Eritrea Is Not Africa's North Korea

The history of the Eritrean state, and a policy for ending its isolation

In Brief

Eritrea has been called Africa's North Korea for two decades. The label has served its enemies well and, until this month, it served Washington DC, which ran an emergency sanctions program against the country's armed forces, its ruling party and its state trading houses for five years. That program expired on 17 September 2026, and the Treasury Department removed every one of its designations the next day. The United Nations Security Council had already ended its own sanctions in 2018. What has not happened is any decision about what comes next.

We, the New Nationalists of America, think that decision should be made deliberately. The Red Sea has become the second vital corridor of the Iran War that began on February 28th, 2026 and remains unresolved. In September the Houthis took the port of Mokha and the island of Perim and, for the first time, hold the Yemeni side of the Bab el-Mandeb. Eritrea sits on the other shore. By Asmara's own count it has about 1,200 kilometres of coastline and more than 300 islands, ports at Massawa and Assab, and a government that has offered Washington the use of its facilities before. It is also one of the poorest and most tightly controlled countries on earth. And yet, those facts are part of the case for engagement, not the case against it.

The history that follows is crucial to understanding Eritrea, because the state Washington DC now has to deal with was built in particular stages. Eritrea is among the least-studied states in the world, and the man who has ruled it since independence is among the least explained of its rulers. History is the most practical thing that America can know.

What we propose:

1. Issue guidance clearing the formerly blocked entities for lawful dealings. Review the older Eritrea-specific restrictions that remain (the arms-export denial policy, the religious-freedom and trafficking designations and their statutory consequences, the visa measures, the June 2025 entry proclamation) against a published list of benchmarks that Asmara can meet.

2. Carry that push to the UN and to Congress. Keep the Security Council’s sanctions regime dead. Move the Human Rights Council's Eritrea machinery from adversarial monitoring toward a benchmark-and-access model. Back Eritrea's return to normal dealings with the IMF, the World Bank and the UN development system. Ask Congress for hearings, a bipartisan framework and the trade and investment tools that follow from it.

3. Offer relief and investment in exchange for things the state can deliver: a fixed end date for national service and real pay for those who serve, private credit, a published budget, enforcement of the labor law the government already has, access for UN agencies and an accounting for the eleven senior officials held since September 2001.

4. Use Eritrea’s geography for the Red Sea, on Eritrea's sovereign terms. Seek access: maritime awareness, port calls, overflight and deconfliction against the Houthi and Iranian threat to the Bab el-Mandeb, and a serious American effort to keep an Ethiopia–Eritrea war over Assab from breaking out.

5. Restore full representation and consular services, bring Eritrea back into the African Union and IGAD conversations, and stop treating a population of about three and a half million as collateral in a dispute with its government. They are the ones paying for its isolation.

The economic and diplomatic record set out below supports a fair claim that critics should have to answer: That the government in Asmara wants to develop and wants to be re-admitted to the diplomatic community.

Part I: Fascist Empire

The man who would fired the first shot of the Eritrean armed struggle, Hamid Idris Awate, was born around 1910 at Gerset, in the south-western lowlands between Tessenei and Golluj (born c. 1910 - 1915). His life is obscure and disputed, and almost everything below rests on a small number of sources that don’t always agree. Many accounts make him an Ascari, a soldier in the colonial army of Mussolini's Italy, who took part in the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia, launched from Eritrea in October 1935, and in the East African campaign. And yet, photographic evidence places him firmly inside of the MVSN, the Blackshirts, rather than the Ascari. The MVSN were loyal followers of the regime in Italy, and did not hold allegiances to the King unlike the Italian Royal Army. Some accounts add that he was conscripted in 1935, others that he volunteered himself. Yet, what is agreed upon is that he was sent to Rome for a military-intelligence course, or perhaps more accurately, at the Italian African Police school at Tivoli, near Rome. What is certain is that Awate was a loyal member of the Italian African Police (PAI), the Fascist empire's colonial police, and of the Carabinieri. Eritrean opposition would later title him “More Fascist than the Fascists themselves!”

The officer of Mussolini's army who would later matter most to Eritrea's memory of these years served in the same war. His name was Amedeo Guillet, and he was born in 1909 into Savoyard high aristocracy. Guillet served in the Abyssinian War of 1935-36 as commander of an indigenous cavalry unit (the so-called spahys), and was wounded and decorated for bravery. His uncle, a corps commander in the First World War, had helped his close friend, the Fascist leader Italo Balbo, to professionalize the militia. Guillet fought in the Fascist regime's wars in Ethiopia, Spain and East Africa, and was justly decorated for them.

Asmara is the exhibit where the Eritrean government’s own words are most revealing, and its story began in these years, when Eritrea was the launching pad of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia (October 1935) and Asmara the showcase of the Fascist empire proclaimed in 1936. The Eritrean Ministry of Information republished in 2016 a travel feature that attributes the city's architecture flatly to Fascism, repeats the colonial-era nickname La Piccola Roma, and dates Eritrea’s great building boom to 1935-41. Futurist architecture had fallen out of favor with the regime in Italy by the 1930s and could be practiced best in the colonies

After serving in the Spanish Civil War, Guillet then served in Libya as commander of a Savari squadron and was sent to Italian East Africa, the Fascist empire's newest colony, where his experience of commanding indigenous forces was wanted to suppress a continuing insurgency. Rome had ordered the killing of anyone found with arms. Guillet offered rebels a pardon if they changed sides or laid down their arms, which meant disobeying orders. The Duke of Aosta, the viceroy and a close friend, shielded him. The Duke ordered him to establish an indigenous light cavalry unit, the Gruppo Bande Amhara a cavallo. Guillet communicated with his men in Arabic and soon earned the nickname "Devil Commander." In February 1940 Guillet was given the task of forming the cavalry group at Gondar. By his own later summary it went to war as eight bands with some 800 horsemen, 400 men on foot, 200 camel-mounted men, a machine-gun section and an anti-tank section, about 1,700 men in all. The Duke of Aosta's viceroyalty had entered the war unprepared, cut off from supplies. Italy's conquest of British Somaliland in August 1940 was its high-water mark.

But the tide turned in late 1940.

During this period, popular biographies of Awate have him appointed a security officer in western Eritrea, then serving as deputy chief (mayor) of the town of Kassala, in Sudan, during the brief Fascist Italian occupation of 1940-41, and promoting its union with Eritrea until the British attack of late January 1941 ended the experiment. The same sources have him fighting as an ascari at the Battle of Keren.

On January 21st, 1941, on the road toward Agordat near Keru (Cub Cub), Guillet's cavalry unit was ordered to cover the Italian retreat, and he personally led a charge against superior British forces. His close friend Lieutenant Renato Togni, who was awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valor posthumously, attacked with about thirty men to secure the regrouping of Guillet's force, and the British called the action the most gallant affair of the war so far and buried Togni with military honors. Guillet charged with about 600 men of his banda amhara. The charge bought time for the retreating Italian infantry, though it had a rather limited effect on the British. Guillet was promoted to captain after Keru and Keren. The British broke through at Keren in March 1941.

Asmara fell on 1 April 1941, and the Duke of Aosta surrendered at Amba Alagi in May 1941.

Guillet evaded captivity and gathered about a hundred former askari to resume the fight, stripping himself of his Italian identity and uniform. In early June the group attacked four convoys coming from Kassala. Over the summer it sabotaged a railway, cut telegraph lines and damaged a road bridge near Ghinda, but the attacks were never pressed, and by August his men had dispersed to sympathetic villages. After a near-fatal ambush, Guillet recovered on an Italian settler's farm with his Ethiopian companion Kadija, and after a British search led by the intelligence officer Sigmund Reich he decided he could not expose her or his men to further danger. In late October 1941, he gathered around thirty exhausted men near Ghinda, dissolved the group and thanked his men as comrades. He crossed the Red Sea to Yemen, where he befriended the Imam, and returned to Italy in September 1943. Guillet never commanded more than a hundred men in this phase, over roughly five to six months, in fewer than two dozen engagements, and that the total number of sabotage acts, fires and raids was around a dozen. British files do not record a serious burden from Guillet’s men. The British War Cabinet decided in May 1941 to shift attention and troops to North Africa on the assumption that no organized resistance would continue in East Africa. The British placed a bounty on Guillet, a bounty of £1,000.

After 1941, many accounts claim that Awate fled after the Battle of Gondar (which fell in late November 1941). But in Eritrean memory, Awate was one of Guillet's hand-picked NCOs commanding a hundred ascari cavalrymen alongside another ascari officer, Ali Gabre. According to this recollection of events, he continued to fight the British with Guillet's cavalry, and then, after Guillet's departure, kept fighting from the western lowlands with about fifty men until 1945, awaiting Guillet's return with help from Rome.

Part II: Occupation

After the World War, once he grasped that the Fascist empire was gone for good in 1945, Awate began raiding Kunama and Nara tribes. During this period, the British Military Administration set a bounty of £300 on his head, though in 1950, he was pardoned and allowed to keep his gun. Awate then surrendered to the British in 1951 under an amnesty, only to take up arms again after 1956. After the British departed in 1952, the United Nations formula of federation "under the Ethiopian Crown" required Ethiopia to rule with restraint. After ten years of contrived unification, which dissolved Eritrea's autonomous parliament, a small rebellion escalated.

Idris Mohammed Adem, who would found the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), was the former president of that federal assembly. Since the 1950s, when overriding American strategic interests compromised Eritrea's right of decolonization, successive administrations propped up the Ethiopian presence in Eritrea thereafter. The United States government often strategically opposed the project of decolonization to serve Cold War aims, provided huge military support to Haile Selassie's regime, including the training of local "counter-insurgency forces", and provided less prominent support to the Mengistu regime despite its alliance with the USSR. The US government maintained its opposition to Eritrea's liberation struggle until the eleventh hour. Despite the US stance costing more than 65,000 Eritreans killed in combat, after liberation in 1993, the Eritrean government would choose to forgive and forget and to begin on a new slate.

