to a port. But the second reason is a more general downturn in Ethiopia-Eritrea relations. For context, bilateral relations have been tense since the war in the late '90s. But when Abiy came to power in 2018, one of the first things he did was sign a peace deal with Eritrea's authoritarian leader, Isaias Afwerki. Abiy was promptly rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But somewhat embarrassingly for the committee, in late 2020, he essentially teamed up with Isaias to fight a brutal war against the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a regional militia and political party based in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray that had dominated Ethiopian politics until Abiy's ascendance.

However, in recent months, relations have once again deteriorated amidst reports that Eritrea is now cooperating with elements within the TPLF to launch an attack on Ethiopia's federal forces. Invading Eritrea would not only give Abiy a way to effectively punish Isaias but would also allow him to deploy more troops to Tigray in anticipation of a renewed conflict with the TPLF.

War definitely isn't inevitable. Abiy has been prophesying a regional war over port access since 2023, but nothing's really happened. Nonetheless, the recent speech by the foreign minister and the resurgence of tensions between Ethiopia's federal government and the TPLF should be cause for concern. And if Ethiopia were to invade, there wouldn't be much Eritrea could do about it. Eritrea does have mandatory military service, but Ethiopia's population is roughly 40 times larger than Eritrea's, and its GDP is roughly 70 times larger. So, it's hard to see the Eritrean army putting up meaningful resistance in case of escalation.