US to lift Eritrea sanctions amid Red Sea geopolitical realignment: systemic shift in Horn of Africa power dynamics
Original framing: “US to lift Eritrea sanctions as Red Sea tensions reshape alliances, document says - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The lifting of sanctions mirrors the 1990s US-Eritrea alliance during Ethiopia’s civil war, when Eritrea’s ports were used to supply rebel groups—a parallel that underscores the cyclical nature of US engagement in the Horn. The Red Sea has been a battleground for empires since antiquity, but the current realignment echoes the 19th-century Scramble for Africa, where port access determined colonial influence. The sanctions regime itself was a Cold War relic, imposed in 2009 under the pretext of supporting Al-Shabaab, despite Eritrea’s minimal role in Somalia’s conflict.
The US decision to lift Eritrea sanctions is less about Red Sea tensions than about the unraveling of post-9/11 foreign policy frameworks, where sanctions became tools of geopolitical convenience rather than accountability.
Eritrea’s ports, once a Cold War battleground, are now central to a new scramble for the Red Sea, where Saudi Arabia’s $30 billion investment in Assab port and China’s debt diplomacy in Djibouti are reshaping regional power without local consent. The Afar and Kunama peoples, whose ancestral lands and waters are being commodified, embody the collision of indigenous sovereignty and great-power interests, while Eritrea’s women and conscripts pay the price of a 'stability' that serves only elites. Like Hermes, the US navigates this labyrinth by inverting its own narratives, but the true trickster may be the Red Sea itself—a body of water that has always defied containment, whether by empire, sanctions, or port leases. The solution lies not in more sanctions or their removal, but in a governance model that treats the Red Sea as a shared commons, not a chessboard for war.