With Hamid Idris Awate taking up arms again after 1956, in 1960 Idris Mohammed Adem, the former president of Eritrea's federal assembly, founded the ELF in Cairo with other students and intellectuals. Its founders were largely Muslim and the movement leaned toward pan-Arabism, with backing from Egypt and Sudan, through which support from Iraq, Syria and China also flowed. Adem persuaded Awate to join and sent him word in 1960 to launch the armed struggle, with supplies routed through Egyptian Muslims. The Eritrean state treats September 1, 1961, when Awate's small band attacked Ethiopian police posts including one on Mount Adal, as the beginning of the armed struggle, and marks the anniversary each year, including through embassies abroad.

Awate's reported reply to Ethiopian intermediaries was that the fighting would end when the Ethiopian flag came down and the Eritrean flag went up. The Eritrean government would later put up a statue at his grave on September 1, 1994. Awate died on 28 May 1962, about eight months after the first shots, presumably from food poisoning.

In May of 1965, Adem and ELF secretary Idris Ghalaudios set up a tribalistic “zone structure” with four zone commands modeled on Algeria’s wilayas. This structure of organization during the Adem era was a facet of the ELF which a certain Isaias Afwerki would later take particular issue with.

Part III: The Commissar from Nanjing

Isaias Afwerki had left Addis Ababa University in 1966 to join the ELF, at a time when it was the only armed nationalist force in Eritrea. He set himself to learn Arabic because the rebels relied heavily on Arab support. By his own later account he found an organization run on clan and confessional lines and hostile to questions, and that experience pushed him and a small circle of highland students toward the idea of establishing a clandestine cell inside the Front.

China entered the story in 1966, when Beijing agreed to arm the ELF on condition that it send the political commissars of its five divisions for training. According to one account, the ELF's president, Idris Mohammed Adem, and another senior figure, Osman Saleh Sabbe, had visited China earlier that year to ask for military help and were received by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Isaias represented the newly formed highland division and Romedan Mohammed Nur the coastal one. The course, at what one account calls the Nanking Military Academy, lasted 6-8 months and paired guerrilla tactics with lessons on how the CCP had beaten the KMT. Isaias Afwerki himself dated his connection to China to 1967.

Only two of the five drew the intended lesson. According to Haile Woldensae, an Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) founder, Isaias Afwerki and Romedan Mohammed Nur studied the Chinese experience for what it might offer Eritrea, while the other three merely treated the trip as a way to get weapons. The ELF leader Idris Ghalaudios, hearing of the pair's radicalism, traveled to Beijing and assured his hosts that the five would form a party and spread the Red Book. Yet, when they returned to Damascus, he then told them it had all been a ruse for arms. While the ELF’s leadership was busy treating Maoism as a price to be paid, Isaias saw it as a program.

On April 4, 1971, activists from two breakaway groups met in the Danakil desert and founded a secret party, the Eritrean People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), with Marxism as its guiding ideology. Its outlook was fiercely nationalist, and heavily inspired by Maoism, in contrast to a more conventionally pro-Soviet current that took over the ELF. Afwerki’s 1971 manifesto, Nehnan Elamanan ("We & Our Goals"), justified the split by attacking the ELF’s leadership. It accused the ELF of discriminating against Christian highlanders and of killing reformist Christian members, proclaimed the single unity of the Eritrean nation, and called for a "revolutionary organization with a revolutionary line." By 1981, the EPLF drove the ELF out of the country.

Part IV: In the Sahel

In 1972 the two breakaway groups moved to the Sahel mountains, a refuge secure enough to work out their political differences while keeping supply lines to South Yemen open. After the 1978 retreat the front held a line at Nakfa that later gave the independent currency its name. The discipline of the Eritrean resistance movement in the Sahel followed the Chinese pattern of rectification that had occured during the 1950s. When the leftist menqa faction attempted to subvert Afwerki’s leadership in 1973-74, several of its leaders were tried and executed, while others were brought back into the fold following prolonged criticism and self-criticism. This was unlike a later group of "rightists" who disappeared without a trace. The merciless elimination of dissent is the original sin of many revolutionary movements, and that fact can observed even in our own honorable American Revolution (Shay’s Rebellion, Alien & Sedition Acts).

Isaias became the party's secretary-general at its first clandestine congress in 1976, and the party drafted the front's programs and leadership slates in secret for two decades. Its existence was not disclosed publicly until the third congress of the EPLF in 1994. At that first congress the party committed itself to a socialist program for the long term and a national-democratic agenda for the present. In January 1977 the front's first congress adopted a National Democratic Program drafted by party members. After the 1978 retreat, the front held the line at Nakfa. In 1979, the National Confederation of Eritrean Workers was founded as the trade-union wing of the EPLF.

Inside the base, the party ran the front. Its cadre school trained organizers who led political-education sessions three times a week for every member, and its central committee doubled as the front's politburo. It drafted programs and leadership slates in secret before each congress. Army units were led by a triad of military commander, political commissar and deputy. Outside the barracks, the front reorganized rural life. Organizers surveyed land tenure and redistributed it through elected village administrations, built on sectoral mass organizations of peasants, women, workers and youth, each initially segmented by class. Village elections could take place every three or four months, and women were guaranteed seats. Popular programs were circulated for member debate before congresses, though the party prepared its own slate for the elections. In the so-called “three privileges campaign” of the 1980s, Isaias Afwerki encouraged junior cadres to shame their superiors for drinking, womanizing and material privilege. After weakening rivals this way, he promoted three generals into the party and front leadership, tilting power toward army loyalists. This was the closest Eritrean parallel to the actual technique of China's Cultural Revolution.

The EPLF drove the ELF out of the country in 1981. After that victory, the Front reached out not merely to peasants and proletarians, but to Eritreans of all political stripes on the basis of common nationalism. In 1982, the Front stopped subdividing its mass organizations by class altogether.

Part V. From Class to Nation

In late 1986 the party renamed itself the Eritrean Socialist Party, and in January of 1987, Isaias Afwerki became the undisputed leader of the EPLF. The 1987 revision of the program dropped all references to opposing imperialists and Zionists and replaced references to the masses of workers and peasants with "the people." It scaled back land confiscation, abandoned large state farming cooperatives, invited Eritrean capitalists to invest regardless of scale, and pledged to inaugurate democratic order.

In the fighting at the port of Massawa in 1990, the EPLF captured 99 Soviet-supplied tanks and inflicted thousands of casualties. It won a decisive victory in 1991. In May 1991, its fighters marched into Asmara, ending the 30-year war of independence. Isaias Afwerki served as secretary-general of the provisional government from May 24th, 1991, until independence. The EPLF's newspaper published in 1991, a portrait of Hamid Idris Awate, photographed uniformed in MVSN attire on horseback.

Eritrea became independent in 1993 after a referendum, and Isaias took office as president on 24 May 1993. The Israeli embassy in Asmara opened on 15 March 1993, before the formal announcement of diplomatic relations on April 27th, and by the Arab press's account the mission was the third to open in the new capital, after the Sudanese and the Egyptian. Eritrea opened an embassy at Ramat Gan, outside Tel Aviv. That year, Isaias went to Israel for medical treatment. Middle East Eye reports that he had fallen into a coma from cerebral malaria and that an American aircraft flew him there. Accounts of the period also speak of Israeli guidance in desert agriculture and in building the state's basic institutions. It was, by the account of everyone who has written on it, a friendly beginning.

Part VI: Independent Eritrea

The seven years after liberation were a period of hope for Eritrea. Fighters turned to reconstruction, the diaspora returned with professionals starting businesses and building houses, and aid flowed in. At its third congress in February 1994 the Front disclosed the existence of the secret party cell that had drafted its programs and slates for two decades. Most of the party's veteran leadership was sidelined at that congress as a younger generation took over the secretariat. The 95,000-strong EPLF became the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with a transitional mandate to prepare the country for constitutional democracy within four years. After 1994, the PFDJ described itself as a left-wing nationalist party open to nationalists of any affiliation, and its national charter lists national unity, popular participation, social justice, self-reliance and a strong link between leaders and people among its principles. In 1994 the government announced a private-sector-led, export-oriented policy, one consistent with the regime’s commitments to self-reliance and high-modernist mass mobilization. The Land Proclamation of 1994 vested all land in the State, made every right over land effective only on government approval, and placed the Land Commission under the president.

The Eritrean government put up a statue at Awate's grave on the 33rd anniversary of the first shots. When a tall contemporary apartment block was built in 1994 overshadowing the Futurist-inspired Fiat Tagliero garage, Isaias Afwerki personally intervened to insist that central Asmara retain its character. The Fascist emblem of the bundle of sticks remains on many of the city's public buildings, and this will remain so, as long as Isaias Fawerki remains an aficionado of the city's architecture. During this period, former inmates of Caserma Mussolini, a Fascist-era colonial prison slated for demolition in 1996, insisted that the building should remain standing. Why? The detention facility, they insisted, was part of their heritage.

The 1995 National Service Proclamation was passed required 6 months of military training followed by 12 months of service, 18 months in all. In 1995 Isaias received the Israeli Minister of Health, Dr. Ephraim Sneh, on a working visit, and Sneh handed over two incubators donated to the maternity ward of Asmara's Mekane Hiwot Hospital (recorded in a government newspaper, Eritrea Profile, later reprinted in the Congressional Record). In December 1995 a dispute with Yemen over the Hanish Islands drew the Arab world to allege that the Israelis were assisting Eritrea, though such allegations are not supported by the evidence.

Part VII: War & the Fortress State

Ethiopia declared war on Eritrea on May 14th, 1998, and Ethiopian jet fighters attacked Asmara on June 5th, 1998, after which the American Assistant Secretary of State for Africa broke diplomatic precedent by addressing the OAU summit at Ouagadougou in support of Ethiopia and lobbying the OAU to adopt a resolution against Eritrea. The war changed the state. Perhaps 80,000 soldiers died on both sides, in battles that very much resembled the western front of the First World War. The war hardened the front's nationalism into a fortress ideology built on hostility to Ethiopia and popular devotion to the State.

In July 1998 President Clinton brokered a Moratorium on Air Strikes between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Eritrea's declared preference was for a comprehensive cessation of hostilities. Yet, the Clinton administration insisted on only a partial arrangement, arguing that Ethiopia was not prepared to contemplate a comprehensive truce. Ethiopia abused the window to buy SU-27 jet fighters, mostly with Western financial support, and on February 6th, 1999, it launched a new offensive on the pretext of an alleged Eritrean air bombardment of the Ethiopian town of Adi Grat, a pretext that the American authorities knew to be bogus. In September 1999 the American "Facilitators" produced a detailed final document known as the Technical Arrangements, submitted to the parties as a take-it-or-leave-it package. Both accepted. Eritrea then learned that Ethiopia had not accepted in good faith, and its head of state conveyed this to the highest authorities in Washington, who reassured him that Ethiopia would face severe consequences should it prove so. Ethiopia declared the peace process in its "terminal phase" and launched its third offensive on 12 May 2000. The Eritrean-Israeli relationship cooled sharply during the war, when Israel was seen in Asmara to have sided with Ethiopia.

The Eritrean president visited Rome, Italy, in 1999. When asked whether there was any Italian he would care to meet, he replied, immediately: Amedeo Guillet, the decorated cavalry commander of Mussolini's Fascist empire. Some Italian foreign-ministry officials doubted the 90-year-old was still alive. He was found at his apartment in northern Rome and summoned to the Quirinale to meet the Eritrean head of state. An invitation to Eritrea was given on the spot.

Italian commentators, in the bloodshed of the Ethiopian–Eritrean War, took the Eritreans' side. Journalist, Indro Montanelli deemed the Eritreans more evolved and civilized than the Ethiopians, Montanelli himself having served in 1935-36 as a volunteer company commander of an Eritrean askari battalion in Mussolini's war on Ethiopia and having written for a Fascist newspaper in Asmara. The historian Angelo Del Boca compared the Italian defense at Keren with the Eritreans' in 2000, and another writer paralleled the material disadvantage of the "nephews of the old askari" with the Italian inferiority against the British in 1940-41. That year, Guillet was made a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Italian Military Order (the 140th anniversary of Italy; 5 silver medals for valor, 1 bronze, 5 war crosses), making him a vital symbol of Italy's relationship to its former colony.

Guillet was received as a head of state from 14 to 21 March 2000. They stayed at the Villa Roma, the Duke of Aosta's old residence and then the residence of the Italian ambassador, Antonio Bandini. Old ascari, veterans of the colonial army of Fascist Italy, turned out to welcome the returning "commandante" at the Catholic cemetery in Asmara. Isaias Afwerki welcomed him at the presidential palace, which had been the Italian colonial army's headquarters in Fascist times and was therefore familiar ground. Guillet visited Italian war cemeteries, old and new battlefields, the baobab at Keren where fleeing Italians had sheltered in 1941 and the Massawa shantytown of Al-Katmia where he had hidden from the British. Guillet praised the Eritreans as "Prussians of Africa," without the Prussians' defects. The Italian press reinterpreted the 1941 campaign as the beginning of the Eritrean freedom struggle, and the Italians, Guillet above all, were even seen as forerunners of Eritrean independence. After the visit, Guillet wrote to Indro Montanelli thanking him for repeatedly mentioning the Eritrean struggle for freedom against communist Ethiopia and its Russian war matériel, and praising the small country for embracing its colonial heritage with pride. The heritage he meant was the empire he had served, that of Fascist Italy.

The Ethiopians overran Eritrean trenches in May of 2000 and the rout began. Isaias Afwerki then telephoned Washington DC to plead for a ceasefire, and Ethiopia's prime minister halted his troops. The United States, having promised Eritrea that Ethiopia would face severe consequences for bad faith, backtracked and only nudged the Security Council to impose military sanctions on both the guilty and the aggrieved parties. The United States extended military support to Ethiopia during the war, directly and mostly through convenient proxies, and American intelligence agencies were embroiled, at the height of the third offensive in May 2000, in instigating sedition and treason, including attempted liaison with Ethiopia, within a small ring of senior officials. In June 2000 Eritrea's foreign minister, Haile Woldensae, signed the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement. UN reporting put the number of Eritreans displaced by the fighting above a million. In 2001 Eritrean diplomats in Washington were deprived of their tax-exemption privileges, in contravention of the 1961 Vienna Convention. Eritrea did not take reciprocal action, and American diplomats continue to enjoy the equivalent privilege in Asmara.

In April 2002 the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission issued its ruling under the Algiers Agreement. Ethiopia did not implement it, and the "No Peace, No War" stalemate that followed became the condition in which everything after is lived. In May 2002 the Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign extended national service to a prolonged period, according to Asmara, due to the existential threat now from Ethiopia.

Eritrea's Labour Proclamation No. 118 was gazetted on November 15, 2001 and replaced a 1991 predecessor. It defines a Labour Relations Board as a body with judicial powers, established by the Minister, to hear and decide claims. According to trade-union monitors, a tripartite board of workers, employers and ministry officials resolves disputes, with recourse to the courts. Unions are permitted subject to ministerial approval for groups of twenty or more, and the statute nominally allows strikes.

In May 2002, according to press reports at the time, the Eritrean government retained the Washington DC lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig, reportedly at around $50,000 a month, to press its case that American troops should be based in Eritrea. The campaign's slogan, as the Washington Times described it, was "Why not Eritrea?" Asmara was desperate to become a US ally.

Guillet's trip paved the way for further military visits. In 2002, the Eritrean Ministry of Defence invited Italian military delegations to visit old battlefields and cemeteries. The participants were mostly active or retired Fascist Alpini (Mountain Infantry), who attended ceremonies in Asmara with former liberation fighters and askari. Reports on subsequent travels (including one in the Alpini magazine as late as 2010) were centerd upon Eritrean-Italian friendship and joint remembrance, the good condition of the memorial sites and cemeteries, and the task of current Italian soldiers to uphold their heroic colonial heritage. The colonial army whose battlefields and cemeteries were toured was Fascist Italy's: the Eritrean sites at issue included those of Mussolini's war on Ethiopia and of the East African campaign of 1940-41, and the tradition to be upheld was that of soldiers who fought for the Fascist empire.

During the Ethiopian drought of 2002-03, the Eritrean government announced that it would allow the use of the ports of Massawa and Assab for the delivery of emergency food aid to Ethiopia, in the midst of the "No Peace, No War" standoff. Its Foreign Ministry declared that it had no desire to penalize destitute populations in Ethiopia for the wrongdoings of their government. Earlier during this same period, Washington DC had demanded that Eritrea pay for American food aid destined for Ethiopia that had perished in the port of Assab in 1998 when Addis Ababa declared war and boycotted the port, an absurd demand to say the least.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stopped in Asmara on December 10th of 2002 for about three hours and met Isaias Afwerki, and contemporary press reports (including the Washington Times of 12 December 2002) described the Eritrean president as offering the use of Eritrean military facilities. Afwerki’s own characterization, as reported, was that the offer was the least one could imagine and that Eritrea was not offering anything in order to get something in return. Embassy officials described offers of facilities, intelligence sharing, overflight rights and mooring permissions. Rumsfeld called Eritrea forthcoming in the present efforts, on Iraq and on the United Nations.

Part VIII: Coalition & Estrangement

The military-to-military exchanges worked both ways. The Alpini association welcomed the Eritrean defense minister, General Sebhat Ephrem, at its 2003 congress. In the same year Guillet became honorary president of the Italian Cavalry Association. The hero so honored had served the Fascist State as a cavalry officer in Ethiopia, Spain and East Africa. The Alpini association (the National Alpini Association, founded in 1919) is the veterans' body of the army's mountain infantry, the Alpini. The Alpini fought in the wars of the Fascist regime, and the memory culture in which the association received an Eritrean defense minister in 2003 and an Eritrean president in 2004 is one that honors the soldiers of those wars.

On March 18th, 2003, the US State Department spokesman read out the roster of thirty countries the United States counted in its "coalition of the willing" for the war in Iraq. Eritrea and Ethiopia were the only two African states on the list, though Rwanda was added within days, which made three. In the winter and spring of 2002-03, Eritrea offered public endorsement, and according to the reports of Rumsfeld's visit, facilities, intelligence and overflight, to American forces. In June 2003, Eritrea was omitted from the list of East African countries slated to receive American counterterrorism funding, while at the same time it remained in the Coalition of the Willing.

The United States then acted unlawfully to obstruct the demarcation of the Ethiopian-Eritrean boundary in accordance with the final and binding decisions of the Boundary Commission. When Ethiopia's prime minister rejected the award in September 2003 as "illegal, irresponsible and unjust" and asked the Security Council to create an alternative mechanism, this was done in consultation and with the approval of the United States of America. John Bolton, then the US Permanent Representative to the UN, later admitted in his memoir that Eritrea seemed to have a point, that Ethiopia was welching on its deal, and that he could not understand why the Assistant Secretary of State, Jendayi Frazer, reversed course in early 2006 and asked to reopen the 2002 ruling and award a major piece of disputed territory to Ethiopia. In June of 2006 Assistant Secretary Frazier, in conversation with the acting UN envoy, Azouz Ennifar, stated that the demarcation as Eritrea wanted it was not feasible, and that the status quo would benefit Ethiopia. A US Embassy Berlin cable of 11 August 2009 agreed that Ethiopia was an "indispensable partner" to regional stability and that the border conflict was frozen for the foreseeable future.

In October 2003, a visiting military team of the US Task Force based in Djibouti (CJTF-HOA) assisted the unlawful departure of an Eritrean citizen to Djibouti aboard its helicopter, in violation of domestic law. In 2003, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom published a report accusing Eritrea of violating religious freedom. On December 30th, 2003, President Bush terminated Eritrea's designation under the African Growth & Opportunity Act, effective January 1st, 2004, for failing to make continual progress toward the program's eligibility requirements, despite Eritrea having just left a state of war two years prior.

The State Department designated Eritrea a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom in September 2004, sanctioning military sales to Eritrea. In 2005 the State Department suspended defense export licenses for Eritrea, describing the closure of some churches, imprisonment without trial, and the detention of prisoners in metal shipping containers in the desert. And yet, this claim was senseless. Eritrea is and has always been a secular state where Christianity and Islam have coexisted for fourteen centuries. The religious groups shuttered by the State were new and fringe bodies, with memberships of a couple of hundred and financing from abroad, that were asked to register and declare their income, and refused.

Throughout 2004, the United States continued to reject Eritrea's request to buy property in New York for its permanent representative to the United Nations. On April 13th, 2004 Homeland Security officers raided the Eritrean Community Centre in Washington and took money and documents from an Eritrean diplomat at gunpoint (and, in violation of the Vienna Convention, refused to return the embassy property despite repeated requests). In September 2004 Eritrea's foreign minister was strip-searched at the New York airport. In 2004, the US government employed UNHCR to encourage the entire Kunama language group in Eritrea to seek asylum in the United States. According to Israeli reporting in 2023, the Eritrean embassy in Israel has been run by a custodian, not by an official ambassador, since about this period.

President Isaias Afwerki himself was welcomed at the Alpini association's national rally in 2004, according to the association's magazine, L'Alpino. In a letter to the magazine, a reader wrote that the Eritrean delegation's presence was an evident sign of the finest impression the Italians had left in those areas. In June 2005, the government issued an NGO proclamation that cut the number of foreign NGOs from 37 to 13. In July it requested USAID to stop operating, and in 2006 it expelled further groups. On September 12th, 2005 the US State Department suspended defense export licenses for Eritrea.

The University of Asmara stopped admitting students and closed in 2006 after its last class graduated. It was replaced by dispersed public colleges, and a UN commission concluded that the closure was tied to preventing further protest from academia after the 2001 clashes over a compulsory summer work program. Students now spend their final year of secondary school at the Sawa military camp.

In January 2006 the American Assistant Secretary of State visited the occupied Eritrean town of Badme through Ethiopia, without Eritrea's knowledge or authorization, and proposed a referendum to decide the town's future. This deed both sanctioned Ethiopia's occupation of a sovereign Eritrean town and added insult to injury. A referendum on a town that the boundary ruling had already awarded to Eritrea was, on the face of it, a departure from the ruling.

In July 2006, Eritrea's new ambassador to Washington DC was warned during a courtesy call on the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs that he would have a hard time during his tenure. A set of diplomatic cables of September 2006, drawn from the WikiLeaks archive, concern Djibouti. A cable of September 14th, 2006, reporting meetings held on September 7-8 between French officials and the American ambassador to Djibouti, W. Stuart Symington, describes a Djibouti that had managed to keep a balanced relationship with Ethiopia and Eritrea and was vulnerable to social unrest for reasons of its own, among them the uneven spread of income from the foreign bases and the pressure of migrants. A cable of September 16th, 2006, records Ethiopia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Tekeda Alemu, telling an American diplomat that he wanted to see a break in Djibouti-Eritrea ties and warning of Eritrean influence over Djibouti.

In November 2006 the American ambassador to Eritrea demanded that the Ministry of Labour & Human Welfare pay 4.5 million dollars for food aid donated by two NGOs (Mercy Corps & Catholic Relief Services), which had been used under the food-monetization policy. This was very similar to an earlier American demand that Eritrea pay for food aid that had perished in the port of Assab in 1998. In the same month, the United States imposed travel restrictions on Eritrean embassy members and their dependents in Washington DC and Oakland, and State Department officials have since almost routinely rejected requests by the ambassador and other diplomats to travel beyond a 25-kilometer limit. In November 2006 the American embassy announced that, effective December 4th, non-immigrant visa services in Asmara would be temporarily suspended for lack of staff.

Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 in violation of Security Council resolutions that were then adjusted to fit the new reality due to American support, and with the tacit encouragement and joint planning of American agencies. In January 2007, security officers at New York's JFK airport conducted an unlawful search of Eritrea's ambassador to the United Nations, isolating him, ordering him through a special search machine and searching his hand luggage despite his diplomatic identification card. When he arrived in Asmara he found that his checked baggage had been opened without his approval and in his absence, with a notice of inspection inside. In February 2007 the American embassy in Asmara sent a note verbale complaining that Eritrea's continued failure to allow the unhindered entry of its diplomatic pouches, which contained materials vital to the issuance of visas, had unduly interfered with embassy operations, and threatening to close to the public and suspend all visa operations from February 14th.

In the same month the State Department's visa office delayed the renewal of the visa of the deputy chief of mission at Eritrea's embassy in Washington under an administrative review. In May 2007 the American embassy told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that its HIV/AIDS prevention program would end on May 31st, which the Ministry called small compared with the programs in other African countries and justified by a pretext of obstacles to inspection trips. The Eritrean consulate in Oakland had been closed by that time, in what the American Assistant Secretary described as a reciprocal measure. The closure cannot be characterized as reciprocal, because the government had never taken reciprocal measures against the American embassy in Asmara.

From 2007 onwards, as after which relations pertaining to the Eritrean border continued unresolved, and diplomatic relations with the US government continued to rapidly deteriorate, Eritrea steered toward the Iranian-Syrian axis, and the World Bank ceased its financing of Eritrea’s Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project.

In February and March 2008, a border dispute between Eritrea and Djibouti was escalated. Djibouti campaigned with allegations that Eritrea had deployed forward troops, a report not confirmed by French officials in the field. French aircraft sent to the area on April 17th, 2008 saw nothing conclusive, and no massive troop concentrations. A cable of May 12th, from the American embassy in Paris quotes a French official saying that there was no historical basis for a border dispute between Eritrea and Djibouti and that both sides should avoid escalating further. On June 10th, 2008 Djibouti forces attacked Eritrean units, and the United States promptly condemned Eritrea’s “aggression” and pushed the Security Council toward a resolution against Eritrea.

On March 1st, 2008, a State Department cable instructed the American mission to the UN to canvass support among certain Security Council members and troop-contributing countries for sanctions against Eritrea over its interference with the UN peacekeeping mission on the border, in particular its refusal to reinstate fuel supplies. The cable listed potential travel bans on key officials, an asset freeze, trade and investment restrictions related to Eritrean resources including mining, and an arms embargo. In May 2008, the State Department decided that Eritrea was not cooperating fully with American counterterrorism efforts, which brought into force, on 1 October 2008, the arms-export prohibition under the Arms Export Control Act.

In May 2008, Isaias Afwerki first visited Tehran, and Iran established a military presence at Assab that year.

Part IX: Sanctions & Flight

In January 2009, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1862 on the Djibouti-Eritrea border dispute. A cable of January 15th, 2009, has Djibouti's foreign minister calling the American ambassador to thank the United States for the resolution, and the ambassador replying that it was a strong text that had come out of a collaborative effort, including close consultation with Djibouti's permanent representative. Djibouti's foreign ministry circulated the text to all missions, stating that the Council had placed responsibility for the aggression on Eritrea and demanded that it withdraw from Ras Doumeira and Doumeira Island within five weeks. Djibouti acknowledged that Eritrea was unlikely to respond positively and remarked that they would now develop a strategy for the next stage, with the American ambassador offering to work closely with him.

In February 2009 the State Department's refugee bureau announced that it had allocated asylum places for 10,000 Eritrean youth who might desert national service, demonstrating that the US government was, from Eritrea’s perspective "willfully engaged in inducing human flight from Eritrea." In June of 2009, President Obama signed an executive order, which it numbers 1349, putting Eritrea among "human trafficking" nations and imposing financial sanctions. A cable of May 29th, 2009 records a breakfast on April 23rd between the acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Phillip Carter, and the National Security Council's senior director for Africa with the Belgian foreign ministry's Africa team. Carter repeated the accusations against Eritrea, hoped the international community would support African Union calls for sanctions, and questioned the wisdom of the European Union's grant of 122 million euros to what he called a “regionally destabilizing pariah regime”. During this period, Washington DC’s foreign policy did not merely decline to invest in Eritrea but worked, in these years, to persuade others not to.

A confidential 2009 cable from the US embassy in Asmara reports that at a Chinese embassy reception Isaias Afwerki repeatedly praised Mao, credited him with laying the foundation for China's later achievements, disliked Deng Xiaoping for undermining Mao's legacy, and read Mao’s biographies while declining books on Deng-era China. The ambassador judged that Isaias governed through a blend of guerrilla experience and his reading of some Maoist philosophy.

The cable, "Uganda to consider Eritrea sanctions resolution which covers Djibouti; remains committed to AMISOM” recorded a conversation on September 20th, 2009, between the American ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, and Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni. In it, Rice stated that the United States strongly supported a resolution addressing Eritrea's invasion of Djibouti, called it a matter of principle that put the Council's credibility at stake, and said that the international community had never effectively confronted Eritrea for invading neighboring countries on five occasions, naming Yemen, Sudan, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia. She said that there was only one chance to secure a resolution, so Djibouti must be included, and advised the Ugandans that a resolution perceived as African-led would not fail: Britain would support it, France would keep its head down, and any Russian or Chinese concerns could be dealt with before the vote. That single cable demonstrated that the sanctions drive was an American initiative wrapped in support of Africa.

A second cable has a deputy assistant secretary of state, Karl Wycoff, telling Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, on November 19th, 2009, that the United States remained committed to achieving a sanctions regime and was broadening the discussion beyond the three Western permanent members and Uganda with a hard push from the US mission at the UN. He said that the American government was also expanding its efforts to undercut support for Asmara and had sent him on a trip to Cairo, Riyadh, Jeddah and other cities to reduce flows of support to Eritrea and to seek concrete support for Somalia's transitional government instead. Britain was quickly convinced that Eritrea was somehow a threat to its domestic security. Wycoff also argued that there was no evidence that Eritrea had improved its behavior, though he observed that Isaias had recently undertaken a diplomatic offensive aimed at cultivating European diplomats. In these months, the record is clear: The United States government was deliberately isolating Eritrea from its remaining partners in Europe and the Gulf, and despite noticing a signal of interest from Asmara, it did not respond in kind.

Qatar mediated the 2010 settlement of the Djibouti-Eritrea dispute and deployed several hundred peacekeepers to the disputed area. The arrangement held for seven years.

The Security Council's Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea reported in 2011 (S/2011/433) that Eritrea had planned a bombing of the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, a plot that was foiled, and that it continued to support Ethiopian rebel groups through Somalia. In December 2011, the Council tightened the regime with Resolution 2023, which the Ministry's chronology counts, with Resolution 1907, as an American-engineered measure. The Security Council sanctions regime imposed under Resolution 1907 in December 2009 rested on two allegations: that Eritrea was arming, training and financing Somalia's Al-Shabaab (ISIS), and that it had provoked an unresolved border clash with Djibouti. Neither charge seemed baseless at the outset, with a 2011 Monitoring Group report documenting a foiled Eritrean intelligence plot to bomb the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, as well as continued support for Ethiopian rebel groups routed through Somalia. Resolution 1907 imposed an arms embargo, authorized inspection and seizure of Eritrea-linked cargo, and imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on blacklisted political and military leadership. The Russian Federation supported the resolution outright, while China's delegation abstained. In the words of a former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, the American strategy was to pin down and punish Eritrea for refusing to give up the legal course of the Boundary Commission.

In July 2012, the Monitoring Group found no evidence of direct Eritrean support for Al-Shabaab in the preceding year, a finding that repeated for four consecutive mandates and led UN experts, by 2017, to recommend that the Council consider remove sanctions from Eritrea altogether. The Monitoring Group cleared Eritrea specifically of the allegation that had anchored the original resolution. Whether that residual activity justified continuing a Somalia-linked regime built on a different, unproven charge is a fair question the Monitoring Group itself seems to have been asking by 2017.

Also in July 2012 the Human Rights Council created a country-specific special mandate and appointed a Special Rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea. Susan Rice was at the forefront of lobbying for it, and Djibouti, Nigeria and Somalia (a non-member) were handed a script to sponsor the resolution. On September 25th, 2012, at the Clinton Global Initiative, President Obama said that he had recently renewed sanctions on some of the worst abusers of human trafficking, including North Korea and Eritrea. The Obama administration continued to the end of its term the annual ritual of designating Eritrea a country of concern for religious persecution.

In December 2012 the private intelligence firm Stratfor reported that Israel maintained small naval teams in Eritrea’s Dahlak island archipelago and at Massawa and a listening post at Amba Soira, focused on gathering intelligence in the Red Sea and monitoring Iran's activities, and that Eritrea was accommodating two Middle Eastern rivals at once, hosting an Iranian presence at Assab (since 2008) and taking Iranian financial support (about $35,000,000 from an Iranian bank in 2009), out of fear of an Ethiopian invasion.

In 2014 the Human Rights Council established the Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea. The United States was a lead lobbyist for it. On the authority of a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, in 2014 fourteen members of the Security Council were contemplating lifting the sanctions on Eritrea. In turn, Susan Rice threatened to veto any resolution to that end. When the Obama administration invited nearly all of Africa's leaders to the US-Africa Leaders Summit that summer, President Isaias Afwerki was excluded on Rice's instructions.

In the same year, Eritrea aligned itself with the Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen. The United Arab Emirates developed a military presence at Assab in the years that followed, and it was the beginning of the Gulf's relationship with Asmara.

The UN Commission's first human rights report on Eritrea, in June 2015, drew on 833 individual testimonies (Eritrea having refused the Commission entry) and found that reported instances of extrajudicial killing, torture, and indefinite national service/forced labor may have occured, amount to crimes against humanity. In Asmara, the Commission was universally seen as an American instrument of punishment. Here is the truth: roughly 47,000 Eritreans applied for asylum in Europe in 2015, and the Commission of Inquiry recorded roughly 5,000 leaving the country each month around the same period, out of a population generally estimated at 3.5-6 million. Indefinite national service is the reason most consistently cited by those who go, and they leave by crossing the Saharan desert and the Mediterranean Sea in unsafe boats. The flight itself is indeed among the more legible pieces of evidence in a dispute otherwise thick with contested anecdotal testimony.

At about the same time, the Eritrean mission to the United Nations was citing the Monitoring Group's own findings, alongside the Qatari-mediated progress on the Djibouti dispute, to argue that both original grounds for the sanctions were exhausted. The Commission's second report, in June 2016, found no improvement on human rights and named specific state, party and military officials as bearing responsibility. Of the roughly 45,000 written submissions the Commission received during its second investigation, it discarded the great majority of them as the product of some sort of organized government campaign.

After the fourth consecutive clean Monitoring Group finding on Al-Shabaab, Eritrea had been vindicated, again. In June 2016, while the Human Rights Council was in session, the United States encouraged Ethiopia to invade Eritrea, and the attempt was crushed. In October 2016, a speech by a presidential adviser at the Atlantic Council was cancelled because of White House coercion on the organizers, and a public meeting of Eritrean Americans with a visiting high-level delegation in Washington was cancelled under administration pressure. In January 2016, Eritrea severed diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran under Gulf pressure. Around this time, the United Arab Emirates asked Eritrea to allow a military base on one of the Dahlak islands to be shared between the Emirates and Israel, a request Asmara says it refused. In mid-2016 press reports based on opposition sources claimed that Israel had completed a listening post on the peak of Emba Soira, to watch the Arab coalition in Yemen and to eavesdrop on Iran, though the Eritrea has since called that ludicrous disinformation. In late 2016, an Iranian vessel, the Saviz, arrived off the Dahlak archipelago, where it stayed for years.

When the Gulf crisis broke out in 2017, Djibouti and Eritrea both sided with Saudi Arabia against Qatar, and Doha withdrew its peacekeeping force from Ras Doumeira in response. Eritrea had itself cut diplomatic ties with Qatar the day before the withdrawal, in support of the Saudi-led bloc. Eritrean forces reoccupied the contested territory almost immediately, bringing the two countries back to the edge of confrontation, and the Security Council had to formally urge both sides toward restraint. To the extent that the dispute is settled today, it is an artifact of the wider 2018 Ethiopia-Eritrea-Somalia rapprochement, not of anything Eritrea did about Djibouti specifically, and the mediation collapsed because Asmara chose a Gulf alignment over preserving it.

As mentioned above, in 2017 the UN experts had recommended that the Security Council consider lifting the sanctions from Eritrea altogether. In September 2017, an American journalist, Nick Turse, reported in The Intercept that the National Security Agency had built a network of clandestine eavesdropping outposts under a project called "Lion's Pride" to help Ethiopia listen to its own people and its neighbors across the Horn of Africa, clear evidence of American partiality toward Addis Ababa. In 2017, the State Department's trafficking-in-persons process placed Eritrea in its lowest tier, with statutory consequences for assistance and visas.

The World Bank-financed conservation and the Asmara Heritage Project led, in 2017, to UNESCO's inscription of Asmara as a World Heritage Site. The Ministry of Information's 2016 republished travel feature had attributed the city's architecture flatly to Fascism. A 2017 Ministry of Information page describes the same building boom as Fascist architects using an empty plateau to try out modernist ideals, lists Futurism, Rationalism, Novecento and Art Deco. Another 2017 Ministry page presents Asmara as the modernist culmination of an ancient, organically developed highland civilization, dismisses the claims of Eritrea having Arab cultural origins as debunked, and closes with the movement's old rallying cry of victory to the masses.

What the Ministry of Information interestingly revealed (if it was not already obvious) is that the government is not embarrassed by the Fascist provenance of its capital. It says so itself. Second, it re-describes the buildings as examples of global modernism and as proof of Eritrea’s sovereignty and antiquity, folding the Fascist-era developments of the capital into its own national origin story. Eritrea was quite unlike both Libya and Somalia, where Fascism’s colonial buildings were often destroyed. Such a sentiment has consistently been almost entirely absent across Eritrea. Critics of the regime have denounced Eritrea’s preservation of Fascist Italy’s architecture, because it presents Eritrea in the modernist idiom of the Fascist era, as an urban model of Fascist heritage. Some have argued that preserving the Futurist buildings of the Fascist era inevitably preserves the agenda that produced them. The Eritrean government, if it could be bothered to reply to these accusations, would likely state quite frankly: So what?

Part X: Peace, War & Reconciliation

On July 8-9, 2018 Isaias and Ethiopia's new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, met in Asmara and declared that the state of war between their countries had ended, that diplomatic ties, transport, trade and communications would resume, and that the boundary decision would finally be implemented. Isaias, who for two decades had rejected any negotiation not premised on that decision, had been caught off guard by Abiy's overture, and responded in kind.

The details of the arrangement were not revealed to the African Union nor to the Ethiopian parliament. The usual provisions for democratization, human rights and demobilization of oversized armies were absent. The bargain was greased by the Emirati crown prince, and the American assistant secretary for Africa, Tibor Nagy, anticipated a warm and cordial relationship. Isaias Afwerki got sanctions lifted, a security pact with Ethiopia and an emerging alliance that drew Somalia into his sphere. After Eritrea was brought in from the cold, the country purchased new defense equipment, sent security agents to Addis Ababa, successfully locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and trained special forces for the Somali army. Unfortunately, the Djibouti dispute’s settlement collapsed in the 2017 Gulf crisis, and was quieted only by Eritrea’s 2018 rapprochement with Ethiopia.

The UN sanctions were lifted by Resolution 2444 in November 2018, following the Ethiopia-Eritrea peace declaration that July. Other jurisdictions that had mirrored the UN regime followed. The chief executive of the company then developing the Colluli potash project welcomed the decision at the time as good for foreign investment in the country. In late 2018, China's Zijin Mining acquired Nevsun Resources, the Vancouver company that had built and operated the Bisha mine, Eritrea's first large foreign-financed mine. The sale was the exit of the first of the two Western-listed mining investors in the country. The second, Danakali, would sell its Colluli potash project to a Chinese state-linked firm in 2023.

In November 2020, Isaias sent his army to join Ethiopian president Abiy's forces in the war in Tigray. Afwerki’s aim was to weaken both Ethiopia's federal government and Tigray so badly that he could eliminate the latter as a viable political entity, and neither would emerge strong enough to ever threaten Eritrea again. Executive Order 14046, signed by President Joseph Biden on 17 September 2021, declared a national emergency over "widespread violence, atrocities, and serious human rights abuse" in northern Ethiopia and, in November 2021, was used to sanction Eritrean entities tied to the Tigray war: the PFDJ, the Eritrean Defense Forces, the Red Sea Trading Corporation and Hidri Trust, and two individuals, the PFDJ's economic adviser Hagos Ghebrehiwet and the security chief Abraha Kassa. This resolution was exactly the kind of unilateral measure the UN's own General Assembly majorities and its Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures have repeatedly criticized as inconsistent with the UN Charter. In May 2021 the State Department had announced restrictions on security assistance to Ethiopia and Eritrea, and in November 2021 it amended its arms-export rules to adopt a policy of denial for defense articles and services to the security forces of both countries. The Pretoria agreement of November 2022 ended the war in Tigray.

In March 2022, Eritrea was one of five states that voted against the UN General Assembly resolution demanding that Russia withdraw from Ukraine, as during the same period, the Russian Federation was negotiating for a naval base in Eritrea. We think both facts are evidence for the argument that will be established in Part XIII: That a state left outside the Western system builds its friendships elsewhere.

The Israeli embassy in Asmara has stood empty since April 2020, when its staff left in the pandemic. On 5 July 2020 Israel's foreign-ministry appointments committee named Ishmael Khaldi as ambassador to Eritrea. In early July 2022 the Israeli government, then led by Yair Lapid, approved closing the empty embassy in Asmara after Eritrea's two-year failure to approve the ambassador. Israeli commentary at the time held that Afwerki simply did not want an Israeli presence in his country, likely in part at least due to Israel's rapprochement with Sudan. Despite this, the Eritrean embassy in Ramat Gan continued on, under a chargé.

Part XI: The Present

The State of Eritrea currently maintains that America’s policy in the region does not serve the interests of Eritrea, of Ethiopia, of the region or even of the United States itself, that it has continued for six decades with damaging consequences, and that Eritrea hopes it can now finally be redressed, to the benefit of regional peace and of American interests. That is an invitation to change, and it was placed on the Ministry's website first in 2023.

On September 2nd, 2023, a gathering of supporters of the Eritrean government in south Tel Aviv turned into a street fight with Eritrean opponents. Well over a hundred people were injured and dozens were arrested. Israeli commentators asked why Israel did not cut diplomatic ties. One answer offered in the Israeli press was security: Israel has no interest in severing a channel to Asmara.

Eritrea’s real GDP growth was 2.6% in 2023 and 2.9% in 2024, with an estimated 3.2% in 2025, driven by mining and services, and the AfDB projects 3.5-3.6% growth through 2027-28. Its current-account surplus was 12-14% of GDP in 2024–25, supported by mineral exports and tight import and foreign-exchange controls, while remittances offset the goods deficit. Mining accounts for about 1/5th of GDP and over 90% of exports, whereas agriculture provides about 80% of employment but only about 12% of GDP. Public debt stood at about 211% of GDP at end-2024, nearly 80% of it domestic, and Eritrea is at the pre-decision point in the HIPC process. Foreign investment is only about 1.2-1.3% of GDP, with two mining joint ventures and no greenfield investment outside mining during 2022-24. In 2023, exports totaled about $529 million (OEC), mainly copper ore, zinc ore, and gold, with China taking about 67% and the UAE about 26%. Eritrea’s top import sources were China, UAE, Turkey, the United States (about $30 million), and Italy, according to approximate OEC data. On health, infant mortality fell from 92 to 37 per 1,000 live births between 1990-2012, under-five mortality fell from about 150 to 50 over a similar period, and maternal mortality dropped from 998 to 286 per 100,000 between 1995-2014. Immunization has remained above 95% for more than a decade, and Eritrea has been polio-free since 2005. Eritrea is genuinely counted among the small number of countries that met the health-related Millennium Development Goals.

The private-sector story is the smallest part of the government's own account, while the financial sector remains state-dominated. State-owned banks hold the bulk of a public debt load that reached roughly 211% of GDP at the end of 2024, one of the highest ratios in the world and nearly 80% domestically held, leaving the country at a pre-decision point in the Highly Indebted Poor Countries process. Available summaries of the economy state plainly that all significant enterprises remain state-owned. The last available World Bank Doing Business ranking placed Eritrea in the bottom ten of 181 countries. Foreign investment has run at around 1.2-1.3% of GDP for years and is concentrated almost entirely in two mining joint ventures: Bisha, sold by Canada's Nevsun to China's Zijin Mining in 2018, and Colluli, sold by Australia's Danakali to China's Sichuan Road and Bridge Group in 2023. Greenfield foreign investment outside mining was effectively zero from 2022 through 2024. China has become by far Eritrea's largest investor, creditor, and trading partner, taking about 67% of exports in 2023 against the UAE's 26%.

What do these figures say? Three things:

1. First, the government has organized its economy around the one asset (minerals) and has kept a large share of the proceeds. It takes a free 10% stake and usually buys 30% more in mining ventures. Bisha alone contributed roughly $800,000,000 to the state in its first five years. A government that wanted only to hoard wealth would not have signed Colluli, a potash project whose developers describe a resource of more than a billion tons of ore and whose UN-funded study of its economic impact projected exports that could eventually make up half of the country's total. Against that, the same government runs the economy through party-owned firms, forbids most private credit, does not publish a budget, and has not transformed its mining income into material change.

2. Second, the state has spent 35 years on the one form of development that does not require the private sector, public health and immunization, and it worked. Against that, it also kept a large share of its young people out of the civilian economy on national service, which is quite a peculiar development policy to many.

3. Third, its diplomacy is that of a state that wants to be welcomed back: the offers to Secretary Rumsfeld in 2002 and the lobbyists it hired, the courtship of the Italian Republic, the welcome it gave to the sanction expiry. Against that, the regime has also refused most things that would cost it control. The honest reading is likely that the Eritrean government wants real development, but it wants it on terms that preserve its control, and wants re-admission on terms that preserve its sovereignty. That is a description of many states that the United States cooperates with, and it is also the description of a partner that we can negotiate with.

As mentioned prior, Labour Proclamation No. 118 of 2001 established the Ministry of Labour and Human Welfare's Labour Relations Board as a body with judicial power to hear and decide disputes, alongside a conciliation branch and formal arbitration procedure. Under that law, Eritrea maintains a single, unified private-sector union: the National Confederation of Eritrean Workers (NCEW), subject to the ruling party and passive toward party-owned enterprises. Eritrean law formally permits unions and strikes. The workers' confederation is one of three party-controlled membership bodies, alongside the National Union of Eritrean Women and the National Union of Youth and Students. They are the only non-religious membership organizations permitted, and the PFDJ preselects their leadership slates, much as the EPRP once did for the Front. The ruling party owns or controls enterprises in banking, trade, construction, shipping and other fields, and holds controlling stakes in mining joint ventures. Internationally, NCEW presents itself as an active member of the wider labor movement. It hosted an International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) consultative meeting in Asmara in August 2015 and, the following March, an ITUC "Decent Work Agenda" solidarity forum; it was, by its own account, a founding participant in the Horn of Africa Confederation of Trade Unions in October 2018; and its Seventh Congress in 2017 drew delegates or solidarity messages, per the Ministry's report, from ITUC-Africa (whose Secretary-General, Arzeki Mezhoud, spoke), the global ITUC's then deputy secretary-general Wellington Chibebe, Italy's CGIL, CISL and UIL, Sudan's SWTUF, Turkey's HAK-IS, Kenya's COTU, the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity, China's ACFTU, and the ILO's Cairo decent-work office.

Since independence, Eritrea has sheltered numbers of refugees, mostly Somalis and Sudanese. UNHCR counted 706 in 1994, 2,650 in 1998, and, by early 2002, 2,208 Somalis and 625 Sudanese. A mid-2000s UNHCR count put the numbers at about 4,600 refugees and 2,000 asylum-seekers, with the Somalis by then at a camp called Umkulu. Although Eritrea is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no national refugee law, the UNHCR reported in 1999 that the Eritrean government was carrying out all protection work itself and had asked for help in drafting a refugee law. In response to the Sudan crisis that began in April 2023, UNHCR says, Eritrea welcomed those fleeing the conflict, providing shelter and access to basic services in host communities, particularly in the Gash Barka region. Even in the height of the “No War, No Peace” standoff of 2002, Eritrea offered to open the ports of Massawa and Assab to famine relief for the Ethiopian people. In the 1990s the government managed the return of about 160,000 of its own refugees, mostly from Sudan, after liberation. In the 2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian War more than a million Eritreans were displaced, and at least one senior American aid official publicly praised the Eritrean government's handling of the internally displaced. The bottom line is that Eritrea has a humanitarian record worth being proud of, especially considering its small income. But the humanitarian access that Eritrea has restricted is precisely the access that a normalized relationship could reopen.

The Italian Republic is the most visible Eritrean success story on the record. On January 28th, 2024, Afwerki flew to Rome, at the invitation of the Italian government, for the 2-day Italy-Africa Summit, whose theme was "A Bridge for Common Growth," accompanied by his foreign minister, Osman Saleh, and the commissioner for culture and sports, Zemede Tekle. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met him on the margins of the summit on January 30th. On February 1st and 2nd, he and his delegation met other Italian institutions and companies, and on February 2nd, the Italian defense minister, Guido Crosetto. In that meeting, Isaias Afwerki set out a partnership based on equality and mutual respect, pointing out Eritrea's strategic importance in the Red Sea region and its position of peace, stability and military strength. Crosetto, for his part, has voiced his hope for closer cooperation. Afwerki also told the heads of the tourism company Alpitour that Eritrea has some 1,200 kilometers of coastline and more than 300 islands, and invited them to craft a joint tourism plan.

In June of 2024, the Italian Minister of Enterprises & Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, led a mission to Eritrea, with representatives of Enel, Fincantieri, the state railways and Bonifiche Ferraresi. He visited the Italian textile firm ZaEr-Dolce Vita, the Casa degli Italiani and a photographic exhibition on closing the distance between the two countries. Meeting Afwerki at the Denden Guest House, Urso described the visit as a follow-up to the investment cooperation discussed with Meloni in Rome, and Isaias set out prospects for phased Italian investment in Eritrean energy, ports and physical infrastructure, fisheries and agriculture, export-oriented manufacturing and water infrastructure. On June 27th, an Italian parliamentary delegation met Afwerki and reiterated Italy's readiness to deepen the two nations’ friendship.

Isaias Afwerki met the Italian Minister of Agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, and the Deputy Foreign Minister, Edmondo Cirielli, at the Denden Guest House, and after the meeting Eritrea's Minister of Trade and Industry, Nesredin Mohamed, and Cirielli signed a Comprehensive Plan of Action on Bilateral Cooperation between the State of Eritrea and the Italian Republic, spanning energy, mining, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture, marine resources, tourism, culture, sport, human capital, economic cooperation and finance, with maritime security added in the Ministry's own account. Italian officials saw it as Italy's bid to be the first Western country to sign a cooperation agreement with Eritrea. The two sides agreed to hold continuous meetings in Eritrea and Italy to monitor and expedite implementation, and Lollobrigida called it the initial tangible step in the efforts made in Asmara and Rome. A G7 state re-engaging economically with a persecuted government still under formal EU scrutiny is genuinely brave and notable.

In early 2025, according to the Mixed Migration Centre, the Eritrean government reportedly issued a nationwide mobilization directive and tightened restrictions on movement. On June 4th, 2025 President Trump signed a proclamation barring Eritrean nationals from entering the United States. In 2025, President Trump wrote Isaias Afwerki a letter, an early sign that Washington DC’s posture toward Asmara was about to change. In September 2025, the emergency declared by President Biden under Executive Order 14046 was extended by Trump for one more year, its last extension.

In December 2025, Egypt (which has been aligning itself with Eritrea & Somalia in a bloc opposed to Ethiopian ambitions on the Red Sea) signed a deal to upgrade and expand Assab, including berths for warships. On December 12th, Eritrea withdrew from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the East African regional body. On December 26th, Israel became the first country to recognize Somaliland. Egypt, Somalia, Turkey and Djibouti condemned the decision. Press reports in 2026 said that Israel planned a base near Berbera. The geography of the Horn, in other words, roughly sorted itself in December into two camps: on one side Ethiopia, the UAE, Somaliland, and Israel, and on the other side, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Eritrea.

The war with Iran began on February 28th, 2026, with American and Israeli strikes, and has continued in different forms since, through a ceasefire (the Islamabad Memorandum) that broke down and a resumed American blockade near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's closure of Hormuz made the Red Sea the second vital maritime corridor in the region. The Houthis resumed attacks in the Red Sea at the end of March, announced in July a blockade on ships bound to or from Saudi ports, and in early September captured the port of Mokha and Perim Island, which gave them direct control of the Yemeni side of the Bab el-Mandeb for the first time. Houthi strikes on Saudi targets continued through September 16th, and by the 18th there was a pause, with the Houthis telling American officials in Muscat that they would not attack American vessels.

On April 22nd, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that the American administration was seeking to reset ties with Eritrea, which it referred to as strategically vital. On April 28th, the Globe and Mail reported that Western governments were finally courting Eritrea. On May 6th, Reuters reported that a State Department note sent to several governments said the United States would rescind Executive Order 14046 on or around May 4th, citing the Red Sea's rising importance. The order then lapsed on schedule later on in September.

On the May 24th, 2026, 35th anniversary of independence, President Donald Trump announced that the American people would join in congratulating the Eritrean people and the Eritrean government, that he had respect and admiration for the steadfast spirit and resilience of the Eritrean people and their dedication to sovereignty, and that, in keeping with the sentiment of his letter to Isaias Afwerki the year before, and with the previous era now behind us, he believed the time was right to move forward together on shared peace and prosperity across the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. The State Department issued its own national-day message that spoke of a new era in relations. In his independence-day speech on May 24th, Isaias Afwerki sharply questioned the policies of the Trump administration.

On September 12th, Middle East Eye published an exclusive interview with senior Eritrean officials, conducted in Asmara. The foreign minister argued that the Emirates were pursuing port imperialism across Africa, that Eritrea had rejected the 2016 Emirati request for a shared Emirati-Israeli base, and said that Eritrea did not want relations with Israel, while bearing it no enmity whatsoever. Middle East Eye also reported that Eritrea had hosted Sudan's army chief twice in two months, and that the tactical alliance between Ethiopia and Eritrea had broken down. The best current analysis of Eritrea is that the country is one that wants to keep its options open and does not want to be drawn into any war, on any side.

On September 18th, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control removed from its sanctions list every person designated under Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order (the PFDJ, the Eritrean Defense Forces, the Red Sea Trading Corporation, Hidri Trust, and the two individuals named alongside them, Hagos Ghebrehiwet and Abraha Kassa) and withdrew the program's guidance. On September 19th, Asmara announced the decision to allow the sanctions to lapse was expected to mark an important step toward strengthening constructive relations and cooperation between Eritrea and the United States. It recalled that in his message on the 35th anniversary of independence, President Trump had said that the time had come for the two countries to move forward together.

National Service Reconsidered

Conscription itself is unremarkable.

Nearly every country that practices it fixes an end date. Switzerland requires roughly 5-6 months of initial service plus periodic reserve duty into one's thirties, Norway 19 months on a selective basis, South Korea 18-24, Egypt up to 36. Israel, a country in comparably protracted and unresolved conflict, requires 24-32 months. Eritrea's National Service Proclamation of 1995 set the term at 18 months, and yet the Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign of May 2002 removed the end date, and conscripts are typically held into their forties and, in practice, often their fifties. What is worth pointing out is that the UN sanctions regime which lasted nearly a decade, likely reinforced the isolation and scarcity in which an already-indefinite system persisted for another nine years, while the unresolved border dispute with Ethiopia is undoubtedly the more direct cause of the state of emergency that Eritrea has been placed in.

Eritrea’s fear is quite justified, as conflict did not end with the 2000 armistice. Ethiopia's military ranked 47th of 145 countries in the 2026 Global Firepower Index, among Africa's five strongest, backed by a far larger population. Eritrea, for its part, has had since 2025 the diplomatic weight of Saudi Arabia and Egypt behind it, Egypt having separately signed a deal in December 2025 to upgrade and expand Assab, including berths for warships. Eritrea's own force is harder to size. The CIA estimated 250,000-300,000 troops as of 2015, but more recent reporting suggests that its current strength runs lower, with some units at half-strength.

And the rivalry between Eritrea and Ethiopia is yet again no longer merely historical. Ethiopian president Abiy Ahmed told parliament in February 2026 that "the Red Sea and Ethiopia cannot remain separated forever," and Ethiopian officials have floated taking Eritrea's port of Assab by force to reverse the landlocked status Ethiopia has carried since 1993, a status that costs it roughly $1,500,000,000 a year in Djibouti transit fees. In early February 2026 Ethiopia sent a formal letter demanding the withdrawal of Eritrean troops from its territory, which Eritrea called false and fabricated, and it formally acknowledged, in the same exchanges, the involvement of Eritrean forces in the Tigray war, accusing them of mass killings. Since February 2026, Ethiopia has redeployed federal troops toward the northern border, flights between Mekelle and the capital have been sporadically cut, and residents have reported banking disruptions. Though a large-scale invasion this year is unlikely, the currently intensifying proxy clashes could eventually escalate into a far larger confrontation.

Eritrean-Israeli Relations

Is Israel to Eritrea what Italy is, an open partnership? No. But the record does not support the story that they are enemies either. Israel opened an embassy in Asmara in March 1993 and Eritrea one at Ramat Gan. Israeli ministers came to Asmara in the 1990s, and the relationship only soured when Israel was seen to assist Ethiopia in the war of 1998–2000, and again as Eritrean asylum seekers began arriving in Israel in the middle of the 2000s. Israel's embassy in Asmara has stood empty since April 2020, and since 2015, Eritrea has voted against Israel in about 95% of General Assembly resolutions. And yet, it is usually counted, with Cameroon, as one of two African Union members that have never formally recognized the State of Palestine.

In December 2025, Ephraim Sneh, a retired general and former deputy defense minister, minister of health and minister of transportation of Israel, wrote in the Washington Jewish Week that he had had extensive and positive dealings with Eritrea and its leaders, that Eritrea is a friendly country that has had considerable and significant cooperation with Israel over the years, and that, while relations are not as warm as they should be for complicated geopolitical reasons, Israel does not regard Eritrea as hostile and no Israeli government would work to undermine it. He credited Eritrea with a record of fighting Islamic extremism, including a central role, with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, in fighting the Houthis in Yemen. The letter was a reply to a series of articles in the Jewish press by, as we read the exchange, an Israel-based Eritrean scholar, Habtom Ghebrezghiabher, who argues that Isaias Afwerki is an ally of Iran.

The United States has more leverage than any other actor with most of the parties in that geometry. A reset between Washington DC and Asmara would change Eritrea's calculations, and Washington's standing with Israel gives it a voice in the Israeli side of the question. We do not propose that the United States make Israeli–Eritrean normalization a condition of anything, but we do propose that it keep the door open, and note that the record supports at least this much of the friends-again thesis:

It would be in both countries' interest to talk, and neither side has ever said never.

The China Question

China takes about two-thirds of Eritrea's exports, holds its two biggest mines and is its biggest creditor. That is a consequence of Western policy, and much of the policy was made in the DC Beltway. Our position is that China would not have needed to become Eritrea's largest trading partner if the West had invested in the country instead.

In April 2009, the acting Assistant Secretary of State questioned a European grant of €122,000,000 to Eritrea, and another of November 2009 cable has an American deputy assistant secretary describing to Meles Zenawi a campaign to undercut Asmara's support in Europe, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The United Nations regime of 2009-2018 froze assets and banned travel of the leadership, and American executive action in 2021 sanctioned the country’s trading houses and the party holding company, institutions that sit at the center of the Eritrean economy. When the UN regime ended in 2018, the chief executive of the leading Western-listed developer in the country welcomed it as good for investment, which tells us that investors had been noticing. And the two Western-listed mining investors that did come, Nevsun and Danakali, sold to Chinese buyers, in 2018 and 2023. The isolation of Eritrea did not cause China's dominance, but it did remove the alternatives. Dependence on a single buyer and lender is the predictable outcome of pariah status. Washington DC has the means to change this through development finance, insurance, export credit and diplomacy that could give Eritrea's government a reason to seek a partner other than the one it has.

“Africa’s North Korea”

The label has been in circulation since at least 2009, when a wire-service headline asked whether Eritrea was Africa's version of North Korea. Like North Korea, in Eritrea there is no constitution in force, no elections, no legislature and no published budget, national service has no end date, and the ratio of the population that has fled as refugees is among the highest in the world. However, in Eritrea, there is no hereditary dynasty (not yet at least), no shrill personality cult, and no nuclear program. Eritrea’s trade is spread between two large partners rather than one; its health record outperforms its income, it has courted G7 governments, the Gulf states and Washington DC, and its capital is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. To refer to Eritrea as the “North Korea of Africa” is misleading as a guide to policy, because North Korea is closed by choice and it is armed to the teeth, while Eritrea has been closed by war, siege and habit, and it wants a way back.

Part XII: The Path Forward

The history above yields one unified policy, and this is it:

The United States should treat the lapse of Executive Order 14046 as the opening of a normalization with Eritrea, and should use it to complete four primary objectives:

1. Finish the sanctions job at home and at the UN.

2. Motivate an improvement in the material conditions of Eritrea's people.

3. Use Eritrea's coast to help secure the Red Sea in the war with Iran.

4. Bring the country back into the diplomatic community.

None of this requires anyone to trust the Eritrean government. It requires Washington DC simply to recognize that isolation has not changed the government's conduct, and that the UN & US sanctions coincided with the mass flight of the young, the closure of the economy and the drift toward Beijing/Moscow. The government has shown at every point since 1987, that it changes course quickly when its circumstances change. It has, since the 1980s, dropped its ideology of class division, pivoted its economic policy, offered facilities to the United States, and attempted to make peace with Ethiopia. And the Red Sea has never mattered more to American interests, at a moment when the Houthis hold the Yemeni side of the Bab el-Mandeb and the longest stretch of the western shore belongs to Eritrea.

Though the Security Council ended its sanctions in 2018, and the American emergency program expired on September 17th, 2026, that is not the end of the matter. The country still faces a thicket of older American measures that were never tied to the executive order. The administration should say, in writing, that it does not intend to declare a new emergency or reimpose measures on the same entities without notice and a defined trigger, and should issue Treasury guidance confirming that the formerly designated entities may be dealt with under ordinary due-diligence rules. America must now review the older Eritrea-specific restrictions on a published timetable. On the record we could assemble, these include the prohibition on arms exports that took effect in 2008 and 2021, the 2004 designation of Eritrea as a Country of Particular Concern, the 2005 suspension of defense export licenses, the lowest-tier trafficking designation, and the visa measures in effect since 2006. Each of these should be reviewed against a published benchmark, and each that is met should be lifted. Individual-level measures against named officials for specific abuses should stay available.

At the Security Council, the US should reject support a revival of the 2009–2018 regime. On the Human Rights Council track, the United States should move from adversarial monitoring to a benchmark-and-access model. At the international financial institutions and in the UN development system, the United States should back Eritrea's return to normal dealings. In Congress, a bipartisan framework should authorize normalization in stages that track consistency on human rights and religious freedom in Eritrea over time.

The purpose of engagement is to change what ordinary Eritreans live with. We propose five benchmarks that the government can meet, that can be verified from outside and that can be announced as successes on its side:

1. Restore (for new conscripts) the 18-month term set by the 1995 proclamation, release (in stages beginning with the oldest cohorts) those held beyond it, and convert the remaining civilian assignments into paid, legally regulated employment. This is the single measure that we think would do most to stem the flight of the Eritrean youth.

2. Loosen the foreign-exchange rules for small exporters and importers, and open the party's enterprises to independent audit.

3. Publish a national budget, invite the IMF's data missions and set a date for the country's first census.

4. Expand the presence of the NCEW across the country, admit the International Labor Organization, and write a ban on forced labor into every contract signed with foreign investors.

5. Let UNHCR expand the protection work it has long done in cooperation with the government.

In exchange the United States should put on the table what it can offer that China cannot or will not: development-finance and political-risk insurance for non-extractive investment in power, water, agro-processing and ports, export credit, a place in the queue for debt relief, scholarships and health cooperation, the restoration of consular services in Asmara so that Eritreans no longer have to travel to Nairobi or Cairo to apply for a visa, and regulated banking channels for the diaspora's remittances.

The Red Sea is, at this moment, the second vital corridor of a war. The Houthis have declared a blockade of Saudi-linked shipping, taken Mokha and Perim, and hold the Yemeni side of the strait. American and allied navies need information, logistics and a safe place to put a ship in. Eritrea has some 1,200 kilometers of coast, ports at Massawa and Assab, the Dahlak archipelago opposite Yemen, and a history of alignment with the Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition against the Houthis.

Eritrea offered the United States the use of its facilities in 2002, and its foreign minister said in 2026 that it does not want any foreign power's hub. The space between those two statements is where a deal has to be found.

Eritrea will not host a foreign power's hub on its soil, and it says it refused a shared Emirati-Israeli base on a Dahlak island around 2016. It also currently criticizes the 2026 Iran War. Any proposal has to fit that posture. We propose a limited, time-bound Red Sea maritime security arrangement, negotiated with the government and announced by it, with five elements: information-sharing on Houthi and Iranian maritime traffic near the Bab el-Mandeb, port calls, resupply and medical access for American and allied ships, including Italy's, at Eritrean ports. We propose overflight and emergency landing, a deconfliction channel among the navies and Eritrean coast-watch forces, and help in building Eritrea's own capacity to watch its coast. This would not be, could not be a base, and it would not be a launching platform for strikes on Iran. This would be a deal for freedom of navigation, which also means the security of Eritrea's own ports and trade, and it would not require the government to endorse the Iran War.

The largest single risk to the Red Sea, apart from the Houthis, is a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea over sea access. Ethiopia's leader has said that his country cannot remain separated from the Red Sea forever and has floated taking Assab by force. The two armies are currently deployed along the border, and Egypt has signed a deal to put warship berths at the same port. A war would threaten the corridor, cost thousands of lives, and end any prospect of normalization. The United States should use its renewed standing in Asmara and its standing in Addis Ababa to press for a negotiated settlement, through the African Union and with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Italy and Turkey, that gives Ethiopia commercial access to a Red Sea port under Eritrean sovereignty, in exchange for a finally demarcated boundary and a standing commitment by both governments not to use force. Ethiopia's landlocked status costs it billions annually, and that is a number that can be bargained with.

In the future, Eritrea must be invited to the multilateral Red Sea and Horn of Africa forums from which it has been absent. The United States must work closer with Italy, whose channel to Asmara is the closest any Western government has and which is already building a multi-sectoral cooperation plan across energy, mining, infrastructure, agriculture, and tourism.

Conclusion

Today, the Red Sea is in hot water, the sanctions have lapsed, and the Eritrean government has expressed hopes that constructive relations can be developed from here on out. The only question left worth asking is whether the United States will let the moment pass by, or if it will seize the moment. The New Nationalists of America proposes a normalization that finishes what the Trump administration has already begun, carrying the case to the UN & Congress, improving the material conditions of the Eritrean people, using the coast to help secure a corridor that the War has made vital, and last but not least, bringing the country back into the diplomatic community.

The people of Eritrea have paid for isolation for an entire generation. They should not be asked to pay for another.